Blessed Are the Piss-takers for They Shall Inherit the Dearth of

Infidels: always look on the dark side of [not-so-British] irony ...

I've never been a fan of American slapstick comedy, accompanied by what my mother always
derided as 'canned laughter'; why should the audience need a cue to know when to laugh?

Yet I never found Monty Python remotely funny – and I have heard a British comedian say the
same thing; where the US uses canned laughter, Monty Python used something even worse: loud
screeching and pulling silly faces as a substitute for genuine intellectual wit – which the Brits excel
at. Huuuhhh?

According to a Gregory Weinkauf, it is the Python's fortieth anniversary, though I didn't get
whether that was to the day, June 10, or just the year. And that article I link to is the motivation, at
this particular moment (as opposed to wider motivation, which stands in its own right and pre-exists
the former by a great deal of time), for writing this piece 'especially' for the Bob Dylan-aficionado
expectingrain website.

On the US's Saturday Night Live in 1979 Eric Idle of Monty Python notoriety introduced, with dark
dramatic irony, 'the very wonderful Mr Bob Dylan'. Of course, in showbiz if you don't like your
guest performer you don't let on. Does item 19 on expectingrain's 11 June 2010 entry, Eric Idle's
Bob Dylan parody from the Python performance about which Weinkauf writes, particularly suggest
Idle thinks Dylan is 'very wonderful'? Not that I am very interested in the answer.

I think newly-saved Dylan's opener of his three songs from Slow Train Coming was 'When You
Gonna Wake Up', featuring the lyric, in it's transmogrified live version (though, thanks to Jeff
Rosen or related cronies or possible successors), I have no youtube clip available to check whether
it did indeed vary as follows from the 'for you/gotta do' album version):

There's a man on the cross and he been crucified

You know who he is and you know why he died

At least that's what it is in many of the '79-'81 tapes circulating. George Harrison, who stumped up
an amount estimated at £2 million upwards to enable Life of Brian ever to see the light of day, must
have been watching. My sweet Lordy. I wonder what Monty Python hero and expert-on-religion
Eric made of it all. Did he in fact find the performance to be 'very wonderful'? George must have
found it to be worth its minutes' weight-wait in gold.

Enthusiasts of Life of Brian contradict themselves and each other about why it is so wonderfully
funny. Many are clearly biblically illiterate, a fact which belies their pretence of being sociologists
of religion or being able to critique or second-guess the Gospel or the four gospels with such a
cheesy dearth of slapstick plateau-tude-beatitudes. 'Blessed are the cheesemakers'. Michael Palin
must be the cheesiest piss-taker ever.

I hear, from the piss-taking Bob Dylan obsessive who had the pleasure of taking a piss with Bob
Dylan in 1987, as per my first link on expectingrain, that 'religious people' widely misunderstand
the plot of Life of Brian, failing to realize that its theme was 'false Messiahship', Brian being
mistaken for the real Jesus in the next manger. (But why would Brian be mistaken for somebody
else who was only just getting his unprecedented Messiah act underway without 2000 years of stale
retrospective for 'bible-thumpers', scoffers, agnostics and Monty Python-fan 'intellectuals' to look
back on?)
But this is just a disingenuous ruse-'plot' that the Pythons sought to hide behind both in the film and
in parrying chat-show and interview flak subsequently. My point is not to critique the film as such
or take issue with the right to mock religion but one of intellectual dishonesty – and, in turn, the
dark side of irony with regard to Dylan's Infidels (1983).

This disingenuousness is effectively laid bare, without disingenuousness but not necessarily without
dramatic irony, by Gregory Weinkauf in the article 'Not the Messiah: Monty Python Strikes
Again', linked to in item 13 of the expectingrain website 11 June 2010:

