The Poet McTeagle

This is probably my favourite Monty Python sketch. It’s not very well-known, unless you are a hardcore fan and have seen every Monty Python’s Flying Circus episode. It doesn’t have the word “spam” or any of their strange and catchy phrases; it’s not even structured in the usual chaotic and random way most of their sketches are, but for me it summarizes what I love about these british loonies in a perfect way. In about 4 minutes, they create a mockumentary about a poet named Ewan McTeagle where they manage to expose and destroy various common places regarding poetry, documentary language and literary criticism. It starts with the typical television documentary frame of the subject in the midst of the environment he belongs to: in this case, a Scottish highland landscape. The music duplicates the information, as we listen to pipes and immediately think of Scotland. The voice over describes what we are seeing in a cheesy wannabe poetic style, telling us how we are supposed to read those images before us. Everything else is just as cliche. What is abnormal is the actual subject of the documentary: McTeagle is just a grumpy scotsman who sends letters because he needs people to lend him some cash.

I find the entire analysis of his work hilarious because all that nonsense and pretentiousness applied in it not only makes me think that the idea that a few can decide what is art and what is not is very arbitrary and capricious, but also that laying an aesthetic point of view on something that wasn’t created for that purpose implies an exercise of power from those who do it. But I’m rambling on.

The intellectuals that analyze McTeagle’s work are “a very good playwright”, who obviously has a typewriter and a bookshelf behind him, and a poetry expert sitting on the most ridiculous chair; the actor who does a rendition of his best poem does it while wearing a crown and enunciating with pauses and drama: Monty Python is all about showing us just how silly we become when we take things too seriously.



Ewan McTeagle’s masterpiece:

Can I have, fifty pounds to mend the shed?
I'm right on my uppers.
I can pay you back when this postal order comes,
from Australia.
Honestly.
Hope the bladder trouble's getting better.
Love, Ewan



Now that’s poetry. Or pottery, whatever.