Celebrate Monty Python’s ‘Holy Grail’ at 50 in Durham — a silly place
Fifty years ago, six mostly-British humorists fresh from injecting dead parrots and Spam into sketch comedy launched their first attempt at movie-making, jumping into cinema with a budget so low they couldn’t afford horses on-set and swapped in coconuts to make the sound of a gallop.
Over 92 minutes, they laid glorious waste to Arthurian legend, launching cattle from catapults, battling a one-legged knight and dismissing fabled Camelot as “a silly place.”
“Monty Python and the Holy Grail” opened to lukewarm reviews, notably from the Chicago Tribune’s Gene Siskel, who criticized its medieval spoofery for containing “about 10 very funny moments and 70 minutes of silence.” The Washington Post called it “rather poky,” while Monthly Film Bulletin panned its “visual buffooneries and verbal rigamaroles piled on top of each other.”
But time has enhanced the movie’s absurd and zany perfection, enshrining killer rabbits, French taunting, affordable shrubbery and recovering newts in the Pantheon of Jokes that Never Get Old. As a snub to those early haters, IMDB now lists “Holy Grail” as the greatest comedy of all time.
Holy Grail Comes to Durham
So as a golden anniversary treat on Oct. 1, Python great John Cleese will host a special screening at Carolina Theatre in Durham, fielding audience questions afterward in a show he’s calling, at age 85, “Not Dead Yet.”
“I’ll be there to share stories, answer questions and to insult the other Pythons,” Cleese said in a YouTube invitation to the show. “It’ll be funny, surreal, naughty and entirely suitable for people who enjoy jokes about shrubbery.”
One bit of unsurprising folklore is that the Pythons could find no studio to back their film in 1975, and thus they turned to rock bands in search of a tax write-off, notably Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd.
More remarkable is that Cleese has long insisted that filming of the world’s funniest movie involved very little in the way of fun.
“Oh it was miserable,” Cleese told Late Night with Seth Meyers in 2018. “It was Scotland in April, and the weather in Scotland is really bad except for two weeks in September. And we were just miserable. We were wet, we got on the mountainside with strange chain-mail with knitted string and after about 10 minutes it would start to rain, and we could afford about three umbrellas.”
‘Not Enough Money is Excellent’
Python-mate Eric Idle, who famously pulled a cart of corpses across the set, chimed in with similar mist-and-mud-soaked memories. Recalling his Grail experiences with GQ, Idle even credits the film’s dismal environs as a boost to its humor. He recalled the Scottish government forbidding the use of its many castles for a set piece, forcing the troupe to find a single private castle and shoot it from all possible angles.
“I think it’s funny,” he told GQ, “because it’s uncomfortable. I think uncomfortable is very good for comedy, and not enough money is excellent for comedy.”
This is a film so irreverent it included God as a cast member, portraying the creator of the universe as a tired old grouch sending his humans on arbitrary quests.
“Every time I try to talk to someone it’s ‘sorry this’ and ‘forgive me that’ and ‘I’m not worthy,’“ God complains. “It’s like those miserable Psalms. They’re so depressing.”
Perhaps that explains the endless likeability of “Holy Grail.”
It follows the formula of comedy as bitter truth laid bare: innocent women branded as witches by townsfolk eager for a public execution; nuns sworn to chastity who yearn for a good spanking; peasants rolling in the mud yelling “Help, I’m being repressed!”
Nothing soothes the wounds the world inflicts more than a silly place.