For those who have never seen the Pythons before (which included most Americans in the mid-1970s), their anarchic, surreal brand of comedy, which abounds in absurd visual gags, comical wordplay, and carnivalesque inversions of social hierarchies and taste, might take some getting use to. The six original members of the comedy troupe (Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, and Eric Idle) initially cut their teeth on stage and radio before delving into television, where they created Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which aired on the BBC from 1969 to 1974 and effectively revolutionized screen comedy. For the Pythons, nothing was sacred, least of all their noble British heritage. As a matter of fact, a great deal of their humor comes from mocking British stereotypes, history, and cultural norms (of course, they don’t hold back on making fun of the French, or Americans, or Asians ...).

The Pythons’ comedy, which found its apex in Holy Grail (the troupe’s second feature film, following their 1971 compilation movie And Now for Something Completely Different), also requires multiple viewings for full appreciation because every scene is so densely packed that one can never take it all in the first time (or even the second or third time). Take, for instance, one of the early scenes where King Arthur (Graham Chapman, valiantly playing the straight man) is riding through a small, dirty, plague-ridden village (are you laughing yet?). Most remember this as the scene where two villagers are pushing a cart loaded with corpses, calling solemnly, “Bring out yer dead! bring out yer dead!” But, look at the scene again, and notice everything that is happening in the background. One of the most obvious is a woman continuously smacking a live cat up against the side of a house. “Why?” you might ask. “Why not?,” the Pythons would answer.

The primary goal of Monty Python and the Holy Grail is to undermine thoroughly and completely Britain’s national legend, King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. There are few things in England as sacred as the legend of King Arthur, but the Pythons show it as little respect as they show for everything else. To them, Arthur is an overblown concept ripe for mockery and farce. What the French auteur Robert Bresson deconstructed the same year in Lancelot of the Lake (1974), the Pythons want to simply demolish. During the film’s hour and a half, they manage to ridicule every aspect of the Arthurian legends, right down to his kingship based on the magical sword Excalibur (“You can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you!” a socialist peasant tells him in one of the film’s funniest scenes of political satire). What if brave Sir Robin (Eric Idle) were actually a complete coward? What if they great Sir Launcelot (John Cleese) were actually an overzealous nitwit who kills an entire wedding party before realizing he’s in the wrong place? What if the most threatening creature on screen were a white bunny rabbit?

The film as a whole is genuinely uneven; it really more a collection of funny skits stitched together with bits of lunatic cut-out animation by co-director Terry Gilliam than any kind of coherent narrative. However, few films can lay claim to such a high proportion of hilarious sequences, including the Knights Who Say “Ni!,” the Castle Anthrax filled with busty, sexually starved women between the ages of 16 and 19, the resilient Black Knight, the insulting French guard, Sir Robin’s terribly honest minstrel, the Swedish subtitles, the Holy Hand Grenade, the “logic” used to determine a woman is a witch according to her weighing the same as a duck, and the question of whether an African or European swallow could carry a coconut. A crucial component of the film’s humor is the manner in which the absurdity of the characters and situations contrasts with the gritty realism of the mise en scène; shot entirely on misty locations throughout Scotland, often in actual medieval castles, the film has a sense of cold, damp, muddiness that you can feel in your bones, even while you’re rolling on the floor laughing. This contrast also extends to the film’s violence, which is both gruesomely realistic and utterly preposterous (the Pythons have a special affinity for the humorous aspects of spurting arteries).

Of course, all of this sounds ridiculous on paper to someone who has never seen the movie. Well, then again, I guess it’s just as ridiculous on film, but in the deranged world of Monty Python, it has a logic all its own.

Copyright ©2012 James Kendrick

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