As with all of the work of Python, the underlying theme here is that it's better to be an intelligent, fun person
than an ignorant, nasty person. Obviously, Life of Brian and Not the Messiah seek to bait Bible-thumpers
(there's a joke about a burning Bush, and "Wepublicans" are dismissed as "a group of power-hungry,
desperate people with no future"), but this is cosmic satire ("O God, You Are So Big" from The Meaning of
Life is retooled as song!) rather than a specific skewering. What I mean by this is that, if you're offended by
Not the Messiah, you may be a total dumb-ass.
But if fans of Life of Brian really were the sociologists of messianism and religious comedy they
pretend to be, then they would naturally have been interested in, and 'got', Bob Dylan's magnum
opus of the messianic theme, indeed the 'messianic complex', at the start of the 80s, the decade that
was supposed to be Dylan's ultimate creative-drought period – including according to the published
'scholars'. Dylan called this (the theme, not the period although the two seem to have been strangely
concurrent), in his Spin interview with Scott Cohen in 1985, 'the messianic complex'.
But when I lent some very simplified essays, adapted for 'cultured' idiots from lengthier more
complex stuff, to the self-appointed Dylan expert and walking Dylan encyclopedia who swapped
urinal steam with him in October 1987, he complained subsequently that the essays 'gave me a
headache'. Yet, clearly having no grasp of the messianic complex either in Dylan's work or in his
own daily life even by 'virtue' of its absence, he presumed to be an expert on the motif of false
Messiahship in Life of Brian and how it went right over the heads of 'religious people' – just like
they supposedly did not 'get' Lennon's statement about being 'bigger than Jesus' or 'imagine no
religion' lyric; they just didn't 'get' it. Too. Whenever I raised Infidels motifs with him there was
total non-comprehension and zero interest on a scale (if zero can have a scale; how about 'minus
zero no limit'?) that reminded me of Jesus' quoting of the prophet Isaiah. Matthew 13:13-15 (New
International Version):
10The disciples came to him and asked, "Why do you speak to the people in parables?"
11He replied, "The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to
them. 12Whoever has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even
what he has will be taken from him. 13This is why I speak to them in parables:
"Though seeing, they do not see;
though hearing, they do not hear or understand. 14In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah:
" 'You will be ever hearing but never understanding;
you will be ever seeing but never perceiving.
15For this people's heart has become calloused;
they hardly hear with their ears,
and they have closed their eyes.
Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
hear with their ears,
understand with their hearts
and turn, and I would heal them.'[a]
And this personal anecdote, in conjunction with Jesus' 'definition' of parable here, seems a beautiful
microcosm or enacted parable of the wider superiority complex of Life of Brian fans. They are so
sure they 'get it'. Get what? Well, I wouldn't know, would I? Why? Because I just don't get it.
Infidels has been given a wide berth by published Dylan writers - even Professor of NT Studies and
author of Tangled Up in the Bible Michael J Gilmour told me he had only 'written a little bit about
Infidels' - with the glaring exception of Michael Gray in his fifty-page chapter called 'Jokerman',
which is indeed more about the opening song than the album as a whole. (I was also perplexed and
amused by Gilmour's omission of any comment, in his web article or to me personally, of what
amounts on various occasions to Gray's pseudo-biblical scholarship: texts are misunderstood and
misappropriated and indeed missed; with regard to the latter particularly as a result of his non-
comprehension of the Infidels 'code in the lyrics'. Indeed, like the failed-hero Jokerman he is
grappling to describe on Bob's behalf, he himself 'overreaches himself'. But maybe Gilmour was
just being polite.)
For all his wordiness and research into Hercules and other non sequiturs in what is still a most
readable and entertaining chapter, Gray has failed, and not even 'heroically', to come to grips with
the essence of the work, the 'code in the lyrics' – a term Dylan first used of the Raeben influence on
Blood on the Tracks. (And the 'Dylan world' has been monumentally dull-witted in failing to see the
links between the two albums.) He has not dealt with Infidels as a landscape, as a concept album.
Indeed, Gray is entirely unaware of what Dylan had been reading at the time, which could be why
there is not the merest hint of this in either of his Dylan tomes or anywhere on the expectingrain
site. But even if he had known, he would still have needed to identify the motifs and how they have
been appropriated. (Heroically reading the bible twice through, in imitation of his hero, has not
equipped him to unlock what Dylan is fundamentally preoccupied with in Infidels.)
And herein lies a moral for the likes of the disgruntled Liz Thomson in item two of expectingrain's
Friday 11 June 2010; if you don't want the likes of Clinton Heylin to appropriate findings without
giving due credit, then consider keeping quiet about the finding(s)? Personally, I find that method
extremely effective.
But getting back to Eric Idle, he's not a Bob Dylan fan; he's just a very bad comedian – a very
wonderfully bad one. Show me a Python fan who gets Dylan's Infidels, and I'll tell you what
Infidels is really about. But then you wouldn't need me, would you? Indeed, I am in any case
redundant, as what Dylan's work means is what it means to you.
The Pythons could, like my Dylan-double-piss-take acquaintance, who lives only to 'get sex' (the
flesh world that Dylan tells Scott Cohen you 'got to' pass through to get to the world of spirit), a
gospel he loudly proclaims, sit on a sharp stone for all eternity without ever getting Bob Dylan's
Infidels. Why? Because, to repeat for the hard-of-hearing:
"Though seeing, they do not see;
though hearing, they do not hear or understand. 14In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah:
" 'You will be ever hearing but never understanding;
you will be ever seeing but never perceiving.
15For this people's heart has become calloused;
they hardly hear with their ears,
and they have closed their eyes.
Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
hear with their ears,
understand with their hearts
and turn, and I would heal them.'[a]
The congenital failure of the 'Dylan world' including its 'scholars' and literati to 'get' Dylan's 80s
work does not mean that it has no value; it just means that I (is another) couldn't relate to it. And
that's fine with Dylan – and by me. Indeed, as Isaiah also says, Who is blind but my servant?
Always look on the dark side of irony (by telling terrible things lightly). One of many Infidels'
ironies is that a lyric in it, which, in addition to the album title, alludes to the Crusades, effectively
has a connection with one of the Pythons. But that dumb-ass may be too much of a bobo to spot it.
Indeed, Michael Gray himself fell into his fair share of Christological, even Christ-illogical, booby
traps ...

