A Comedic Holy Grail
- cultured-grunt
- May 15
- 10 min read
I have been a fan of the movies from as far back as I can remember, any kind of movie as long as it’s good. However, I have always had a particular fondness for comedies that reliably make me laugh. One of my all-time favorite movies of any genre, and one that epitomizes the making me laugh attribute, just celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. This movie is Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
The first memory I have of that movie is being present in the living room while one of my parents was channel surfing and momentarily stopped at a program where I saw a man dressed as a medieval knight cut off the arm of a man dressed in black armor as obviously fake blood squirted out of the stump. I then saw the knight who retained his limbs kneel down to pray only to get promptly kicked in the head by his, literally, disarmed opponent. I recall laughing at the head kick but not registering any of the dialogue.
I don’t know how much time passed between this initial glimpse and the first time that I saw the whole movie, but it quickly became a personal favorite. The “Monty Python” part of the film’s title refers to the comedy troupe who wrote the film’s screenplay and provided most of the performances. That troupe’s history is worth going into.
The Monty Python troupe, whose members are often referred to as the Pythons, consisted of John Cleese, Michael Palin, Eric Idle, and Terry Gilliam, along with the late great Graham Chapman and Terry Jones. The Pythons were all very educated men with Jones and Palin being educated at England’s prestigious Oxford University and Cleese, Chapman, and Idle coming from the similarly prestigious Cambridge. Terry Gilliam, the lone American of the troupe, was a graduate of Occidental College, a private liberal arts college in Los Angeles, California, and had worked as an animator on a couple of shows in which Eric Idle starred.
Members of the troupe had experienced success on television shows and been offered their own late night comedy programs. Knowing each other from a combination of performing while University students and on previous shows, the six men joined up and created the revolutionary TV program Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which is credited with defining sketch comedy TV, in 1969. This program aired for 5 years and, along with subsequent films, is credited with bringing absurdist humor into the mainstream and defining sketch comedy for all who would follow them. In the wake of Flying Circus, the troupe completed their first original film.
The production faced challenges right out of the gate as no film studio wanted to finance it. Eventually, the Pythons got the needed funds through their own contributions and donations from a few British Rockstars including the bands Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. The film would be made for the very modest budget of $410,000, and with such a modest budget the filmmakers would implement some very clever strategies to work within it.
The first, and possibly the most prominent, example of this occurs in the very first scene of the movie. The movie is the Monty Python troupe’s take on the legend of King Arthur and his knights on their quest to find the Holy Grail, and knights ride horses. The Pythons originally wanted to use real horses in the movie, but quickly realized that acquiring and wrangling the animals would be beyond their budget. The solution at which they arrived was to have the Knights mime riding horses while a servant followed behind banging halves of a coconut together in a reference to old-time radio sound effects.
This inspired solution not only saved money, but also provides one of the greatest recurring sight gags in this film or any other comedy. Other methods used to keep the movie within the meager budget included using the same castle, shot at different angles, for most of the production, having the Pythons perform the majority of the roles in the film, and frequently employing stills and models in place of more elaborate sets or locations.
The film brought in a modest box office in its initial release, but was a great success in that it made more than 8 times its budget. As is the case with many great films, Monty Python and the Holy Grail achieved a lasting impact subsequent to its initial theatrical release. The film now enjoys a passionate global following and is often recognized as one of the greatest movie comedies of all time.
At the time of its release, New York Times film critic Vincent Canby described the film as “inspired lunacy”. I have always felt that this is a great way to describe the film since a lot of the humor can be described as absurd, random, or outright lunacy, but is done in a way that demonstrates the high intelligence of the men who created it. I still maintain that the screenplay for this movie is inspired as the writers manage to make things that shouldn’t have comedic potential become comedy gold. One example that I often cite is in the first scene when King Arthur has a conversation with a guard atop a castle that devolves into a discussion about Swallows and the unlikelihood of finding coconuts in a temperate zone. On paper this should be boring or just plain stupid, but the Pythons make it hilarious.
