21. Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983)
The Meaning of Life is probably closer to the world of TV sketch comedy, rather than ensemble movie, but the Pythons’ gang-show film was a box office smash and won the Grand Prix in Cannes in 1983 (while Víctor Erice’s The South and Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy got zip). With crazy grandiloquence, it took us through all the big questions of existence, and the tragicomic limits of physical pleasure were finally exposed by the restaurant scene in which Mr Creosote explodes. Like John Landis’s portmanteau comedy The Kentucky Fried Movie from 1977, this was full of very chancy, confrontationally bad-taste material that wouldn’t get on television then or now.
