Monty Python and the Holy Grail at 50

Discovering this movie itself was a bit like finding the Holy Grail!

Because I’m an old, nostalgic son-of-a-gun, I often like to write about movies that I enjoyed at certain points in my life, and usually how I personally experienced them. And as Doc Brown says at the end of Back to the Future, 30 years is “a nice round number.” If you’re new to this substack and interested, check out my previous post, GoldenEye at 30, my Pulp Fiction at 30, and others that I didn’t specifically call “Blank at 30,” but they’re in there.

For this one, pardon the pun, I decided to try, “Something completely different.” Just kidding, it’s not that different. But in fact, I decided to write about a movie that is actually older. About as old as I am, in fact. A movie that is 50 years old, in fact, but still one of the funniest, if not the funniest, movies of all-time. I am, of course, referring to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

The only way this is a little different is that I’m not really going to talk about what it was like seeing it 50 years ago, because I’m not that old. So maybe this post should be titled “Monty Python and the Holy Grail at 36.” Nah, that’s weird.

I’m not sure how other people came to discover this movie, or how people discover any movie nowadays other than your streaming service recommending it, but I know I, and probably a lot of people from my generation, found this movie by flipping channels in the mid-to-late 80’s. I was lucky enough to have a small TV in my bedroom when I was young, and my memory is a bit fuzzy, but I don’t think it even had cable, so sometimes, after my homework was done, I would lay on my bed and surf the six or so channels that I could watch. Those of us from the Boston area probably remember The Movie Loft on TV-38 (WSBK), hosted by Dana Hersey. And if you don’t remember it, what the hell were you doing in the 80’s?

It was on The Movie Loft that I, and several of my friends, came across this weird British movie with these knights who strutted around on pretend horses in search of The Holy Grail. Since I almost never caught the movie from the beginning, I had no idea what was going on, but I laughed heartily every time I saw it. Soon, word began to spread amongst my friends about this movie, but chatter was from different friend groups and different scenes, and some of the scenes had nothing to do with searching for a Holy Grail. Some of the scenes were just large bearded men with funny voices saying, “Ni.” Thus, it took me a while to figure out we were all talking about the same movie. As luck would have it, the father of one of my close friends at the time was English, and he regaled his son with stories of this comedy troupe Monty Python and the movies that they made, including this one with the knights and the invisible horses.

Now knowing what I was looking for helped, but I still continued to just catch various showings of the movie on The Movie Loft or wherever it would play. Eventually, however, I realized that my local video store had a copy of this movie, so I rented it and even made a bootleg copy of it to enjoy whenever I wanted. The video store actually had all of the Python movies, but for some reason, I was only interested in Holy Grail. I finally saw Life of Brian just a few years ago. I’m weird like that.

But not as weird as the folks in Monty Python. The taunting Frenchman, the killer rabbit, Tim the Enchanter, the Holy Hand Granade, this movie has it all. If you haven’t seen this movie and have no idea what I'm talking about, then you are missing out. However, I also have a bit of that jealousy thing where you wish you could experience something again for the first time. Also, there were a lot of jokes that completely went over my twelve year-old head when I watched this movie on my 13-inch trinitron, so seeing it again for the first time would probably be hilarious. For example, I only understood about 50% of the Sir Gallahad at Castle Anthrax bit, with the spanking and all that. That’s some funny stuff, watching it now.

As a tween, however, I loved the raw silliness of it all. I knew on some level that there was satire going on there. I figured out that they were somehow sending up medieval chivalry, poverty, politics, feudalism, Christianity, and classic movies, but really, I’ll be damned if it isn’t just freaking hilarious to see a guy still wanting to fight after he gets all his limbs chopped off. Basically, I know why it’s funny when Dennis the mud-farmer and his wife (I guess. Who really cares?) accost King Arthur for ordering them around because they didn’t vote for him, but do I need a reason other than It’s just damn funny?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m very glad that Holy Grail has many levels of comedy, and you can debate until the cow gets catapulted over the wall whether it is parody or satire or whatever. And I’m happy that it is way above most of the comedy that was available to me at the time (mostly sitcoms and Police Academy movies), but I have to be honest with myself and not pretend to be any more highbrow than I actually am; this movie cracked me up at twelve and cracks me up today, for the same reasons. Like I said, a few of the jokes that went over my head then hit differently now, and that just makes for a better experience. But I just love the silly, goofy dumb jokes. If you want to look deeper, good on ya, but you can’t tell me that you enjoy it any more than I do.

The only aspect that may be worth examining here is if the way I found this movie, and the shared but separate experience that my friends and I had growing up in small-town Massachusetts in the 80’s, with not much else to do but watch TV and go outside and talk about what we watched the night before. And we would go out, into the neighborhood, unsupervised, and play baseball and ride our bikes places, and talk about girls. And sometimes say “Ni” to each other. That is what I really miss. I still talk to a couple of those friends from back then, but we don’t play baseball and say “Ni” to each other. We mostly talk about our aches and pains and money (and sometimes girls.) But back then, we didn’t have aches and pains and money wasn’t really an issue, so we could talk about this hilarious movie that we all discovered on our own, but it still managed to bring us all together.

As always, thanks for reading. Please subscribe and spread the word. And if you really want to help out, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Money wasn’t an issue when I was twelve, but it sure is now. And while you’re at it, please consider donating to the Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation. They definitely need it more than I do right now.

Ni.