"Every age sort of has its own history. History is really the stories that we retell to ourselves to make them relevant to every age. So we put our own values and our own spin on it"
About this Quote
Jones is smuggling a radical idea in casual, shruggy phrasing: history isn’t a vault, it’s a writers’ room. Coming from a comedian who spent a career puncturing authority (and, in Monty Python, literally rewriting the rules of narrative), the line lands as both warning and permission. Warning, because the past is never delivered to us uncut. Permission, because that malleability is how societies stay emotionally attached to events they didn’t live through.
The intent is demystification. “Every age sort of has its own history” refuses the museum tone that treats history as fixed and self-evident. The “sort of” matters: it’s a comic hedge that disarms the listener while sliding in the sharper claim that what we call history is selection, emphasis, and framing. Jones isn’t denying that things happened; he’s pointing at the editorial machinery that turns happenings into meaning.
Subtext: the fiercest political fights are often battles over reruns. When we “retell” the past to make it “relevant,” we’re also laundering our present-day values through ancestral authority. That can be generous (recovering ignored voices, revising myths that protected power) or cynical (weaponizing “tradition” to freeze society in place). Jones’s comedy-trained eye catches the punchline: we accuse others of revisionism while quietly revising at full volume.
Context matters, too. Jones wasn’t just a performer; he wrote and presented history, often with a populist clarity that resisted grand-man simplifications. This quote reads like a manifesto for that approach: treat history as a living script, then ask who gets to hold the pen.
The intent is demystification. “Every age sort of has its own history” refuses the museum tone that treats history as fixed and self-evident. The “sort of” matters: it’s a comic hedge that disarms the listener while sliding in the sharper claim that what we call history is selection, emphasis, and framing. Jones isn’t denying that things happened; he’s pointing at the editorial machinery that turns happenings into meaning.
Subtext: the fiercest political fights are often battles over reruns. When we “retell” the past to make it “relevant,” we’re also laundering our present-day values through ancestral authority. That can be generous (recovering ignored voices, revising myths that protected power) or cynical (weaponizing “tradition” to freeze society in place). Jones’s comedy-trained eye catches the punchline: we accuse others of revisionism while quietly revising at full volume.
Context matters, too. Jones wasn’t just a performer; he wrote and presented history, often with a populist clarity that resisted grand-man simplifications. This quote reads like a manifesto for that approach: treat history as a living script, then ask who gets to hold the pen.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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