Guidance through life’s travails is nowadays provided not only through such traditional channels as religion, but also through forms of religion which those who practise them tend to call ‘spirituality’. For some, religion provides answers, as it has done for centuries, but the waning for many other people of religious belief leaves them looking for meaning elsewhere. People nevertheless still seem to be searching for some overarching meaning to their lives. The keynote of our time – or one keynote a least – is scepticism, and comedy can be a particularly powerful expression of such scepticism. In the wake of Python’s film, Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide and numerous other examples of comic debunking of human beliefs and pretensions, any attempt to take seriously the question of the ‘meaning of life’ may seem ponderous and foolhardy. The parodic song that opens Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life empties a number of ‘deep and meaningful’ questions of the portentousness they might otherwise possess: ‘Why are we here?’, ‘What’s life all about?’, ‘Is God really real?’, ‘Is life just a game where we make up the rules?’, ‘What is our fate?’ (Monty Python 1983). The Hitchhiker’s Guide is not the only example of comedy that takes the wind out of our sails. Comedy and satire irreverently puncture such inflated ideas and help to keep us humble.

Perhaps ‘what-is-the-meaning-of-life?’ questions also deserve comic treatment because they presume that human beings are special and important enough for us to think or at least hope that human existence must have some ‘ultimate’ meaning and significance.

Only a fool – or human being (there’s not much of a distinction between the two in The Hitchhiker’s Guide) – would ask such a question, because it implies that something as perplexingly big and impossible-to-fathom as the ‘meaning of life’ is as simple as answering a question like ‘what time is it please?’ What’s more, such is the folly of assuming that a random and chaotic universe might have some purpose behind it, that the answer to the ‘Ultimate question of Life, the Universe and Everything’ may as well be the computer-generated ‘42’. Or so we are told by ‘Deep Thought’, the (second) greatest computer in the universe in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.ĭeep Thought’s answer makes a mockery of the question. What is the answer to ‘the Ultimate question of Life, the Universe and Everything’? Answer: ‘42’.

Hitchhiker's guide to the universe 42