March 5, 2024
We are the sisters who say Ni! Bring us…a shrubbery.
On today’s episode of Deep Thoughts, Tracie and Emily dig into a source of both sisters’ understanding of what is funny, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. After 49 years, this film remains super funny, because it subverts our expectations. With minimal plot, despite the purported quest for the titular grail, it’s basically just a vehicle for a slew of the Pythons’ favorite medieval sketches.
A Deep Thoughts look at those vignettes reveals interesting questions about power, authority, and knowledge, nuanced (but not exactly positive?) commentary on queerness and masculinity, and a fundamental playfulness with the medium of film that remains delightful this half-century later. We disagree about how sympathetic we’re meant to feel about the leftist peasants’ self-governance, but we are in complete agreement that the Castle Anthrax scene is improved when we assume the oral sex Lancelot thwarts was to be performed by Galahad, not on him.
Don’t hurt your brain calculating the airspeed of an unladen swallow! Have a listen to our Deep Thoughts about Monty Python and the Holy Grail!
Mentioned in this episode:
The article about the zeitgeist: https://www.popmatters.com/monty-python-and-the-holy-grail-40th-anniversary-edition-blood-politics-sil-2495463955.html
One gay commentator on queerness in Holy Grail and Spamalot https://epgn.com/2020/12/02/one-joke-too-many/
CW: Discussion of transphobia, homophobia, Woody Allen and male fantasies of sex with teenaged girls
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