Monty Python's Holy Grail [or: Get With the Program Chicks and Young People]

There are two types of people in this world: those people who refuse to like Monty Python and those people who like Holy Grail, Life of Brian, and the Dead Parrot sketch. (there are no other kinds of people)

Somewhere in the neighborhood of my tenth year, my mom was out of town for the weekend, and my pops rented a copy of MP'sHG on VHS from the strange little video store by Petrini's in Sunnyvale.  We sat in an old brown oyster chair with matching ottoman that was pushed up to within five feet of the television.  From that chair, we chuckled and belly-laughed our way through an hour and a half of extreme British irreverence -- invincible warriors with no arms and legs, flying killer rabbits, huge knights that only wield the destructive gibberish word of doom (heh heh . . . ni).  In all seriousness, Monty Python's Holy Grail is  everything that we want in a comedy.


And yes, I say we as in you me and your mother and your cousin and their friends and professional colleagues and their friends' friends and colleagues' colleagues' mothers and cousins.  While in public people wail about romance and beauty and silly double entendres and Bullock and Ryan Reynolds ........

.................REYNOOOOOOOOOOOOLDS!!!!!.................

..........the truth is you all want jokes.  You don't want to see two beautiful, successful single people in a big metropolitan city find love.  You don't want to see Heigl end up with Ed Burns.  No no no.  Deep in your heart, all that you want to see in your comedies is irreverence.  A magical, fantastical world full of dick jokes and random inserts.  Why do you think that you like Judd Apatow's flicks so much (40 Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up and Anchorman) and why do you think you like Family Guy so much?

And yet,  quite a few people in this world do not like Monty Python.  My wife hates Monty Python.  She won't even watch one second of Monty Python anything.  My friend, JL, who's a little younger than me, doesn't get it.  Doesn't get it?  Really?  What's there not to get about a man with two coconuts banging them together to mimic the clopping of a horse whilst a man in chain mail with a crown on his head skips pretending to be on a horse? (That's gold, pure unadulterated gold)

So the question becomes why is it that Monty Python is so unpopular amongst women and young people?  Is it because of the accents?  The weird drawings?  Why do you -- and I'm pointing a finger right at you JL and SY -- reject genius so readily?

Meanwhile, a fuzzy Steve Carell has a :)  waxed into his chest and tummy hair, and you all are all ROFLYFAO?  Or naked Chinese guy jumps out of the trunk of a car and bolts from the scene like his butt is on fire and Brad Cooper is holding the the bic.

Perhaps I'm wrong about what people want in their comedies?  Perhaps the Haters do want the love and likability thing.  Perhaps they like the sophistication of successful quasi-young people as they experience sex in the city and try to escape Dane Cook (hint: tell him there's a passed out sorority girl behind him and run) in favor of Jonah Hill.

Well, I was actually motivated to do a little research, believe it of not.

Check this out: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheWoobie

For those of you too lazy or uninterested in clicking this link, the article is about what is referred to as a woobie.  A woobie is a character built into a story that is so damned sweet and innocent, that the audience loves him or her immediately, and then truly needs him or her to be dumped upon; dumpings which generate more sympathy for an already sympatheic character, and makes the viewer want to scoop the woobie into her arms and hug it until the woobie's eye pop out.

The woobie can be seen in most of the top comedies over the years.  Practically all loved by chicks and young people.

1. Rick Moranis in Ghostbusters
2. Steve Buscemi in The Big Lebowski
3. Nicholas Cage in Raising Arizona
4. Cameron in Ferris Bueller
5. Steve Martin in The Jerk
6. The Fat Guy in Animal House
7. Daniel Stern in Home Alone 
8. Katie Holmes in general

In the Monty Python universe, men (men as in mankind, not men as in the inferior gender) do not need woobies.  For a woobie is something that is so weak and frail that you love it.  In Monty Python, the weak and frail, the sensitive and meek, are pathetic and burdensome.

Case in point: about half way through Holy Grail we are introduced to Herbert, the frail and pale son of a burly, if incompetent, castle builder.  Herbert is locked in a tower until he is forced into marrying an ample woman who is giggly and rosy in her wedding dress.  Herbert is not lovable, he looks a fright and he likes to sing.  He whines and he frumps about and he has no fashion sense.  He is the anti-woobie.  Not sympathetic, just pathetic.

Herbert is the closest that Holy Grail comes to even sniffing a woobie.  Monty Python has no use for them because they demand more plot and character.  Herbert gives Holy Grail a platform for like 5 gags in one ten minute episode that doesn't even resolve Herbert's wedding story.

Is that it, chicks and young people?  Do you require plot?  Like, you actually need some story with a beginning, middle, and ends that resolves in a way that mirrors the beginning?  but why?  The woobie that you love -- the Bambi and the entire cast of Breakfast Club -- must be tortured.  You have to go through that pain, watch your woobie get dumped upon.  Dumped upon!

That's so mean to the person you know (and love).  That's so mean to . . . yourself. 

In that respect, perhaps, chicks and young people, the next time you see Holy Grail on the TV, and a certain over-25 year-old man in your life's eyes brighten, take the opportunity to leave your woobie in the crib and watch MP'sHG with him.  You might be surprised.  All you need is the episodic insanity and quick jokes offered by these wacky British people.  And, it sort of teaches you about history too.  There's knights and a Trojan Rabbit and antagonism with the French.

It is, quite simply, everything that we want in comedy.