Thanks for y’all’s replies.
Heh. I had a medieval literature professor who said that the Monty Python troupe was the only company she’d trust to create a movie of Gawain and the Green Knight because “they really know their medieval.” I wonder if your professor knows my professor?
On that note, my mom (English teacher) used to show Holy Grail in class when they studied King Arthur, cause it was the one time when the kids would pay attention.
I first saw Monty Python about thirty years ago, when it started coming on PBS in America. My observation since then:
Monty Python – funny.
Obsessed fans recreating Monty Python sketches word-for-word – not funny. Creepy.
I think the people talking about absurdity are on the right track, but it’s also the BUILDING absurdity they use so well.
Absurd: Saying “I didn’t expect some kind of Spanish Inquisition” and the Spanish Inquisition bursts in.
Building Absurdity:…and keeps flubbing and adding to their lines until they finally get flustered and have to go out and come in again.
My Arthurian legend/medieval English lit professor shows and talks about Monty Python and the Holy Grail every chance he gets.
Maybe all these professors are onto something…
Splunge!
I demand a shrubbery.
Sir, I’d like to Get out of the Army. It’s dangerous. There are men out there with guns. Some of them even have tanks. Did you realize that if there’s a war, a real proper war, I’ll be sent to fight? I might even be killed!
All I can say is that I get down on my knees and thank God every day that I discovered Monty Python all by myself in the late 1970’s. If I’d heard the geeks and creeps spouting every line ad infinitum (and I oughta know…I’m one of them) Then I’d probubly hate them too, and wish they were dead, and myself, for not liking them… what was the question again?
Conquistador Brand Instant Coffee brings new meaning to The word “Vomit”
2 words: Fishslap Dance
My wife is a professor of music history. She’s putting a class together to teach next spring on Medievalism. It’s not about real medieval music, but on the various ways that imagined versions of the middle ages have been interpreted musically over the years. She starts with Wagner’s Ring and Orff’s Carmina Burana, and ends up with the soundtrack to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings.
During the section on film music she will of course be showing Monty Python’s Holy Grail as well as Excalibur and, believe it or not, Army of Darkness … .
The reason that they are so accurate, IMO is that Terry Jones is apparently a world renowned expert on history (especially the medieval period), and I believe he lectures on the subject at Oxford university from time to time. Sorry, no link, just remmber reading this in a newspaper article published several years ago- too lazy to go digging it up now.
From Wikipedia, on Terry Jones:
Non-fiction
Chaucer’s Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary - 1980, (updated 1994)
Foreword to The Quest for King Arthur by David Day - 1995
Television
Terry Jones has presented several factual television programmes, notably a major BBC documentary series, The Crusades (1996).
Link: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140257454/ref=pd_sim_b_dp_1/026-8825942-7523616
Links to Terry’s history books: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0413691403/qid=1061879758/sr=1-8/ref=sr_1_2_8/026-8825942-7523616
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0563370076/qid=1061879758/sr=1-6/ref=sr_1_2_6/026-8825942-7523616
Are you a conscientious objector?
No, sir. I’m a coward.
See? That’s a joke.
Respectfully, I disagree with Eternal’s carefully nuanced and delicately phrased load of hogwash.
Humor comes from the (harmless) unexpected. (Harmful unexpected causes a fear response.)
The Pythons brilliance came from taking mundane situations into unexpected directions. Coconuts replace horses, to no discernable effect. Knight gets all his limbs hacked off and still wants to fight. Crucifixion victim whistles and sings about looking on the bright side. Starving sailors in a lifeboat argue about who gets to eat who. An undertaker tries to convince a potential client that his mother’s body would be best disposed of by ingestion. Restaurant staff goes into berserk hysterics over a dirty fork. Vikings sing about Spam…
Do you find these incongruous concepts funny?
ok, you’ve all missed it by a mile:
MP popularized postmodern irony
seinfeld encompassed the coda