How Monty Python and the Holy Grail became a comedy legend
bbc.com
bbc.com
Absolute masterpiece.
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The text doesn't do the scene justice. Michael Palin is a national treasure!
...But for his postman. (Possibly obscure reference from Armando Iannucci's Charm Offensive. Pluri-national, international treasures.)
"Now we see the violence inherent in the system..." :-)
Gives you a proportion of the extent...
Same thing happened with a FleetwoodMac song. Different teacher.
Then a few weeks later, I mentioned the panel to another friend from the same church. He was in his mid-20s, and an educator in independent Catholic and charter [liberal arts] schools.
He told me that teachers there were expressly forbidden from introducing pop culture references. I mean, it seems nice for a student to share an in-joke with teacher, but is that an inclusive environment and a safe space?
It is never an error to adhere to the curriculum and thus ensure that your class materials engage all the students with cultural and moral sensitivity.
I think it's fair to say it changed me as a person. I never took anything too seriously after that.
Now, about 90% of them have been taken down. Which is a shame, as this is how I discovered them. Another loss for kids these days.
I rewatched it a few weeks ago, took note of the symbolism surrounding it, and now I am horrified, shocked, disgusted that I ever took delight in the abuse of women and degrading them. And I cannot watch Abby on NCIS without thinking of what the actress has been through in her real life.
People have told me "you need to like British humor to enjoy it" but I've seen a lot of funny jokes in British movies... And I know many funny people from the UK.
So, PLEASE... Could anyone tell me what's funny about Monty Python?
Go watch Brazil and tell me that Gilliam isn't furious with humanity and the state of things in the world.
However, Monty Python was far from lazy, they cleverly deconstructed a repressive British culture at the time, they mocked class and authority, uptight education institutions, pointless bureaucracies, religious hypocrisy, and violent glorification of British history.
Their humor can be pretty crass by today’s standards, but if you approach their work as an absurdist, subversive satire, they’re one of the best that have ever done it.
I’ve always found their underlying message to be “don’t take things too seriously and enjoy life.”
As for what’s funny, they’re just absurd. A flying bunny that rips knights head off, an accidental messiah who just points out basic common sense which is interpreted by the masses as direct edict from God, brilliant deconstruction of bullshit bureaucracy in form of ministry of silly walks. Things like that.
But if that doesn’t tickle your fancy, that’s okay too.
That being said, the good sketches from their show are still funny and memorable today. But as with any sketch show, there's a mixture of quality. Holy Grail has its intergenerational staying power among nerds and theatre kids for a reason, even if the quoting and references to it have become pretty trite in my view.
Life of Brian is probably the best thing they've done, and is definitely one of my favorite comedies ever.
They could be bizarrely homophobic and also celebrate gay culture in the same show. They were often very misogynist.
I still laugh at it. I still watch it. But the adulation faded.
No Australian enjoys their take on Australian wine. It's wincingly unpleasant. Barry Humphries, Germaine Greer and Clive James fed cultural stereotypes which died out when earl's court became too expensive for Australian backpackers. The abos armpit thing comes back to me far too often from naive British friends who would never use the N word, or make jokes about Irish being stupid. They don't know what they're saying.
Eric Idle complained he had to do Spamelot to get some retirement income. George Harrison made bank on the films.
The situationist surreal stuff, Terry Gilliams pasteup animation, very good. Dressing up as ladies.. tiresome.
There's a line from pythons dressing up as working class women to little Britain making fun of incontinent old women.
I'd say there was a bit of kicking down. The gumbies and the three Yorkshireman a bit (that predates python, they brought it in with them, they'd written for something like "that was the week that was") mainly they kicked middle class values.
In that vein, TBH I find it hard to square a post celebrating famous British humour on a site where any humour, whether good or in poor taste, is mercilessly punished by downvoting and faux outrage. I'm not calling hypocrisy, just pointing to an odd juxtaposition of values.
Do y'all delight in things the Python team said precicely because you wouldn't tolerate it or have the personal sense of security to say it today?
I don't think HN actually hates humour, it just has a relatively high bar. Some of my most upvoted comments have been jokes. But I like to think they were reasonably good ones.
Regarding the Pythons and transgression, I think for me it's probably a case by case thing. There's obviously "good" transgression and "bad" transgression, but I suppose you have to have some support for the willingness to transgress, if you want positive social change to be a possibility.
Regarding specific things the Pythons said, the most actually transgressive-at-the-time thing I can think of is probably Graham Chapman's overt homosexuality and support for gay rights, which was no small thing in 1970s Britain.
Edit: Or you could make a case for it being the "blasphemous" Life of Brian, although I don't think the public outrage about that was really in step with mainstream opinion.
Edit2: I'm wondering whether Some Like it Hot, Milton Berle etc were considered transgressive in the US? Were these things not actually quite mainstream in the 20th century, even in the US?
Yes, I think us Brits defused many of our internal tensions as a mult-cultural AND classist society in the 70s and 80s with the transition from vaudeville racism to new-wave "alternative comedy". It didn't change the status-quo but it did move the dial toward more progressive ideas.