The main reason that I love this movie so much is that it masterfully balances comedic brilliance with outright silliness, through some of the absolute best writing in any medium or genre. The film is often described as being a series of sketches held together by a common motif. I could go on about each scene in the movie and why it is so great, but in an effort to not bore anyone reading this I will focus on three of my favorite scenes with a mention of the film’s ending.
Bring Out Your Dead
The first legendary scene about which I will write takes place in a rural village beset by some kind of plague. We see a man played by Eric Idle striking a simple bell or chime in front of a cart with a few bodies piled onto it as he calls “Bring out your dead” after each chime. A man played by John Cleese then approaches with the body of an older man laid over his shoulder.
As John Cleese prepares to deposit the body, the man on his shoulder, played by John Young, calls out (in one of the lines from this film that I actually quote a lot) “I’m not dead” prompting Idle to respond “Here now, he says he’s not dead”. The scene then becomes a conversation between Idle and Cleese where Idle explains that he can’t take the body in its present state due to it being “against regulations” and Cleese attempting to convince Idle to make an exception. As this goes on the older man occasionally interjects with proclamations such as “I feel fine”, “I’m getting better”, and “I think I’ll go for a walk” sometimes earning humorous replies such as “You’re not fooling anyone you know, you’ll be stone dead in a moment” from Cleese.
My wife once pointed out the humor found in the scenario of trying to apply modern bureaucratic principles to a situation such as a Medieval plague. Even thinking about the back and forth between these three makes me laugh as the brilliant ridiculousness plays out. A big part of the brilliance is the absurdity of the situation coupled with the lines being delivered in a casual, straightforward manner bordering on deadpan. The scene ends with Idle fatally bludgeoning the old man, earning a casual “Right, see you Thursday” from Cleese, before the scene concludes with Arthur and Patsy riding past and Idle brilliantly summing up class distinctions by commenting that the passing “rider” must be a king because “He hasn’t got sh#% all over him”.
The Black Knight
Another favorite scene features Arthur and Patsy coming across a character known as The Black Knight, played by John Cleese, engaged in a violent altercation with a knight dressed in green, played by Terry Gilliam, in front of a bridge rather needlessly placed over what looks like a stream of water maybe a few inches deep. After the Black Knight dispatches his foe, Arthur approaches him and invites him to join his court at Camelot. The Black Knight does not respond until Arthur is about to move on to cross the bridge and is informed that “none shall pass”.
Arthur and the Black Knight begin to fight with their swords until Arthur cuts off the Black Knight’s arm and figures that he has won. To his surprise, the Black Knight responds with one of the most quoted lines from the film, “tis but a scratch” leading to yet another great exchange of dialogue between the two of them:
Arthur: A scratch? Your arm’s off!
Black Knight: No it isn’t.
Arthur (pointing to the lobbed off arm): Then what’s that?
Black Knight (after a glance at the arm and subsequent pause): I’ve had worse.
They continue fighting until Arthur cuts off his enemy’s other arm and says “Now stand aside, worthy adversary” before praying in gratitude for his victory before he is kicked in the head by his not quite vanquished foe. As the Black Knight continues to kick him, Arthur delivers my favorite line of the entire film when he yells “Look, you stupid bastard, you’ve got no arms left!”. This is my favorite line because it is one of the only times in the movie that someone pleads for reason.
This pattern continues until the Black Knight is left with none of his appendages, at which point he declares “alright, we’ll call it a draw”, and Arthur rides away while the Black Knight spiritingly threatens “Come back and get what’s coming to you! I’ll bite your legs off!
Witch Trial
When I was a freshman in high school, I got to take an awesome World Studies–Humanities class. We were studying about Aristotle and his system of logic when my teacher, Mr. Hoffman, showed the class a video clip that he introduced as a scene from one of his favorite movies of all-time, and an example of bad logic.
