Monty Python and the Holy Grail

The Black Knight, The Killer Bunny, The Knights who say Nee, Shrubberies, llamas, swallows, "Run away!", "Bring out your dead", the holy hand grenade. If you haven't heard of any of these references than chances are you have never seen "Monty Python and the Holy Grail", perhaps you haven't even bothered to see it, after all it's very silly.

For the non converted, Monty Python was a comedy troupe started in the 1960s by five Brits (John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin), and one American who did animation for them (Terry Gilliam). They had what is arguably the most influential and groundbreaking sketch comedy show "Monty Python's Flying Circus", which lasted for seasons, where they created inspirational silliness such as "The Dead Parrot sketch", "The Spanish Inquisition", and "Spam". Their show never played it safe, it would change format all the time, in one infamous episode they played their closing credits right in the middle of the program.

Their show would grow more and more until it found itself too big for the small screen, and no doubt the Pythons craved a larger canvas to let loose their madness on. "The Holy Grail" was the first of three very funny films the troupe made together, and it is probably by far the silliest and the one that refers the most to the original television program.

In the film, the Pythons retell the Arthur Legend and the quest for the holy grail, it more or less sticks to the original story about King Arthur, and his knights of the round table, with each Python playing a knight or their trusted steeds (the horses in the film are men galloping with coconuts to make the sound effect). Chapman himself plays Arthur, but every troupe member shows up in multiple character roles.

I could go on about the plot, but that's really the boring part about this film, the plot is more or less a backdrop, an idea that can be parodied by the Python's best ability and they do it in spades.

The beginning of the film starts out almost like a series of sketches, as we see Arthur riding through the country side, the most famous bits coming from Eric Idle, playing a dead collector at a local village, he shouts out "Bring out your dead!". When one citizen isn't "quite dead yet", Idle speeds things up by knocking him upside the head with a mallet. It's all darkly grotesque, but is so ridiculous, you can never take it seriously.

Not soon after that, Arthur encounters the black knight, who loses every limb in a sword fight, but is still convinced "it's only a flesh wound". As a side note on this particular scene, when I first saw it as a kid of ummm I'll say about ten, I don't remember laughing harder at a single scene before in my life, and even though I can anticipate what's to come, I still laugh out loud.

The film really is a series of scenes like the ones described above that work as a sketch, with the idea of the grail being the through line which will give everything a conclusion. The film ends abruptly with the plot being interrupted by policeman coming to arrest them all for the murder of a local historian who was helping narrate the stor. It was said the filmmakers got the idea of breaking the fourth wall like this after Mel Brooks used the same technique at his conclusion of his western parody "Blazing Saddles". But this is just the way to end a film like this, if they were going to actually obtain the grail in a more conventional way then that would be a let down.

Some might argue that "The Holy Grail" doesn't hold up as well as a film compared to the group's later efforts, and a case can be made for their follow-up "The Life of Brian" to be their masterpiece. But I like "The Holy Grail" just a little bit more for the simple reason that it is all very silly, it doesn't seem to concern itself with anything but making us laugh at very ridiculous things. Perhaps some might say it's a scathing indictment on autonomy or religion, or the monarchy, but that metaphor is all but lost in the debris left over from the holy hand grenade.

What the film does do, and does well is one of the reasons I love comedies like these, it breaks the rules and makes something that is usually stuffy and self-important like a costume epic, and brings it down a peg. Most costume epics, at least the bad ones are designed to show off expensive sets and scenery, and actors saying some important but not so interesting things, in fact to quote from another python sketch, it's all very dull, dull, dull, dull. Monty Python takes some of the starch out of films like these, first by showing off their not-so expensive budget, and talking about not-so important things such as if coconuts migrate.

That's the beauty of comedy, it's the eternal equalizer, drama is there to show that the middle ages had kings, and knights and great battles, and comedy is there to show that it also had a lot of shit in the streets too.