Richard Dawkins Dies (Not Really) and Meets His Maker in a New NSFW Animation

When Christo­pher Hitchens died, it did­n’t take long for humorists to imag­ine the com­ic sce­nario: what hap­pens when the surly athe­ist comes face to face with God? It’s amus­ing to con­sid­er. And when it comes to Richard Dawkins, the humorists aren’t wait­ing for the biol­o­gist’s demise to play things out. In Kevin Breen’s South Park-style trib­ute, Dawkins arrives at the Gates of Heav­en, only to dis­cov­er that God exists after all. When the “Man in the Sky Who Saves Amer­i­ca, Bless­es the Queen” asks Dawkins for his reac­tion, the author of The God Delu­sion gives him an ear­ful. The stri­dent lan­guage is pure Dawkins. Actu­al­ly, his lines are sound bites tak­en from recent Dawkins speech­es. In 2006, a stu­dent famous­ly asked Dawkins “What If You’re Wrong [About the Exis­tence of God], and the Oxford biol­o­gist replied with lines that sound famil­iar.

In this clip, crit­ics will find anoth­er rea­son not to like Dawkins; fans will find anoth­er rea­son to adore him. But, what did Richard Dawkins think? “Fun!,” he wrote, as he post­ed it to his Face­book page.

Note: This video con­tains some strong lan­guage. It’s basi­cal­ly NSFW.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Alan Watts and His Zen Wis­dom Ani­mat­ed by Cre­ators of South Park

The Unbe­liev­ers, A New Film Star­ring Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Wern­er Her­zog, Woody Allen, & Cor­mac McCarthy

Christo­pher Hitchens: No Deathbed Con­ver­sion for Me, Thanks, But it was Good of You to Ask

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John Cleese’s Eulogy for Graham Chapman: ‘Good Riddance, the Free-Loading Bastard, I Hope He Fries’

The British come­di­an Gra­ham Chap­man delight­ed in offend­ing peo­ple. As a writer and actor with the leg­endary Mon­ty Python troupe, he pushed against the bound­aries of pro­pri­ety and good taste. When his writ­ing part­ner John Cleese pro­posed doing a sketch on a dis­grun­tled man return­ing a defec­tive toast­er to a shop, Chap­man thought: Bro­ken toast­er? Why not a dead par­rot? And in one par­tic­u­lar­ly out­ra­geous sketch writ­ten by Chap­man and Cleese in 1970,  Chap­man plays an under­tak­er and Cleese plays a cus­tomer who has just rung a bell at the front desk:

“What can I do for you, squire?” says Chap­man.

“Um, well, I won­der if you can help me,” says Cleese. “You see, my moth­er has just died.”

“Ah, well, we can ‘elp you. We deal with stiffs,” says Chap­man. “There are three things we can do with your moth­er. We can burn her, bury her, or dump her.”

“Dump her?”

“Dump her in the Thames.”

“What?”

“Oh, did you like her?”

“Yes!”

“Oh well, we won’t dump her, then,” says Chap­man. “Well, what do you think? We can bury her or burn her.”

“Which would you rec­om­mend?”

“Well, they’re both nasty.”

From there, Chap­man goes on to explain in the most graph­ic detail the unpleas­ant aspects of either choice before offer­ing anoth­er option: can­ni­bal­ism. At that point (in keep­ing with the script) out­raged mem­bers of the stu­dio audi­ence rush onto the stage and put a stop to the sketch.

Chap­man and Cleese had been close friends since their stu­dent days at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty, and when Chap­man died of can­cer at the age of 48 on Octo­ber 4, 1989, Cleese was at his bed­side. Out of respect for Chap­man’s fam­i­ly, the mem­bers of Mon­ty Python decid­ed to stay away from his pri­vate funer­al and avoid a media cir­cus. Instead, they gath­ered for a memo­r­i­al ser­vice on Octo­ber 6, 1989 in the Great Hall at St. Bartholomew’s Hos­pi­tal in Lon­don. When Cleese deliv­ered his eulo­gy for Chap­man, he recalled his friend’s irrev­er­ence: “Any­thing for him, but mind­less good taste.” So Cleese did his best to make his old friend proud. His off-col­or but heart­felt eulo­gy that evening has become a part of Mon­ty Python lore, and you can watch it above. To see a longer clip, with mov­ing words from Michael Palin and a sing-along of “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” led by Eric Idle, watch below:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mon­ty Python’s Best Phi­los­o­phy Sketch­es

Mon­ty Python’s Life of Bri­an: Reli­gious Satire, Polit­i­cal Satire, or Blas­phe­my?

