This year, YouTube celebrated its twentieth anniversary, prompting younger users to wonder what life could have been like before it. The fiftieth anniversary of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which premiered in April of 1975, has inspired similar reflection among comedy enthusiasts. It can be difficult, at this point, to imagine oneself back in a culture not yet disrupted by Monty Python’s rigorously absurd logic, scattershot satire, and deliberate breaking of narrative and social convention — a culture, indeed, where that sort of thing could be feared too dangerous for television and film.
It was their BBC sketch series Monty Python’s Flying Circus that introduced this comedic sensibility first to Britain, and then to the world. Between that show’s third and fourth seasons, the Pythons — Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, and Terry Gilliam — took on the side project of creating their own cinematic re-interpretation of Arthurian legend.
With a modest budget furnished by Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson, and other investors connected to the music world, they plunged themselves into a grimy, unglamorous vision of the Middle Ages, punctuated by inexplicable anachronism and saturated with an iconoclastic disregard for received wisdom and trumped-up glory.
There the Pythons told a story that, while perhaps lacking in narrative structure — to say nothing of historical realism — more than compensates in sheer comic momentum. By all accounts, it holds up half a century on, even for those viewers who’ve already seen it so many times as to have involuntarily committed every joke to memory. In celebration of its anniversary, the film has become available to stream free (albeit not in all regions of the world) on the official YouTube Movies & TV channel, where the latest generations of Monty Python fans first discovered their work. Even if lines like “I fart in your general direction” no longer raise any transgressive frisson, there’s still little on that platform’s universe of content to match Monty Python and the Holy Grail’s multilayered silliness, whose place in the annals of comedy legend has long since been assured.
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Monty Python and the Holy Grail Re-Imagined as an Epic, Mainstream Hollywood Film
Monty Python’s Best Philosophy Sketches
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
