Though some of the crew have passed away, it looks like we are going to be getting a new film that is a riff on one of their classic movies. In addition to their groundbreaking television series, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the team also produced a number of delightful comedy films like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Life of Brian, and Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. There is an argument to be made that they are the most important sketch comedy group of all time. The team select their favourite sketches over six episodes.Monty Python is one of the most influential and well-respected comedy troupes in history. Monty Python's Almost the Truth (2009) 7/10 Another perfectly decent documentary.Monty Python: The Meaning of Live (2014) 6/10 A doc on the above reunion.But this feels like going through the motions. Monty Python Live (Mostly): One Down, Five to Go (2014) 5/10 Nice to see them upright.Monty Python Conquers America (2008) 7/10 Bog standard talking-heads doc.Monty Python Best Bits (mostly): Season 1 (2014) 7/10 A perfectly serviceable compendium.Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979) 10/10 Regularly voted the funniest British film.Monty Python's Fliegender Zirkus: Season 1 (1972) 8/10 The German version of the series.Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) 9/10 The first non-sketch Python film is one of the great Arthurian romps. Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969) 7/10 The fitful first series.Like the recent Derry Girls and Young Offenders, it also confirms that humour travels further than we sometimes suspect. The running gag on Albrecht Dürer is particularly good. The two episodes of Monty Python's Fliegender Zirkus combine translations of very English gags with some excellent jokes tailored for the Teutonic market. If you're sick of the familiar then the one to go for is the brilliantly bizarre German version of the show. The 2014 live show is probably best avoided by all but the most fanatical completists. Life of Brian and Monty Python and the Holy Grail are not just packed with jokes, they are elaborately composed motion pictures that leave all televisual origins in the dust. There were eternal truths buried in the absurdity. You can't escape Always Look on the Bright Side of Life. The line "What have the Romans ever done for us?", from Life of Brian, is still dragged up to stress ingratitude to a cultural or political antecedent. The Parrot Sketch was so ubiquitous it was quoted by a puzzled Mrs Thatcher in a speech about the SDP. It’s hard to argue with a team whose best works have bedded down so deeply in the culture. It seems baffling now, but the loud, brash, increasingly unamusing Saturday Night Live – topical in a way Python never pretended to be – sprang from its creators' enthusiasm for Python. The show inspired everything from Spinal Tap to Larry Sanders to The Simpsons. For them, the class issue was irrelevant. If you can endure that odd US habit of over-stressing the second syllable in “Python” you will hear the likes Judd Apatow, Hank Azaria, David Hyde Pierce explain how Monty Python changed their lives. It begins with the team admitting that – despite the presence of Gilliam – they regarded it as a given that nobody in America would understand the show. The current Netflix batch includes a decent talking-heads documentary called Monty Python Conquers America. And yet Monty Python remains the most influential force on comedy in the post-war period. The surviving cast members would admit all of these things. It’s something to do with the dreaming spires.Īll these things are true. Apparently the former is more verbal and the latter more visual. Indeed, such was the influence of those universities that contemporaneous acolytes noted an “Oxford style” in the writing of Terry Jones and Michael Palin and a “Cambridge style” in the writing of Eric Idle, Graham Chapman and John Cleese. The American Terry Gilliam aside, all of the Python crew went to either Oxford or Cambridge. Yes, the humour is rooted in upper-middle class life. You wouldn’t have thought it of Michael Palin. Men pursuing women is seen as an enormous lark in the original series. You could accuse Dickens of doing something similar – ogres or saints in his case – but that author was less inclined to view sexual assault as a hilarious gag. In the original series and in most of the films, women appear usually either as sex objects (played by Carol Cleveland) or shrieking grotesques (played by male cast members). Nobody can easily deny that they had a problem with women.
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