Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t: A Pop-Culture Podcast
Deep Thoughts about Monty Python and the Holy Grail
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
Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thoughts by visiting us on Patreon.
We are Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our family as the Guy Girls.
We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com
We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, and analyzing pop culture for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, and whatever else we find.