John Cleese, Mon­ty Python Icon, on How to Be Cre­ative

Tom Waits Shows Us How Not to Get a Date on Valentine’s Day

It’s Valen­tine’s Day and love is in the air. Or at least some­thing is in the air in this delet­ed scene from the 1999 cult film Mys­tery Men. We’re not sure exact­ly what. In the film, Tom Waits plays the mad sci­en­tist Dr. Heller, inven­tor of “Fog-in-a-Tube” and “Truth­paste,” among oth­er things. For anoth­er strange scene of cupid’s arrow gone bad­ly astray, see our post from last year, David Lynch Falls in Love: A Clas­sic Scene From Twin Peaks.

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Relat­ed con­tent:

Tom Waits’ Clas­sic Appear­ance on Aus­tralian TV, 1979

Tom Waits Makes Com­ic Appear­ance on Fer­n­wood Tonight, 1977

Tom Waits and Kei­th Richards Sing Sea Song “Shenan­doah” for New Pirate-Themed CD: Lis­ten Online

Watch Lambeth Walk—Nazi Style: The Early Propaganda Mash Up That Enraged Joseph Goebbels

In a ter­rif­ic his­tor­i­cal prank that sent Nazi Pro­pa­gan­da Min­is­ter Joseph Goebbels storm­ing out of the screen­ing room, British min­is­ter Charles A. Rid­ley edit­ed togeth­er scenes from the film Tri­umph of the Will with the music from the musi­cal Me and My Girl to cre­ate a spoof that infu­ri­at­ed lead­ers of the Third Reich.

Lam­beth Walk—Nazi Style was released in 1941 to news­reel com­pa­nies. It was billed as “Schich­le­gru­ber Doing the Lam­beth Walk, Assist­ed by the Gestapo Hep Cats,” and lays the catchy tune against images of Hitler and Nazi sol­diers from Leni Riefenstahl’s sem­i­nal pro­pa­gan­da film.

The sto­ry goes that the par­o­dy enraged Goebbels to such an extent that he ran out of the screen­ing room, kick­ing at chairs and scream­ing obscen­i­ties.

“The Lam­beth Walk” tune was writ­ten for the 1937 musi­cal, about a Cock­ney boy who inher­its a for­tune and must leave behind his work­ing-class ways to become a gen­tle­man. Nazi par­ty offi­cials called the tune “Jew­ish mis­chief and ani­mal­is­tic hop­ping,” mak­ing it even fun­nier as the back­ground music for Nazi sol­diers parad­ing.

The name “Schich­le­gru­ber,” by the way, was also a dig at Hitler. It was the name of his mater­nal grand­moth­er, whose son Alois (Hitler’s father) was an ille­git­i­mate child. Oops!

via Slate

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Don­ald Duck’s Bad Nazi Dream and Four Oth­er Dis­ney Pro­pa­gan­da Car­toons from World War II

“The Duck­ta­tors”: Loony Tunes Turns Ani­ma­tion into Wartime Pro­pa­gan­da (1942)

Hitler Reacts to Take­down of Hitler Par­o­dies

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Read more of her work at .

The Centrifuge Brain Project: Scientists Solve Mankind’s Great Problems by Spinning People

What if the very thing that made you feel crazy hap­py also made you smarter? That’s the ques­tion under­ly­ing the work of the Insti­tute for Cen­trifu­gal Research, where sci­en­tists believe that spin­ning peo­ple around at a suf­fi­cient­ly high G‑force will solve “even the trick­i­est chal­lenges con­fronting mankind.”

We fol­low Dr. Nick Laslow­icz, chief engi­neer, as he strolls through amuse­ment parks, wear­ing a hard hat and tak­ing notes, and describes the lib­er­at­ing pow­er of spin­ning and the “mis­take” of grav­i­ty.

