by Robert Tippett

Created on: August 18, 2008

Monty Python and the Holy Grail is one of my personal top-five all-time movies. This has absolutely nothing to do with any favor I had with the comedy stylings of Monty Python. I hated their BBC television show and found other movies they did an equal bore. British humor is something best born into. Instead, the theme of the Holy Grail was the major interest for me; and along that theme, the Monty Python group placed some "blow-me-away" subtleties that mesmerized me.

The almost immediate slapstick humor that one is confronted with is the absence of horses in a movie about knights. Instead of real horses, the members have coconut halves in their hands, which they clap together while moving in some horsey-prance steps. This gives the sound of a horse's hooves cloopity-clopping along. While this is in-your-face at first, causing you to laugh, the subtlety is they never stop with the pretend horse thing.

By the end of the movie, you no longer notice the ridiculousness of this and you accept in your mind that they are riding horses. You forget how stupid it is that the Knights of the Round Table would get into a debate with French castle tower watchmen, over how an African swallow could fly coconuts to England. The amazing thing about this sleight-of-hand is it is just like how stupid real life can be when ridiculous becomes the norm, simply by refusing to admit to the ridiculous. We see this scene played out every day in the political and religious arenas, not to mention fads like music and art.

A second subtle scene comes when King Arthur comes across a village of idiots, who are in the process of trying a woman accused of being a witch. The humor comes in the philosophical sense of questioning that Arthur has for how they determine correctly if the woman is indeed a witch, or not. Eric Idle explained that the way to tell if she is a witch is to tie weights on her feet and throw her in the lake. If she is a witch, she will float. King Arthur says, "But if she is not a witch she will drown." Idle's character is too dense to know anything to do, other than what "the law" says to do. Since she has been accused of being a witch, the law is clear that he must throw the woman in the lake with weights tied to her legs.

The subtlety is this is a scene that pokes fun at our societal laws, which are morally based. Witches are evil people who must be punished by those laws, even though many people do not believe in witches. The legal system has become so complex, due to people

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