The OP isn’t saying Monty Python and the Holy Grail isn’t a funny movie.
What (s)he is saying is that too often, fans of the movie (and of Monty Python in general) act like it’s uproariously hilarious. Like it’s the Best. HUMOR. EVAH!!! And if you don’t chime in with the requisite dialogue at the appropriate time, if you don’t laugh your head off like you are some sort of stoned teen nerd, you must have something seriously wrong with you. And this is in its own way a sad bid of comedy.
The whole point (if there is any) to the Monty Python humor is to point out how silly it is to be sheeple. We are laughing at absurdity precisely because it so thoroughly shows how stupid mundanity is. The Ministry of Silly Walks sketch isn’t just commentary on the stupidity of British government; it’s commentary on how uncomfortable we get when someone walks just the least little bit out of the ordinary. So for people who are fans to act like someone who isn’t acting JUST LIKE THEM has something WRONG with them is for those people to totally miss the point.
I love many of the sketches Monty Python did. I have the complete Flying Circus, and I have both MT&tHG and* Life of Brian*. I watch them fairly often, and when I do, I routinely laugh at the funny parts, even if I know them completely by heart. But, then, I also do that with The Court Jester, Groundhog Day, The Great Race, Young Frankenstein, etc. So it’s not that different. And I certainly don’t expect everyone to feel like I do about that humor; if your idea of something rip-roaringly funny is one of the Hangover movies, I doubt you and I are going to agree about MP. And that’s ok.
It should be noted that much the same sort of thing goes on with some music. If you don’t act like anything and everything someone like Prince did is Teh Awsum!, you can be treated like you have leprosy. I just shudder and think to myself, “I wonder if Beethoven groupies were the same?”
The movie “MP and the Holy Grail” is not mentioned by the OP.
Am I going mental? It isn’t is it? I had to go back in check.
They were talking about MP in general. Some weird offshoot started with someone thinking it was HG only. But the OP was talking about MP not any specific films or series.
I saw it much later, by myself or perhaps with my younger brother, in the late 80s, and found it quite hilarious. That said, Life of Brian is, to me, clearly their most cohesive work (and one that I find the funniest). I actually don’t think I’ve seen MP in a group, as most of my friends were not fans of MP humor. Their (at that time) late-night PBS bits that were broadcast here in Chicago were extremely hit or miss. I found maybe one out of every four or five funny, and the rest tedious. I recently rewatched some of those on Netflix, and my opinion hasn’t changed. There really is a lot of mediocre work, but it’s worth it for the one in four or five skits that tickles me.
I saw Holy Grail when it first came to theaters. (Yes, I’m ancient.) I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t like it because I was VERY squeamish, and the Black Knight, Killer Rabbit, and the wedding scene grossed me out. What can I say? I was in college and a wimp, and Flying Circus had been gore-free. Thank God, I got over all that. Years later, I occasionally showed parts of it when covering the bubonic plague and tracing the roots of the Salem Witch Trials in the HS history classes I taught. No matter how much students begged, though, Castle Anthrax was right out.
Even when I didn’t show the movie, though, I could always tell which students had seen it. When I collected papers with, “Bring out your dead,” they’d respond with, “I’m not dead yet!”
Wow. I made this comment a couple of days ago and it has blown into the stratosphere.
I’ll address some of the questions mentioned in chat and give my 2 cents on other opinions.
I do think that the movie MP&HG is funny but not as funny as many make it out to be. It’s not that I don’t laugh at the first joke but after a while, a joke can be overplayed rather quickly due to repetition (even the introduction with the writers getting “sacked” is a bit too long for my taste.)
Life of Brian is a significantly better movie than MP&HG but it’s not my favorite movie.
I can agree that some of the skits that MP does can be quite funny in segments but not as a full run-through. I could watch maybe 10-15 of them and be fine.
All in all, thank you chat for a diverse take on MP and thank you for being so kind.
I’m joining the OP with my relative indifference to Monty Python. Yes, they’ve had some very iconic and funny bits, mostly on the TV show but also in the movies, but on the whole I find what they do to feel labored and over-extended. The absurdism is fine, as far as I’m concerned, but it often only takes a few seconds to understand one absurdity, while they may stretch it out for minutes. That just becomes tedious.