The actor is ter­rif­ic. Yes, The Cen­trifuge Brain Project is a joke. Laslow­icz is just zany enough to be believ­able as a sci­en­tist whose research began in the 1970s. The sketch­es on the project’s web­site are fun too and direc­tor Till Nowak’s CGR ren­der­ing of the ride con­cepts are hilar­i­ous.

centrifuge_plan_steam_pressure_catapult

The cul­mi­nat­ing exper­i­ment fea­tures a ride that resem­bles a giant trop­i­cal plant. Rid­ers enter a round car that ris­es slow­ly up, up, up and then takes off sud­den­ly at incred­i­bly high speed along one of the “branch­es.”

“Unpre­dictabil­i­ty is a key part of our work,” says Laslow­icz. After the ride, he says, peo­ple described expe­ri­enc­ing a “read­just­ment of key goals and life aspi­ra­tions.” Though he lat­er adds that he wouldn’t put his own chil­dren on one of his rides.

“These machines pro­vide total free­dom,” Laslow­icz says, “cut­ting all con­nec­tion to the world we live in: com­mu­ni­ca­tion respon­si­bil­i­ty, weight. Every­thing is on hold when you’re being cen­trifuged.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mir­a­cle Mush­rooms Pow­er the Slums of Mum­bai

Dark Side of the Moon: A Mock­u­men­tary on Stan­ley Kubrick and the Moon Land­ing Hoax

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Vis­it her work at .

The Troggs Tapes: ‘Put a Little Bit of F***ing Fairy Dust Over the Bastard!’

Reg Pres­ley, lead singer of the Six­ties rock group The Trog­gs, died Mon­day at the age of 71. The Trog­gs (short for Troglodytes) are often men­tioned as a major influ­ence on the punk rock move­ment of the 1970s. They record­ed a string of hits between 1966 and 1968, most notably “Wild Thing.” The Trog­gs are also remembered—much to the band’s chagrin—for one of the most noto­ri­ous bootlegs ever: “The Trog­gs Tapes,” described by Uncut mag­a­zine as a “hilar­i­ous, 12-minute swearathon.”

The Trog­gs Tapes were record­ed in Lon­don in 1970. The band was work­ing on a song called “Tran­quil­i­ty,” but things weren’t going well, and the ses­sion degen­er­at­ed into a foul-mouthed orgy of acri­mo­ny and recrim­i­na­tion. A copy of the record­ing some­how made it onto the boot­leg mar­ket and became leg­endary. Sat­ur­day Night Live par­o­died the Trog­gs Tapes in a sketch with Bill Mur­ray, John Belushi and oth­ers play­ing a group of frus­trat­ed medieval musi­cians who say the word “flog­ging” over and over. The tapes are also par­o­died in This is Spinal Tap, dur­ing the record­ing scene at the “Rain­bow Trout Stu­dios.” In a piece this week pay­ing trib­ute to Reg Pres­ley, the Tele­graph music crit­ic Neil McCormick writes:

Before the inter­net, The Trog­gs Tapes were hard to find, yet every­one seemed to know about them, an elu­sive­ness that only added to their allure. I remem­ber get­ting my hands on a copy in a Dublin flea mar­ket, then sit­ting aroud late at night with friends laugh­ing our­selves sil­ly at the inani­ty and pal­pa­ble sense of frus­tra­tion as the musi­cians fail to find a way to artic­u­late and cap­ture some sound idea, beyond the reach of either their lan­guage or their tech­ni­cal abil­i­ties.… In truth, it is the kind of con­ver­sa­tion you can hear every day in record­ing stu­dios all around the world, but there was some­thing lib­er­at­ing and myth-bust­ing about the expe­ri­ence of eaves­drop­ping on these unguard­ed musi­cians at work.

You can lis­ten to an abridged ver­sion of The Trog­gs Tapes above. To learn more about Reg Pres­ley, you can read his fit­ting­ly uncon­ven­tion­al obit­u­ary in The Tele­graph. And to end things off on a pos­i­tive note, we offer a glimpse of The Trog­gs when things were going con­sid­er­ably more smooth­ly, with the band per­form­ing “Wild Thing” in 1966:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the 1962 Bea­t­les Demo that Dec­ca Reject­ed: “Gui­tar Groups are on Their Way Out, Mr. Epstein”

8,976 Free Grate­ful Dead Con­cert Record­ings in the Inter­net Archive, Explored by the New York­er

Monty Python’s Life of Brian: Religious Satire, Political Satire, or Blasphemy?

