The Meaning of Life

2-04-07 - [from What's New] Thanks to Gregory Johnson for sending this great perspective enhancing wonderful song I've long loved. It's from the splendid Harold Giliam film The Meaning of Life. And here's a charming anecdote involving my son Clay, me, Eric Idle, and John Cleese.

I showed this movie to my son Clay (15) when he was in the fourth grade - I think, say ten years old. One of the skits in the movie has John Cleese stuffily delivering a totally graphic sex education lecture at a proper British boys school wherein a bed comes out from the wall and his wife comes in and he has sex with her while explaining more about the ensuing act of coitus. There are many more hilarious scenes in that movie including the one with the rotund projectile barfing diner (voted by not sure whom funniest movie scene of all time not long ago) and this wonderful song.

The next day as I walked innocent little Clay to school he asked me, "Dad, is there more than one kind of sex?"

"Yes," I said, "There are many kinds of sex."

"And is one of them where the man puts his penis in a woman's vagina?"

"Indeed," I answered, "In fact, that is the main thing, the most popular type of sex."

"And that," he pronounced with a dramatic pause and a sweep of the hand, "Is the meaning of life."

Thank you for that moment, Clay, and thank you for that song, Eric Idle (singing it anyway).