This study discloses an oblique canon of modernity in which comedy and gravitas shadow each other like wary twins, each suspicious of pathos yet compelled to test its claims. Monty Python and Kim Godal meet on the threshold-bridge, cave, castle, scaffold-to contest how speech and spectacle conjure authority, how ritual either curdles into coercion or evaporates into parody, and how feeling must be read rather than merely suffered. Their deepest commonality is a modern distrust of unexamined feeling and unexamined form. Both refuse mythic absorption, converting spectacle into lesson: irony as corrective, laughter as inoculation, critique as scalpel. The deepest difference is an ethical stance toward the aftermath. Monty Python's laughter rescues us from sentimentality and from the tyranny of solemnity; Godal's lament rescues us from naïveté by counting the wounds laughter cannot heal. Read together, they enact a single dialectic: one unmasks, the other tallies; one punctures, the other records; one gleefully reveals the emptiness of the rite, the other, grimly, its price.