Before I saw Mon­ty Python’s Life of Bri­an, I only knew that reli­gious peo­ple did­n’t like it, which intrigued me. Then I found out that some reli­gious peo­ple like it very much indeed, which real­ly intrigued me. Build­ing its sto­ry on a satir­i­cal par­al­lel of the life of Jesus Christ, Life of Bri­an could nev­er have helped draw­ing fire. But the Pythons knew how to use it: “So fun­ny it was banned in Nor­way!” read one of the film’s posters, and indeed, the Nor­we­gian gov­ern­ment put the kibosh on its screen­ings, as did Ire­land’s, as did a num­ber of town coun­cils in Eng­land. “As a satire on reli­gion, this film might well be con­sid­ered a rather slight pro­duc­tion,” writes Richard Web­ster in A Brief His­to­ry of Blas­phemy. “As blas­phe­my it was, even in its orig­i­nal ver­sion, extreme­ly mild. Yet the film was sur­round­ed from its incep­tion by intense anx­i­ety, in some quar­ters of the Estab­lish­ment, about the offence it might cause. As a result it gained a cer­tifi­cate for gen­er­al release only after some cuts had been made. Per­haps more impor­tant­ly still, the film was shunned by the BBC and ITV, who declined to show it for fear of offend­ing Chris­tians in this coun­try.”

All this con­tro­ver­sy came to a now-infa­mous 1979 tele­vi­sion debate: In one cor­ner, we have Python’s John Cleese and Michael Palin. In the oth­er, we have con­trar­i­an satirist Mal­colm Mug­geridge and Bish­op of South­wark Mervyn Stock­wood. You can watch the whole broad­cast on Youtube (part one, part two, part three, part four). In the extract above, you can hear Cleese argue that the film does not, in fact, ridicule Jesus Christ, but instead indicts “closed sys­tems of thought” of the type drilled into his con­scious­ness dur­ing his board­ing school years. Palin takes pains to under­score its nature as not whol­ly a reli­gious satire, but more of a jab at mod­ern Eng­lish soci­ety and pol­i­tics trans­posed into the Bib­li­cal past. Mug­geridge and Stock­wood, while den­i­grat­ing Life of Bri­an’s cin­e­mat­ic mer­it all the while, nonethe­less see in it a dan­ger­ous poten­tial to cor­rupt the youth. But it turns out that they’d shown up at their screen­ing fif­teen min­utes late, miss­ing the scenes which would have told them that Jesus Christ and the hap­less Bri­an of the title are two dif­fer­ent peo­ple. Indeed, Bri­an is not the mes­si­ah. The les­son here: watch Life of Bri­an in full, as many times as it takes to get you draw­ing your own non-received con­clu­sions about reli­gion, soci­ety, and com­e­dy.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Mon­ty Python’s Best Phi­los­o­phy Sketch­es

Mon­ty Python’s Away From it All: A Twist­ed Trav­el­ogue with John Cleese

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Kingsley Browne, Wayne State Law Prof, Embarrasses Himself Spectacularly on The Daily Show

Jon Stew­art and com­pa­ny can make pret­ty much any­one look like an imbe­cile. Some nights they have to put a lot of elbow grease into it. Some nights less. And, some nights, they can just leave the elbow grease on the work­room shelf. Like Mon­day night, when Kings­ley Browne, law pro­fes­sor at Wayne State, gave an inter­view to The Dai­ly Show and opined on whether women should take part in front­line com­bat. While some con­ser­v­a­tives have opposed widen­ing wom­en’s role in com­bat by point­ing to “anatom­i­cal facts,” Kings­ley pulled some pop psy­cho-biol­o­gy out of his dusty store­house of patri­cian knowl­edge. “Girls become women by get­ting old­er; boys become men by accom­plish­ing some­thing, by prov­ing some­thing.” Saman­tha Bee could have just stayed home and col­lect­ed a pay­check that night. 1950s prat­tle just sounds increas­ing­ly fool­ish and fun­ny in 2013 (even if its effects are still per­ni­cious). But, even so, Bee did add the Andy Grif­fith fade-to-black & white, and that was a pret­ty nice touch.

Note: If Mr. Browne feels like his views weren’t ade­quate­ly expressed on The Dai­ly Show, we would wel­come him to elab­o­rate on his views in the com­ments sec­tion below.

Also note, if you’re look­ing for more musty mus­ings from the liv­ing muse­um, you can catch Mr. Browne on CNN.

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