How Monty Python and the Holy Grail became a comedy legend
101 comments
·April 9, 2025riffraff
perilunar
For those who haven't seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7qT-C-0ajI&t=129s
belter
"We are an anarcho syndicalist commune..."
"Now we see the violence inherent in the system..." :-)
switch007
I mean, if I went around sayin' I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me they'd put me away!
--
The text doesn't do the scene justice. Michael Palin is a national treasure!
mdp2021
> Michael Palin is a national treasure
...But for his postman. (Possibly obscure reference from Armando Iannucci's Charm Offensive. Pluri-national, international treasures.)
mdp2021
(...I tired to find the clip and post the transcript, but it is unavailable. It was along the lines of Michael's postman having been interviewed in 2007, complaining that Palin received too many letters. Mark Watson must have replied that "It was sad, since Michael Palin speaks with high regard about his postman"... And so on.)
n1b0m
Funnily enough I came across a similar comment a few days back
null
mdp2021
Funny coincidence, I believe a few hours earlier I read a comment from Dang who called some complaints a "Help, help, I'm being repressed".
Gives you a proportion of the extent...
dang
I have to force myself not to use that line. It's too sarcastic for a good mod comment, but it's also so perfect, it pains me to edit it out. So other few words fit! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lStcwT_RGrQ#t=50).
6stringmerc
It’s a hard business, being a shrubber, that we must all acknowledge.
aa-jv
He's NOT the Messiah, he's a VERY NAUGHTY BOY!
BLKNSLVR
Should be required watching for entry to adulthood.
bambax
I first saw it in school, at 15 (a looong time ago). Could not believe my eyes. Could not believe one was allowed to even do that. The incredible freedom of it all, starting with the title sequence, and the incredible irreverence, crazyness.
I think it's fair to say it changed me as a person. I never took anything too seriously after that.
john_the_writer
My 15year old can quote it. Their teacher said something the other day, and she replied from the movie. They both laughed, but the rest of the class (apparently) all looked confused. I was very proud.
Same thing happened with a FleetwoodMac song. Different teacher.
readthenotes1
One company I worked for, we used to joke that we should get rid of all the software questions and ask what the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow is.
nickpeterson
That would be a terrible interview question, because it doesn’t clarify whether you mean an African or European swallow.
ycombinatrix
That's part of the appeal, the candidate needs to answer with a range or ask a clarifying question that uno reverses the interview
spc476
But then the interviewer will be launched into the Pit of Eternal Peril.
HaZeust
It's the question that Screaming Bee used for gauging your voice profile for the MorphVOX voice changer!
alnwlsn
I was somewhat disappointed to learn that there's a lot less Monty Python on Youtube than there used to be. You can still find the Cheese Shop, Dead Parrot, or Silly Walks, but about 15 years back it seemed like nearly every sketch from Flying Circus was there. Most of which were uploaded by the official Monty Python youtube channel.
Now, about 90% of them have been taken down. Which is a shame, as this is how I discovered them. Another loss for kids these days.
metalman
Cleese on a talk show with Taylor Swift is evidence of how efortless it is for him to totaly take over a situation, poke horrible fun at someone, without giving cause for offence, charm the hell out of woman 25% his age ,while talking about his own wife and her cat he's old now, but still formitable buddy got to work with him
block_dagger
It's not dead yet.
glimshe
I have an embarrassing confession to make. I absolutely hate Monty Python and don't find them funny almost at all. The jokes are childish, obscure and lazy from my Gen X point of view.
People have told me "you need to like British humor to enjoy it" but I've seen a lot of funny jokes in British movies... And I know many funny people from the UK.
So, PLEASE... Could anyone tell me what's funny about Monty Python?
lordfrito
Not trying to oversimplify the appeal, but I personally found their juxtaposition between the absurd and highly intelligent social commentary endlessly entertaining because deep down it felt like they were saying something is really really wrong with society and existence in general. They wrapped it up in comedy, because what else can you do in the face of an existential crisis but laugh at it? They always felt like a group of very angry young men trying to disrupt the stuffy old system from within. Very subversive stuff, especially for it's time. It really resonated with me as an angry/angsty (and relatively intelligent) adolescent male.
