Thus The Wall Street Journal today. “The former Monty Python star who released his memoir, ‘So, Anyway…’ this month, regrets the loss of broad general knowledge that allowed a wider variety of comedy,” elaborates the newspaper. Very well put. Broad general knowledge is going the way of the dodo, to be sure. The first thing that came to my mind after reading the byline was the Flying Circus sketch from 1969 about a competition to summarize Proust in fifteen seconds. And it was an all-England competition, no less. This sort of competition would be unimaginable even in France at this day and age. “Proust?” one can imagine young people frowning nowadays, “what’s Proust?” Not to sound too glib, every generation can complain in a similar way ever since the Renaissance. Our grandfathers complained about the disappearance of Greek from the curriculum, and our fathers bewailed the disappearance of Latin. Broad general knowledge is best forgotten once and for all. Luckily for my generation, Monty Python sketches are widely available on the World Wide Web. Après nous, le déluge.