I do think HN is an odd place in it's intolerance of humour, and I don't see that "high bar" because TBH it's the lowborw geeky "knob-gags" that make the grade here in my observation. I think it's actually the old struggle of poets and philosophers (see Republic 2, 3, 5 [0]) is at play. HN adapts to filtering what it can't process. It's a bit like that AI brain in Blake's Seven that Villa causes to explode by feeding it riddles. I'm noticing even this "meta" talk about humour is being downvoted (and I hope those doing so are getting a good ironic laugh from that) :)
I've always seen this as a counterculture to Reddit, not as intolerance of humour.
I've made my share of (attempted) humourous posts on HN.
The main pushback I've gotten has been from people who want to keep the conversations focused on "serious" discussion.
Casual racism has and always will be there. No point in worrying about it.
Intentional joking, with the understanding that it should be taken as a joke. Often about the reaction of the triggerable. "Dear BBC..."
I’ve heard that before and I don’t get it. They were just playing characters like any other they played, but some were women so they wore woman’s clothing.
It has nothing to do with feminism (for me, at least), it's just that I didn't find it funny.
That amounts to objecting to representing females. Rule was: "female unless awkward → one of the pythons; when awkward → Carol Cleveland".
The point was that the writers would also be the performers.
When femininity was an important part of the sketch, they often had Carol Cleveland or other women play the role.
If you don't find it funny that's fine.
As it was, I think Connie Booth was the only proper lady that showed up in Python stuff.
Little Britain's poor taste jokes would've happened regardless of Python, because of its centuries long history of crossdressing.
Many of their takes also involved kicking back against society. Put a man in a woman's position and suddenly the things women endured daily become absurd. Have a man make a crass suggestion towards another man like an asshole would to a woman, and suddenly it becomes absurd and weird. In isolation those events could be considered homophobic, but between an animated politician eating the queen and a farmer explaining that his sheep are flying into trees to nest, I don't think such pessimism is warranted.
My take watching Python is that the actors very much knew that misogyny and homophobia are stupid as a concept. They didn't shy away from portraying society as it was (and unfortunately, still is), but they weren't necessarily trying to take anyone down.
The fact many Python sketches are offensive these days says more about how society has aged than Python, in my opinion. When Python has a man in a dress, it's just a silly character, but when in modern media it has become necessary for such things to be a statement for (or, even worse, against) basic human rights.
I think the strength and weakness in Python is that they'd make fun of anything and anyone. That include sensitive topics that haven't changed as much as they should have in the last century.
As a Frenchman I should be defending Tati but by God I have never found him funny. Poetic, maybe (maybe!) but funny?? Not in the least IMHO. One can guess what he means, immediately, there is no subtext. "Modernity is dehumanizing." Yeah, well, it probably is, but we all know that now, don't we? (Same thing with Chaplin BTW.)
Monty Python is incredibly funny, and still is, because it's often absurd, and absurd stays absurd forever.
I suspect that, like most things that we now recognise as classics, much of Monty Python wasn't recognized at the time as a classic. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Python_and_the_Holy_Grai... suggests that, while reception was generally positive, there wasn't the sense we'd now expect of a great treasure having just been unearthed.
All of which is to say that, whatever is comparable right now, we probably think of it as so-so, and will have to await retrospective critical appreciation to find out what we should have been treasuring.
Monty Python was a huge success in its day - which is why it spawed multiple seasons, movies, comedy albums, books, and of course multiple careers (for all involved, even the mere non-speaking ...cartoonist), and even live shows. And that's just in the 70s and early 80s.
>For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Python_and_the_Holy_Grai... suggests that, while reception was generally positive, there wasn't the sense we'd now expect of a great treasure having just been unearthed.
Its funs where younger demographics. Mainstream reviewers of the time were notoriously out of touch. Hardly anybody more square than Ebert (at least he did gave it 3/4).
Green Wing [1], Channel 4 television series (UK)
Aunty Donna, Australian comedy troupe that has a lot of surrealist humour. A good introduction is this sketch [2] and their Netflix show "Aunty Donna's Big Ol' House of Fun".
The Frantics, a Canadian sketch comedy troupe. They are most known for their sketch "Boot to the Head", but their CBC radio series which ran from 1981-84 was (to me) very reminiscent of Python.
I'd imagine fans of The Mighty Boosh and Python intersect quite a bit.
The Mischief Theatre Company - the ones behind the "Goes Wrong" theatre shows, e.g. "The Play That Goes Wrong", the "The Goes Wrong Show" on BBC, etc.
Bleak Expectations by Mark Evans, BBC Radio 4 pastiche on Dickens (2007-2012) - one of my favourite pieces of comedy in any medium. Here's the first episode [3] on YouTube.
I've seen a lot of live comedy that reminded me of Python at places like the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Wing>
"Every sperm is sacred..." (https://youtu.be/fUspLVStPbk)
or
"Can we have your liver?" (https://youtu.be/Sp-pU8TFsg0)
:)
Such as.
Also the typo ("quiet" instead of "quite") and the absence of capitals at the beginning of sentences, or points at the end, give out a general impression of carelessness.
You should judge a fair assessment of reality, not a self-fed "sensation".
If there's submissions with stupid titles like "12 ways to serve Spam" then these should just be flagged by the users.
You can modify them again if the automated result is unsatisfactory.
> these should just be flagged
No, we submit articles, not titles. (Which in journalism are often not even the product of the same author.)
The original submitter can for a limited time. Often they don't, leading to butchered titles like this one.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...