Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

Rated PG, which is important because we showed our kids this movie.  Okay, everything except "The Tale of Sir Galahad."  My son kept saying things were not appropriate and I am now aware that my kid is a better person than I am.  He was more confused that I could laugh at an image of God talking to King Arthur.  There's some cartoon nudity.  There's a lot of blasphemous jokes.  There's blood and talk about sex.  It's got everything that I shouldn't forgive, but totally do.  PG.

DIRECTORS:  Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones

I almost swore that I wouldn't watch this movie again.  I mean, what would be the point?  I know every line.  As a guy who has a theatre degree, you've heard this movie quoted by so many people that it practically ruined it for me at this point.  It's kind of like Napoleon Dynamite, ruined because of fans.  But then again, I have kids.  I thought that my kids should see this movie before they stop listening to me.  And that was more eye-opening than anything else.

I thought that my kids would not stop laughing.  When I first saw this movie with my dad, I couldn't stop laughing.  Some people are writing this off as the fact that the feeling that the movie is dated at this point.  It was dated for me then.  I wasn't born until 1983.  I didn't watch it until probably 1993.  I remember thinking that the movie just looked old.  It looks really bad, even remastered.  But I remember thinking that it didn't matter.  I still thought it was genius.  It safely might be the funniest movie ever made.  Sure, I know the Python guys only consider Monty Python to be a chapter in their lives, but it really did have an impact on the comedic landscape.  But there my kids were, constantly asking questions like, "What's going to happen?"  or "Why is he doing that?"  Did I screw up somewhere along the way?  Like, outside of clearly family comedies, have they seen a comedy movie before?  Even the basic stuff mostly flew over their heads.  Don't get me wrong, there's a few bits where they chuckled.  They did not like the monks hitting themselves in the head with palates. They thought it was inappropriate.  I may have raised them to be too Catholic.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail is the perfect movie to come back to after you've had a break from it.  Because I was Mr. Cool Guy back in grade school and high school, I had this movie memorized.  As much as I throw stones at people who overquote this movie, at one point I was one of them.  Trust me, if you want to make me really hate someone, remind me how I used to be that someone.  But because it was a memorized movie, I started to get some real diminishing returns from it. Comedy works from an element of suspense and the full effect of dramatic irony.  Like with horror movies and magic tricks, the effectiveness lies in knowing that there's going to be a turn, but not knowing where the turn is.  Now, if you have memorized a comedy, you are laughing more at the memory of the joke than the joke itself.  You have good times and that's something that is a good time.  When my wife and I were watching this, we kept doing side glances at one another because there was a shared experience of what was happening.  But if this was a staple in the house, I can't imagine really caring about the film beyond that point.

But I should talk about the movie itself.  I always treated Monty Python and the Holy Grail as a standard film.  It had a beginning, middle, and end for me.  But knowing what I know about Monty Python after the fact, Holy Grail is simply a collection of (admittedly) genius skits all sewn together.  If anything, the film has more genetically tied to the variety hour than it does to traditional storytelling.  The film gives Arthur a few bits where he is barely a character.  He is running into some over-the-top scenarios and plays the straight man for these scenarios.  (By the way, I'm aware that deconstructing the format of Monty Python and the Holy Grail is just the death of comedy, so please bear with me.) But then there's the Camelot bit, which is just a way to get all of the major players together.  Within minutes, the film separates them again.  Why?  The backbone of Monty Python is sketch.  There's something pervading the entire piece of collaboration.  If Monty Python's Flying Circus lived-and-died on people coming together for sketches about anything, ...and the Holy Grail works because of limitations.

If anything, this might be Exhibit A for the argument that limitations builds creativity.  When writing this film, the disparate members of Monty Python had to keep every joke about the Middle Ages and King Arthur.  I think that there's this assumption that Monty Python's Flying Circus was brilliant because they're British.  I like me some Flying Circus, but that show missed almost as much as it hit.  Instead, by forcing the topic to be about the Grail legend, we really get to see the smartness of Python shine.  Again, I could probably do a deep dive in how this movie was created.  But it's funny how tonally similar some of the bits are in the movie.  A lot of the scenes are about false wisdom or the ironic nature of wisdom in society, like how people discover witches or Dennis feeling repressed.  But most of these bits are both silly and smart at the same time.  Maybe absurdity thrives against a story that allows for some shorthand.  For example, let's break down The Knights Who Say "Ni".

Yeah, I'm going to do it.  No one can stop me and I need to find things to write about.  If I'm using "Dennis Feeling Repressed" as a brilliant bit about politics in the Middle Ages, "The Knights Who Say 'Ni'" is the opposite of that.  It's probably the most quotable because of its absurdity.  The conceit is that there is a monster in the woods.  Arthur, filled with terror, must traverse these woods.  The Knights Who Say "Ni" kill anything with this absurd word, that clearly anyone can use, as shown by Arthur's treatment of the old woman.  But the entire joke hinges on the juxtaposition of what is expected to what the actual terror is.  (Honestly, the Knights Who Say "Ni" is the same joke as the rabbit and the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.  Both are expected menaces only to be dumbed down to the tiniest insignificance.) Everything that the head knight says gets significantly dumber.  And that's the point.  What is he going to do with a shrubbery?  Don't worry about it. Cutting down a tree with a herring?  It's so dumb that it actually makes Arthur self-aware of the farce that is going on.  It's great.

So it's not really a movie.  I'll tell you what.  It's hard to write about the film as a film because it is just a collection of sketches.  I know that the film ends on an intentional anticlimax.  But that meta-narrative is the only way to really tell the story.  I will say, as much as my kids kind of didn't get it (somehow), my daughter adored the opening credits.  I suppose there's something for everyone.  I don't want to slag off their generation because that's what old people always do.  But I do wish that my kids got on board this movie.  Maybe I'll try again in a few years. Maybe, like many comedies, it needed a bigger audience to make laughter contagious.  But there's something absolutely brilliant here and it's really hard to write about that.