Directed by Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones; Screenplay by Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin; Featuring Graham Chapman (King Arthur), John Cleese (Lancelot), Eric Idle (Robin), Terry Jones (Bedevere), and Michael Palin (Galahad)
Parody is the art of imitating an existing literary (or other artistic) form. Notable literary parodies include Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock, and Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Film is an art form that has greatly lent itself to parodists: Some famous examples of film parody are' Young Frankenstein,' Airplane!, Austin Powers, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which stands as one of the most popular parodies of all time. Part of the film's appeal lies in its skewering the clichés of knighthood and chivalry that are familiar to many viewers through their reading of Malory and White. While a student of Arthurian legend will not learn any of "the official story" from this film, he or she will definitely learn about the conventions of knighthood through they ways in which they are parodied by the Python troupe.
The world of Monty Python and the Holy Grail is one that looks vaguely medieval (there are knights, kings, battles, lots of mud) but also surreal. Arthur and his knights do not ride horses, but instead skip while their servants bang two coconut halves in rhythm. God appears in the sky as a purposefully cheap-looking piece of animation and tells the knights to stop groveling ("Every time I try to talk to someone it's sorry this and forgive me that and I'm not worthy") before he tells them to search for the Grail. The film stops, rather than concludes, when a team of twentieth-century policemen finally catches up with Lancelot, who earlier in the film kills a "noted historian" as he explains Arthur's predicament to the audience. This combination of earnest, questing knights and an illogical and silly world is what gives the film much of its comedy.
