It was with some surprise, as I gathered my recollections of Monty Python and the Holy Grail before its 50th anniversary this week, that I realised I had seen it in full only once, back when I and the film were both considerably younger. It felt like more. The first fully narrative feature by Britain’s best-loved TV sketch troupe is among the most fondly, frequently and recognisably referenced comedies in all cinema; the film’s best scenes are hard to separate from various everyday quotations or pub impressions thereof. Some comedy is made not so much to stand as individual art than to be absorbed into our collective comic language, and so it is with Monty Python, their best work a stew of endlessly imitable idioms and accents, to be relished with or without context.
In all truth, I remembered laughing at Monty Python and the Holy Grail more vividly than I remembered exactly what I was laughing at. For this I must blame my late father, whose laughter – loud and barking, often a beat ahead of lines already known and eagerly anticipated – I perhaps recall more vividly than my own. The film was one of a jumbled canon of comedies that, over the course of my childhood, he eagerly presented to my brother and me as apices of the form, with hit-and-miss results. (Paper Moon? Wholly shared joy. Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines? He chuckled alone.) Monty Python and the Holy Grail was among the hits: some giggling fits are too giddy not to catch on.