Go watch Brazil and tell me that Gilliam isn't furious with humanity and the state of things in the world.
comeondude
Nothing to be embarrassed about, different strokes for different folks.
However, Monty Python was far from lazy, they cleverly deconstructed a repressive British culture at the time, they mocked class and authority, uptight education institutions, pointless bureaucracies, religious hypocrisy, and violent glorification of British history.
Their humor can be pretty crass by today’s standards, but if you approach their work as an absurdist, subversive satire, they’re one of the best that have ever done it.
I’ve always found their underlying message to be “don’t take things too seriously and enjoy life.”
As for what’s funny, they’re just absurd. A flying bunny that rips knights head off, an accidental messiah who just points out basic common sense which is interpreted by the masses as direct edict from God, brilliant deconstruction of bullshit bureaucracy in form of ministry of silly walks. Things like that.
But if that doesn’t tickle your fancy, that’s okay too.
snovymgodym
Well the simple answer is that humor is subjective and that the things which were considered novel, topical, subversive humor in 1970s might not hit the same for everyone today. I'm not even sure the "British Humor" aspect has that much to do with it, since I think Monty Python has a bigger following in the US than in the UK. It might just not be your brand of humor.
That being said, the good sketches from their show are still funny and memorable today. But as with any sketch show, there's a mixture of quality. Holy Grail has its intergenerational staying power among nerds and theatre kids for a reason, even if the quoting and references to it have become pretty trite in my view.
Life of Brian is probably the best thing they've done, and is definitely one of my favorite comedies ever.
nancyminusone
Silly Walks isn't just funny because it's a grown man flopping his legs around like a kid, but also because there's apparently a department of the government to manage such activity. That's absurd.
mdp2021
Have you seen them at Graham Norton's?
dvh
Can someone decipher what one of the prophets was talking about, the "thing with attachment", it always struck me as a perfect portrayal of a prophet that somehow seen future, but because himself being from a distant past cannot really comprehend or explain it.
sorokod
I thought that was more in the spirit of "Society for Putting Things on Top of Other Things"
ggm
I enjoy python stuff but not all of it aged well. A lot of older comedy aged better. Jacques Tati films for example. Or Chaplin.
They could be bizarrely homophobic and also celebrate gay culture in the same show. They were often very misogynist.
I still laugh at it. I still watch it. But the adulation faded.
No Australian enjoys their take on Australian wine. It's wincingly unpleasant. Barry Humphries, Germaine Greer and Clive James fed cultural stereotypes which died out when earl's court became too expensive for Australian backpackers. The abos armpit thing comes back to me far too often from naive British friends who would never use the N word, or make jokes about Irish being stupid. They don't know what they're saying.
Eric Idle complained he had to do Spamelot to get some retirement income. George Harrison made bank on the films.
The situationist surreal stuff, Terry Gilliams pasteup animation, very good. Dressing up as ladies.. tiresome.
There's a line from pythons dressing up as working class women to little Britain making fun of incontinent old women.
jeroenhd
Monty Python was hardly the only show that featured men dressed as women. Drag has actually been part of British entertainment for a long time. And, honestly, I don't really see the big deal, as long as it's not done with a hateful agenda.
Little Britain's poor taste jokes would've happened regardless of Python, because of its centuries long history of crossdressing.
Many of their takes also involved kicking back against society. Put a man in a woman's position and suddenly the things women endured daily become absurd. Have a man make a crass suggestion towards another man like an asshole would to a woman, and suddenly it becomes absurd and weird. In isolation those events could be considered homophobic, but between an animated politician eating the queen and a farmer explaining that his sheep are flying into trees to nest, I don't think such pessimism is warranted.
My take watching Python is that the actors very much knew that misogyny and homophobia are stupid as a concept. They didn't shy away from portraying society as it was (and unfortunately, still is), but they weren't necessarily trying to take anyone down.
