Their jokes about assigning gender to babies and to being transgender, dressing in drag, like all of it was a send-up.
Sure, they did punch down if you were a person who were in those groups, but the fact that it was large enough social event to be relevant enough to be a comedy skit on a television show or a movie seen by millions implies that there were some serious things going on back then that they could see and wanted to address.
What the hell was going on that put all of those things in their mind?
The UK is an incredibly Classist society with a long-running “know your place” kind of mindset and very low Social Mobility for an European nation - people very much are defined by their class (all the way to ther being a very specific, non-regional, English language accent for the upper class) and one’s social class is very much inherited.
The 60s and the 70s were the peak point for the result of the post War (that being WWII) increase in social mobility in Britain with lots of Working Class lads and lasses making it big in, amongst others, the arts (and you see it not just in Comedy but also Acting more in general and especially in Music were almost every great British star from that age had working class origins).
All this has in the meanwhile being reversed, hence once again almost all modern British artists are the sons and daughters of the upper-middle and upper classes.
During that golden period the massive mix of people from all origins in the arts created all kind of original and “not knowing your place” art expressions, and I believe the Money Pythons are one of those.
Love seeing foreign people attempt to explain the culture of a country they’ve never been to.
That’s such an interesting statement.
Irrelevant for my post, since I lived in Britain for over a decade, but interesting.
Thank you for sharing that tidbit about yourself.