In The Nightingale's Code, John Gibbens says on p 345:

... by and large Dylan was baffled in his attempts to find again a public voice befitting the times ... At the
root of this choice [to leave Outfidels off Infidels] there seems to be a failing confidence in his public's
ability to follow what he was on about.

Personally, I find a line from the loquacious Jonathan Cott's laconic Dylan more powerful than the
whole of Gray's 'Jokerman' chapter: the jester 'tells terrible things lightly'.
And so do I. The Eighties were a piece of shit when you look at tit. But I was thinking about
Infidels: the whole time – while being baffled and bewildered by the rest of them. According to
Gray, Infidels was a 'mudcake creature' – 'with the marvellous exception of 'Jokerman'', even
though, because he never tried to 'get beneath the surface waste' (beyond cribbing bits and pieces
from various websites without cross-checking his sources – prior to telling me quite stroppily that 'I
really just don't' use the web), he never spotted that the Jokerman is himself a mudcake creature.
Sunday Times, 1 july 1984 Week in Focus p 15. Mick Brown exclusive interview:

Bob Dylan tugged at a cigarette, stroked the beginnings of an untidy beard and gazed pensively at the stream
of traffic passing down the Madrid street. 'What you gotta understand,' he said at length, 'is that I do
something because I feel like doing it. If people can relate to it, that's great. If they can't, that's fine
too. But I don't think I'm gonna be really understood until maybe 100 years from now. What I've
done, what I'm doing, nobody else does or has done.'

The messianic tone grew more intense.

'When I'm dead and gone maybe people will realize that, and then figure it out. I don't think anything I've
done has been evenly mildly hinted at. There's all these interpreters around, but they're not interpreting
anything except their own ideas. Nobody's come close.'

'Baffled and bewildered'. Who played, and who didn't dance?

Postscript following the glut of today's, 12 June 2010, gratuitously untopical 'Jokerman' posts,
although careful investigation suggests the one Karl Erik preceded mine with did in fact precede
mine by under an hour – though I'm still wondering:

To what shall I compare the 80s generation of Dylan commentators and more recent ones which,
not even having been old enough at the time, persist in the same wilful delusions and critical non
sequiturs about Dylan and, and in, the 80s? Calling Infidels the secular album following the overtly
Jesus trilogy (though about Shot of Love I still find you contradicting each other), is in fact just
another manifestation of the syndrome of Monty Python fans lecturing on the theme of false
Messiahship while being totally oblivious to its centrality to the Infidels 'code in the lyrics'. Yet
none of the 'Jokerman' posters today have even referred to Monty Python from yesterday. It's all
there today: the same old tired stuff – including the material Michael uncritically appropriated for
his unheroic failure to come to grips with Infidels. But it is not like those who know very well what
his errors were have any motivation to point them up. Indeed, they have a vested interested in their
not coming to light. Who is blind but my Servant, indeed ...
Luke 7:31-33 (New International Version):

31"To what, then, can I compare the people of this generation?

What are they like? 32They are like children sitting in the
marketplace and calling out to each other:
" 'We played the flute for you,
and you did not dance;
we sang a dirge,
and you did not cry.' 33For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and
you say, 'He has a demon.'
It never occurred to Michael to tie up the opening lyrics of Infidels with their closing ones (which
ties in with a monstrously dismissive and ignorant comment, laden with dramatic irony, he makes
about the album), but it occurred to John Gibbens. When I last checked the Bob Dylan
Encyclopedia in the bookshop I don't recall seeing John in there; I think I looked him up (about four
years ago). Yesterday, I could not find the encyclopedia on the shelf to check. But Michael doesn't
mind including a lot of his windbag cronies whose insight is about one ten thousandth of that of
John Gibbens.