David Duneman

Expository Writing

Joe Serio

2/3/13

Especially Religious Fanatics

“The Life of Brian” is a smart, comedic satire on the time period of Jesus’ life. The Monty Python series has a certain style to them that seems to inspire laughter. The Life of Brian plays on social cultures that are portrayed in movies like “Jesus of Nazareth” and The Bible. The beliefs of The Christian Bible are criticized quite a bit but I feel they satirize more, with a hint of criticize and they do it well at that. The most harsh criticism I thought was where the followers start tailing Brian and praising him as their messiah. The followers of Brian are portrayed as non-intellectual people that are capable of believing anything. For example, in one scene Brian is trying to explain to them that he is not a messiah, and one woman says “only a messiah would deny being a messiah” and then Brian says “Okay, I am the messiah”, so then the crowd starts chanting “He’s the messiah, he’s the messiah”. In this instance there was no way Brian was going to come out not as the messiah. These followers are also a metaphor for the believers in the Christian religion. The followers will believe just about anything that’s written in the Bible. Another good example of satire was the three groups that all hated the Romans; there’s the Judean Peoples’ Front, The Judean Popular Peoples’ Front, and The Peoples’ Front of Judea. This is also another metaphor about the fallacies in religion. These names are saying exactly the same thing, but in different ways, and that’s what most religions do as well. There’s this one scene where two of the groups of “Judean People” are both on a mission to take something from the Romans (I forget what, but that’s not the point), they don’t know each other are one the same mission until they clash into each other, and instead of joining sides for the same cause they fight each other until they don’t get anything done. This is a metaphorical hint that religious fanatics will always being fighting against the non-believers without getting anything done. There is also another instance where the “Judean People’s Front” doesn’t get anything done. The scene where they’re discussing making a plan and then acting on it, well they just go in a circle saying that they need to stop talking and take action already but then they never actually take action. The highest of the Roman authorities were highly criticized as well. There wasn’t a scene with Pontius Pilate where everyone in the scene wasn’t laughing at him. He has the Elmer Fudd complex, where he’s always saying w’s instead of r’s. This is how Brian escaped being captive of Pilate. The guards are too busy laughing at Pilate so Brian gets his chance and runs away. Lastly, being crucified is talked about as not a big deal to the Judean people. In one scene, there’s a line of people waiting to be crucified and there passing through the line as if it’s a line to get your lunch. There’s this one character that always, jokingly, has a chance to get out of being crucified but always says something to get back to being crucified. This movie is very funny and I’d recommend to anyone (especially religious fanatics).