What? You think all of the references to Maoist China and dead PMs and MPs aren’t funny nearly four decades on? 
When I was growing up we used to watch Monty Python every Sunday night on PBS. My two siblings and my dad and I would just crack up at it, but mom didn’t get it. However, she would laugh her ass off when we recited lines from it at the table. So maybe part of it was just getting past the accents or something.
One of my favorite Python-watching memories was one particular Sunday when us kids were all in our early to mid teens, and my dad’s older sister and her husband were visiting. (Older as in 20+ yrs older, almost old enough to be my grandmother.) It was time for MP to come on and we all sat down in front of the TV, and my folks were explaining to my aunt and uncle (who had never seen the show before) how much us kids loved watching this show every week. Well, the episode that happened to air that night was the “Full Frontal Nudity” episode! :eek:
Link added for the terminally lazy. (And because I prefer the original sketch.)
Americans have essentially never heard of the Goon Show.
I caught an episode of “Kids in the Hall” the other day and was surprised at how much of it was about as funny as a punch in the teeth. Most of it has not aged well.
Even classics “Simpsons” episodes, which are rightly considered some of the funniest comedy ever written, have terrible parts. The other night we saw “Lisa the Vegetarian,” a seventh season episode that has some killer gags and is rightly regarded as a classic; the bit where her class watches a pro-meat video starring Troy McClure just slays. It had about fifteen hysterical jokes in a three-minute routine. I was really enjoying it… but the last third of the episode crashes and burns badly. Paul and Linda McCartney suddenly appear and there’s just no laughs for a good five minutes. You could turn the episode off seven minutes before it ends and lose nothing. And even in its glory years the show had some episodes that just weren’t funny at all.
Most comedy is like this; it’s dull most of the time but every now and then it slays you. The good comedy will slay you every fifth or every tenth joke. The bad comedy never does. Even great standup routines, the very best comedy albums you’ll ever listen to, are distilled versions of the standup’s total body of work. By the time you listen to that classic Richard Pryor or Denis Leary routine, the comedian has himself eliminated the jokes that crashed through the long process of perfecting his set, and the album itself was edited to take out the dull parts of the routine.
My brother in law is currently on The Second City’s mainstage, and even he’ll tell you that the company doesn’t expect every joke to really land (the performers write the routines.) They fully expect only a certain fraction of the jokes will really kill, and the difference between a great show and a bad one is just how big that fraction is.
Monty Python is, let’s be honest, famous for absolutely nailing every tenth joke. I think some of their routines are riotously funny, but if you asked me to name them all I could at best give you ten bits that make me laugh out loud and ten more that are funny but not gut-busters. Since “Flying Circus” ran for 45 episodes, there would have been, at a conservative guess, 300 sketches and bits out of which I can only remember 20 funny ones, so that’s not a huge success rate. If you watch their movies, most of them bore you to tears except for a few choice jokes. But that’s what you remember years later; you don’t remember the shit unless it’s right in front of you.
Really? I find that somewhat hard to believe; I mean, I can certainly see finding it not funny, humour being a pretty individual thing and all, but even then I think you’d have to give some points for originality, innovativeness, and occasionally even cleverness (take, for instance, the mice sketch – to take such a controversial issue as homophobia and just effortlessly point out its sheer absurdity in a seven minute sketch takes quite some skill, IMHO).
I don’t find it/them funny, either.
A friend showed me Holy Grail in high school (around 2001-ish) and I was actually really surprised at how bad I thought it was. As a huge nerd, I was expecting to really get into it.
Since then I’ve seen Life of Brian and some Flying Circus sketches, and think they more or less range from painful to boring.
Yeah, there’s a scant handful of Monty Python moments I think are mildly funny, and the rest don’t do a thing for me.
And Monty Python was huge with my crowd in high school and college, watching one or two of the movies and some Flying Circus episodes was a frequent social event (not to mention then having to listen to people recite the lines at the diner at 3 AM) so my failure to appreciate it isn’t due to lack of exposure in my formative years.
Oddly, I have a very high opinion of the individual members. If they came up in conversation, I would say “Oh, I love John Cleese!” or “Oh, I love Michael Palin!” or whatever. Somehow though the whole package as Monty Python doesn’t do it for me.
Monty Python is funny. People quoting Monty Python generally is not. People quoting Monty Python at length is grounds for justifiable homicide.
Do you mean you love their contributions to Python or what they did later? I do think that one of the few comedy series that has stood the test of time is Fawlty Towers.
I totally, totally agree with this. Bravo 
And, uh…
BURMA!
Agree 100%. Multiple times, I’ve happened to run across a MPFC marathon, or a DVD, and been sort-of excited about the idea. And every fracking time, I sit looking like this, wondering why I was expecting laughs. Their best was great, but they produced a LOT of nonsense.
Joe
What they did later, so for Cleese it is Fawlty Towers and the rest of his acting career, for Palin and Terry Jones it is their writing.
Wow, I had the same experience a few years ago. I remember laughing like a maniac at KITH. I mean, uncontrollable gales of laughter. Now, the funny stuff is pretty good, and the vast majority is just awful! I mean, how often can we see that fucking Chicken Lady?
Maybe I was high. Well, DEFINITELY I was high, but maybe that was the difference.
Joe
Semprini.
Monty Python was only really funny to me at a certain age in my life. Around the ages of 16-21 I thought it was comedy gold. Not so much after that.
Similar to Mel Brooks comedies which were comedy gold between the ages of 10-16.
A handful of Monty Python moments is laugh-out-loud funny. The other 90% not so much, though I’ll watch just for the weird cartoon bumpers. That’s the way it is with most comedy, for me, anyway. I don’t find SNL funny and never did (except for those few moments). Slapstick, dumb dads/hotwives/smartass kids, people drinking hot sauce or tattooing themselves - I try, but I don’t find it actually funny. MP is from a certain time and place - it used to be on PBS, late at night, BEFORE cable, when things like The Love Boat were supposed to be the pinacle of hilarity. My friends and I made a real effort to stay up and watch MP, wiggling the rabbit ears on our clunky old TV sets. (Funny or not, it was a whole lot better than The Love Boat!)
If you don’t laugh at Life of Brian you were born without a sense of humor.
It’s less well-known than Fawlty Towers, and probably more British in its cultural references, but another off-shoot of MP that’s worth seeing – and that (for me) is standing the test of time – is Ripping Yarns
I was going to make a joke about this thread being entirely too silly, but this made me stop before I could post.
My mind is completely blown. I may come back and respond. Probably not, though.
I like all of the above, and I don’t see any of them as being mutually exclusive.
“Across the Andes by Frog” is a classic travelogue.