Monty Python and the Holy Grail

I woke up this morning to one and one-half hours of glorious, old-fashioned comedy sketches from Monty Python. I'm probably feeling a little too glum to write a review of it right now, so let me inform you that this review is, in fact, NOT an actual review, but an approximation of what sort of review I might write if writing a review were what I had in mind. It isn’t, and this is not, and well, I’m still here, and so are you.

I’m not, for instance, going to tell you all about how Graham Chapman, portraying King Arthur (he refers to himself as “Arthur, King of the Britons”), has long-winded debates with the sentries atop crumbling castle walls about African versus European swallows and whether or not they could manage to carry coconuts across the ocean. This isn’t a review, and that sort of thing is an appraisal of a plot point, scene, or happenstance in a shamelessly absurdist comic farce, and so has no place here. Furthermore, there will be NO recounting of his duel with the helmeted “Black Knight,” who seems suspiciously like fellow Pythonite John Cleese. I will not describe the uproarious hilarity of seeing him divested of all four of his bodily members and/or extremities, as the case may be, and, though reduced to an armless and legless torso in such an incomparably sad state, still being willing to “bite your knees off!” No, very much no, and no again. That would be reviewing a film bristling with classic comedic gems, and that’s something we’re not about to approach here. Do you get my message?

I will, furthermore, and let me state now categorically and for the record, ladies and gentlemen of the jury—I repeat, WILL NOT—speak of Eric Idle as Sir Robin the Not-Quite-So-Brave-as-Sir-Lancelot, whose noble and trustworthy chronicler and balladeer follows behind him, envisioning for him a death in song with bloodcurdling lyrics that might make any modern death metal band proud. I won’t speak of it at all.

The budget for this film, by the way (if, indeed, I were going to comment on or write a review of said film, which, you can rest assured, I am not), apparently didn’t include or cover the cost of actual horses. Thus, that animating ogre Terry Gilliam follows his Goodly King around, clomping two halves of a coconut together for the sound of hooves. No horses appear in the film I’m not writing about.

Michael Palin takes a turn both as a French soldier with a curling mustache and an “outrageous accent,” who taunts the Brits and “farts in their general direction.” As Galahad the Chaste, he’s rescued from a castle of beautiful nurses by John Cleese, just in the nick of time, as they were threatening to have an orgy with him.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail - The Insulting Frenchman

John Cleese dons his wizard’s robes as Tim the Enchanter, unleashing volleys of flame and deafening explosions right before the bold Arthur and his knights are attacked by the world’s most ravenous and bloodthirsty bunny rabbit.

Of course, in a world where three-headed knights argue over who didn’t brush whose teeth, and King Arthur is upbraided as an oppressor by two dung-shoveling peasants—one of whom mouths anarcho-syndicalist theory as if he were a doctoral student working on his thesis—one can be forgiven for expecting anything, even cartoon man-devourers with twenty eyes and big slavering jaws, swallowing knights whole long before they’ve concluded their quest for the Holy Grail. Whatever that is.

In the end, the British constabulary arrives with a “What’s all this then?” attitude and sets things right. But not before the credits, which have already rolled at the start of the picture. In between, Carol Cleveland is burned at the stake, Graham Chapman talks to God, and Terry Gilliam beats two halves of a coconut together to make horse clomps.

It doesn’t sound as if it would be very enjoyable, but, believe me, if this were a review, it would, in fact, be a stellar one.

But it isn’t. No, not even close.

It’s, well...

...And now for something completely different.

Monty Python And The Holy Grail

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