The Life of Brian, the film that narrated the delirious adventures of a Jew who was accidentally born on the same day as Jesus Christ, was greeted in 1979 with protests and pickets against the Monty Python, condemned to hell as “heretics”, “blasphemers” and the like. much worse. More than 40 years later, now that the specters of religious censorship have been overcome, the most celebrated comedy by the Beatles in British humor has crashed into the wall of “self-censorship” in the new woke era of political correctness.

John Cleese, one of the four survivors of the sextet, until now very critical of the so-called cancel culture (“cancellation culture”), has not been able to avoid applying the story and suppressing one of the scenes from Brian’s life for not hurt the sensitivity of the spectators -and in particular of the trans community- in the theatrical version that is expected to be released in 2024.

The scene in question had hitherto gone unnoticed under the noise caused in its day by religious irreverence. It was about a dialogue in which a character named Stan (played at the time by Eric Idle) proclaimed to his revolutionary colleagues in Judea that she has decided to become a woman and that he wants to be called Loretta from then on.

“What?” replied the incredulous character par excellence, a certain Reg (played in the cinema by John Cleese himself). “It’s my right as a man: I want to have babies and it’s every man’s right to have children if they want to,” Stan replied.

“You can’t have babies,” Reg would reply. “Don’t oppress me,” Stan would reply. “I’m not oppressing you, but you don’t have a uterus. Where are you going to carry the fetus? Are you going to put it in a box?”

At a staged reading of the theatrical script in New York, John Cleese faced a strange reaction upon arriving at this scene. “What do you think?”, he asked the American actors. And the almost unanimous response was, “We love the script, but you can’t do that Loretta scene these days.”

So John Cleese -author of the famous “dead parrot” sketch- took out the scissors and resigned himself to mutilating his own script. The 83-year-old author/actor however could not contain his frustration and in a recent solo show on the London stage revealed what had happened: “So we have to stop doing something that nobody has complained about for 40 years, At least that I know of, because suddenly it offends the public.”

“What is one supposed to do with that?” Cleese wondered, preparing a parallel soliloquy on “cancellation culture.” “I think there were a lot of things [in The Life of Brian] that in some strange way served to predict what was going to happen later.”

Without anyone forcing him, yes, John Cleese has also decided to delete the hilarious and glorious final scene, when all the crucified whistled and sang in chorus Always Look On The Bright Side of Life (“Always look on the bright side of life” ). The song will close the show, but Cleese has not specified the reason why he has decided to suppress the mass crucifixion, nor how he intends to stage it finally.

The author of the theme, Eric Idle, has expressed his surprise on Twitter and has openly distanced himself from the theatrical version prepared by his former party partner at Monty Python: “I have nothing to do with this production and adaptation. Apparently, Cleese cut the song.”

Curiously, Idle had so far been more condescending than his colleague when it came to adapting Monty Python’s humor to the new times: “There’s nothing wrong with the audience. What you can’t do is cause yawns. And if they don’t laugh It’s because there’s something wrong with the jokes.”

Relations between Idle and Cleese have soured since the group’s last meeting in 2014, when there were still five (Terry Jones died in 2020; before, Graham Chapman said goodbye to this world in 1989). Terry Gilliam, embarked on his particular chimera with Don Quixote, suffered something similar to a stroke in 2018 and Michael Pallin continues unstoppable with his television and traveling vocation (his last two stops were North Korea and Iraq).

There is therefore little chance of a final reunion around The Life of Brian, the most celebrated of his films, which came to hold the title of the highest grossing British film in the United States. Woke censorship, which in recent months has been primed with books by Roald Dahl, Agatha Christie and Ian Fleming, meanwhile continues to wreak havoc on both sides of the Atlantic.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project