I cut my teeth on the Goon Show when I was a teenager (my college radio station had a bunch of them on LPs). Some people refer to them as pre-cursors to Monty Python, but their style was quite different. Usually they had one story rather than skits to fill their half-hour radio show (with breaks for fairly extended musical numbers, so say 23-24 minutes), and their humor was a combination of silliness, catchphrases, very corny jokes and wordplay, and sound effects that were also often key to the humor. And the jokes came one right after the other, in the style of “if you don’t like that joke, just wait a couple of seconds for another one.” I can imagine lots of people wouldn’t like that sort of thing, but I did, and more than I ever enjoyed Monty Python.
So, as someone wiser than I once said, it’s all a matter of taste. My taste is for some brown Windsor soup and a bucket of custard over my head.
Are you referring to songs like “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” or “National Brotherhood Week”? His political stuff is *soooooo *1960s you simply won’t get it unless you have at least some idea of what was happening in the US and around the world at the time.
His really nasty stuff, on the other hand, can be enjoyed without such knowledge. Having a sick sense of humor to begin with is of course a great help.
I appreciate how they weave in so many subtleties into their absurd humor. The one sketch they did where the two guys are looking at models for a new apartment complex is one of my favorites. One of the guys comes in with a model that is effectively a slaughterhouse that will purposely kill all of the tenants.
The two guys are overly polite in explaining that killing the tenants is really not what they are looking for, but thank you very much for coming. Then the architect goes on a spit-filled rampage how if you are not with the in-crowd you can’t get anywhere in the world. The two guys don’t bat an eye and are still apologizing, then the architect starts begging for a chance.
It’s not funny when you type it, but the absurdity and the comparison between crazy people, being polite, being rude, and begging, all common things we see in society are presented in a minutes long sketch with exaggerated emotions struck me as hilarious.
I think this is a characteristic of English humor going back at least to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which is sort of a parody of adult civilized society seen through the eyes of a child. Scenes of Alice (like for example the Mad Tea Party) read like Monty Python sketches (or vice versa).
YOU want to complain! Look at these shoes. I’ve only had them three weeks and the heels are worn right through. f you complain nothing happens, you might as well not bother. Oh my back hurts, it’s not a very fine day and I’m sick and tired of this office.
So I’m growing up in Dallas, eleven years old in 1974, and one day my mom says to me, “there’s this really crazy show on Sunday night that you have to stay up and watch.“ This actually meant staying up past my usual bedtime, which was a big deal.
So I stay up and watch it, and I find it pretty funny, but I don’t fully get it. The next week is just fantastically better, however (the larch, bicycle repair man, the restaurant fork bit), and so she and I end up watching every single episode after that. (my stepfather, on the other hand, thinks it’s the stupidest thing he’s ever seen and skips it)
It was perfect humor for a teenager, and obviously had some other positive context for me. Flash forward, I just watched “Life of Brian“ with my teenage son this week, and I thought it was pretty funny, but it wasn’t just as resonant as I remember. I think the main thing, to the posts above, is that nothing was unexpected in the way it was 40 years ago. So it’s clever, but the absurdity doesn’t catch me off guard anymore.
If I can go forward in time about twenty years, Monty Python has the same problem as classic Simpsons or early Saturday Night Live. It was something very new to pop culture, it has a lot of obsessive fans that can quote it endlessly, and generally the funniest stuff is remembered and the terrible stuff forgotten. And I own the old A&E DVD releases of Flying Circus, as well as copies of Holy Grail and Life of Brian as well as the first ten seasons of the Simpsons, so I think I have some credibility when it comes to that sort of fandom. I can probably quote more Simpsons than I can Monty Python, but I can do a whole lot of either one.
But all humor is subjective and I understand that the Monty Python style doesn’t work for some people. There’s plenty of clanging duds in their stuff; most are in the TV show simply because that’s the most material and these days I generally don’t even bother watching the fourth series or The Cycling Tour if I’m in the mood to watch the show. The DVD release made it even easier to skip around to only the best sketches thanks to lots of chapter divisions.
