What's the joke with this line? It's in the Spanish Inquisition scene right after Torquemada wins on the slots-type game. Mel's delivery cracks me up anyway, as well as his acolytes whispering to each other "in the car", but what does it mean? Just to put his earnings safely in the car? I'm probably reading too much into it.
shareIt was just a scat jazzy riff that fit the scene perfectly.
"I will not go down in history as the greatest mass-murderer since Adolf Hitler!" - Merkin Muffley
It's a joke, seeing as cars didn't exist when it was set.
shareI came to the board based on this exact moment of the film - my question: the first monk that repeats the line "put it in the car" to the other monks he's the one with the really deep voice and I think he's the same monk who urges Brooks to pull the lever on the wheel "Try it Torq you might win a buck!"
That wasn't Buster Pointdexter/David Johansen, was it? I looked up Johansen in IMDB and he's not credited there, and only a couple of people are credited for the Inquisition in HOTW.
It was partly a riff on the fact that cars didn't exist yet, partly a rather more-incisive riff on the fact that one of the primary motivations for the Church (and the government, especially in places like Spain and France) in the Inquisition was self-enrichment. They'd arrest people in order to confiscate their wealth and property. This was particularly true in the case of Jews, since Jews were allowed to be moneylenders, i.e. engage in usury, when Christians weren't. This meant both that some Jews had extensive wealth and that some prominent Christians, including kings and nobility, were indebted to Jewish moneylenders. So a good way to lay hands on that wealth, or to erase your debts, was to arrest the people in question and have them killed by the Inquisition on charges of, well, not being Christian. Basically, Torquemada was admitting, in a whisper to his subordinate, that he was doing all this to get rich, not because he actually cared all that much about heresy or anything.
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