My preferences were for, say, a Peter Sellars/Inspector Clouseau movie, or, even better, some good ole' bare-bones humor, the type you could find on that classic and long-running "country" television series, Hee Haw (e.g., Archie Campbell, Junior Sample, Roy Clark) or maybe the Carol Burnett Show (or its spin-off, Mama's Family), and earlier with Abbott & Costello or Laurel & Hardy: true classics of the genre.

But watching snippets—that is all I could stomach without retching—of Representatives Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler lecturing the United States Senate this past week, reminded me of Monty Python at its most mad… incredibly ridiculous, almost insanely wild…but at the same time, severely and eerily serious. Serious, in the sense that those House impeachment managers take themselves so very one-dimensionally, so solemnly. They do not or cannot see or understand what others see and understand about them and their supposed "case against the president."

For them even a funny jibe or joke proffered by Donald Trump at a public rally before tens of thousands of people (e.g., "Russia, if you hear me, can you help us find the thousands of emails that Hillary Clinton 'lost'," or, "I could walk down 5th Avenue and shoot somebody, and I'd still have support") is terribly ominous. The resemblance to Monty Python comes specifically because they take such eminently silly, throwaway lines meant to be funny, and hold them up in the utmost seriousness and solemnity, in what are monumental deliberations about the very future of the American nation.