The fact many Python sketches are offensive these days says more about how society has aged than Python, in my opinion. When Python has a man in a dress, it's just a silly character, but when in modern media it has become necessary for such things to be a statement for (or, even worse, against) basic human rights.
I think the strength and weakness in Python is that they'd make fun of anything and anyone. That include sensitive topics that haven't changed as much as they should have in the last century.
bambax
> A lot of older comedy aged better. Jacques Tati films for example. Or Chaplin.
As a Frenchman I should be defending Tati but by God I have never found him funny. Poetic, maybe (maybe!) but funny?? Not in the least IMHO. One can guess what he means, immediately, there is no subtext. "Modernity is dehumanizing." Yeah, well, it probably is, but we all know that now, don't we? (Same thing with Chaplin BTW.)
Monty Python is incredibly funny, and still is, because it's often absurd, and absurd stays absurd forever.
Angostura
“Dressing up as ladies” was just a massive part of British comedy that went back to music hall. See also Les Dawson, Dick Emery etc etc.
ChrisMarshallNY
My understanding, is that it went back to Shakespeare. In Ye Olde Days, women weren't allowed to act. Men dressed in drag to play the parts of women, and used those shrill voices.
As it was, I think Connie Booth was the only proper lady that showed up in Python stuff.
dazzawazza
Everything is of it's time. They pushed the barriers back in their time so that we could enjoy a better world now. They never claimed to be omniscient and that is to all our benefits.
Casual racism has and always will be there. No point in worrying about it.
rightbyte
I think the cosplay was quite challanging at the time? Like, there was very little kicking downwards. Little Britain lacks taste in comparison.
ggm
Yes it was hugely transgressive. As was the nudity. John Cleese presenting the fake 6 o clock news wearing nothing but a bow tie, Gilliam playing the piano starkers.
I'd say there was a bit of kicking down. The gumbies and the three Yorkshireman a bit (that predates python, they brought it in with them, they'd written for something like "that was the week that was") mainly they kicked middle class values.
nonrandomstring
True, but do you (HN readers) look on transgression only with nostalgia? What would be usefully transgressive today? Much subversive humour is Socratic in just asking (pointing out) hard questions.
In that vein, TBH I find it hard to square a post celebrating famous British humour on a site where any humour, whether good or in poor taste, is mercilessly punished by downvoting and faux outrage. I'm not calling hypocrisy, just pointing to an odd juxtaposition of values.
Do y'all delight in things the Python team said precicely because you wouldn't tolerate it or have the personal sense of security to say it today?
nkrisc
> Dressing up as ladies.. tiresome.
I’ve heard that before and I don’t get it. They were just playing characters like any other they played, but some were women so they wore woman’s clothing.
stavros
I'm not English so I get it, it's not that they dressed up as women specifically, it's that they did it constantly. After the Nth time it got a bit old. I know that men dressing up as women was a UK comedy staple at the time, but it always looked a bit too trite to me (even when I was a teenager).
It has nothing to do with feminism (for me, at least), it's just that I didn't find it funny.
nkrisc
But the joke wasn't that they were men dressed as women. Typically they played it completely straight. The joke was the character they were portraying, a type of character that was often a man or a woman.
When femininity was an important part of the sketch, they often had Carol Cleveland or other women play the role.
If you don't find it funny that's fine.
mdp2021
> it's that they did it constantly
That amounts to objecting to representing females. Rule was: "female unless awkward → one of the pythons; when awkward → Carol Cleveland".
The point was that the writers would also be the performers.
card_zero
The Kids in the Hall did it too, extensively, in the 90s.
myheartisinohio
You have a problem with drag, eh?
aa-jv
Misogyny in comedy is still real. Just saw SNL fully taking the piss out of an actress' teeth this weekend, in fact.
Coincidentally read a comment yesterday on the lines of "strange women lying in ponds distributing swords does seem like a decent basis for a system of government at this point".
Absolute masterpiece.