Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Holy Grail is where the team worked out how to make a FILM rather than a run of sketches, and Life of Brian is that method applied to a real subject. What carries across: a continuous narrative that the sketches hang off rather than interrupt, a low budget turned into a joke about the period itself, the same troupe playing every part of every crowd, and an ending that refuses the resolution the genre promises. Filed MEDIUM. The two share their makers, so this records a development rather than an influence between strangers, and the Python films sit together in the universe field besides.

The parody needs the text to be parodying, and it is this one: Arthur assembling named knights, the sword and the claim to kingship, the vow, the quest for the Grail announced from on high, and the individual knights peeling off into their own adventures. The jokes are aimed at the romance conventions Malory fixed. The Black Knight is the chivalric refusal to yield taken literally; Galahad's chastity is treated as a problem to be solved; Lancelot's rescue is a massacre because that is what the original is if you count the bodies. Filed MEDIUM: the Pythons were working from the whole Arthurian tradition and from medieval texts generally, and Malory is its central English source rather than a book they adapted.