Arthur rides into a village where a group of people bring a woman to a knight named Bedeviere, played by Terry Jones, accusing her of being a witch. After a few moments of conversation, Bedeviere informs the crowd that there are ways of telling if the accused is a witch and goes into what is actually a legitimate example of logical deduction. The flaw is that the initial truth is erroneous as Bedeviere’s deduction is that witches burn because they are made of wood, and the way to tell if the accused is made of wood is to see if she weighs the same as a duck since both wood and ducks float in water.
The trial ends with the accused witch being weighed against a duck on Bedeviere’s large scales and being found guilty. After the “witch” and the duck are removed we can see that the scales are completely lopsided. The dialogue in this scene is hysterical as Bedeviere flaunts his supposed logic, even employing the Socratic method of answering questions with questions in order for the students to arrive at their own answers. Some of the answers given to questions such as “What else floats in water?” are great as members of the rabble shout answers like bread, apples, very small rocks, churches, and my personal favorite, Lead.
Watching this scene makes me wonder, when I’m not laughing, how western civilization survived long enough to get to the Renaissance.
Ending
The film ends with Arthur and Bedeviere, accompanied by a large force of knights that has apparently been with them the entire time, charging to attack the castle containing the Holy Grail. Before the attack can begin, a modern police wagon pulls up in front of the charging force. This is followed by officers emerging to arrest Arthur and Bedeviere for the murder of “a famous historian” earlier in the movie. One of the officers then breaks the camera, promptly ending the movie.
I didn’t like the ending at all the first time I saw it, I had hoped for an epic battle sequence, and remember thinking something along the lines of “what the heck was that?” the first time I saw it, unsure of what I had seen or how to react to it. But, after learning that the ending was so prompt because the production ran out of money, I find it absolutely hysterical and praise the creativity of the filmmakers.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail is one of my favorite movies, specifically comedies, largely because it is the most incredibly smart silly humor that one can find. Aside from the scenes I wrote about, the rest of the film is loaded with other examples. One great example comes from a scene where a peasant defies tropes of fantasy adventures by questioning Arthur’s account of receiving the sword Excalibur from The Lady of the Lake, and subsequently Arthur’s claim to sovereignty, by giving a grounded and realistic assessment of the claim by stating that “...strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government”.
Another great sequence of smart silly humor is the Pythons making one of the greatest adversaries faced by Arthur and his knights being a killer rabbit guarding an important cave. The brilliance of this comes from the Pythons being inspired to include this based on a carving on the facade of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, France. There are depictions of virtues and vices throughout the facade, with the vice of cowardice depicted as a knight running away from a rabbit.
It is often said that the key to great comedy is timing. The Pythons definitely understood this and applied it masterfully. A great example of this is during the earlier mentioned Witch Trial scene when Bedeviere asks the crowd how they know that the accused woman is a witch. One of the villagers, played by John Cleese claims that she turned him into a newt. Bedeviere questions this by asking “A newt?”. The character played by Cleese faces widespread doubt as the accused witch, and several of the crowd, look at him questioningly.
The comedian Tommy Chong once claimed in an interview with Sammy Hagar that the “secret to great comedy is…the pause” making a long pause himself to emphasize his point. The moment in Holy Grail sees Cleese using a similarly brilliant pause after Bedeviere’s question before delivering what might be the greatest comeback line ever, with a somewhat timid response of “I got better”.
Comedy comes in many different forms and subgenres, with a lot of it seeming to be over the top and giving the appearance of desperately trying to get a laugh through loud or disgusting jokes. I will always prefer smarter humor that uses brilliant writing and excellent delivery to make one laugh, sometimes while also thinking. Monty Python and the Holy Grail is one of the best examples of this kind of comedy of which I am aware, and will probably always be my favorite take on the King Arthur legend. It is the smartest silly humor, inspired lunacy, and always time well spent.
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