And now for something completely different; a review of Monty Python's Flying Circus. The Monty Python crew are experts in doing absolutely silly and ridiculous things, while providing highbrow and intellectual commentary around social, political and cultural topics. While some of the references are obviously outdated and / or hard to decipher in today's age, the comedy gold shines through. This is coming from a 21st century American with little background in British history. Doesn't get much better from a sketch comedy perspective. The sheer range of characters, topics and scenarios is endless and hysterical. At any given moment, you could be watching a gameshow about deaths of famous people like Genghis Khan or listening to a man with a tape recorder up his nose. If you're intimated by the accents, then I recommend throwing subtitles on. It's a gamechanger. If your not sure whether you are ready for the full show, then start off with a greatest hits reel on Youtube. While the Holy Grail is their most well known and respected work, I'd argue that this is actually better. This review is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet 'is maker!

9/10

Monty Python is funny.
The Flying Circus is a motley group of short skits, and often they have weird segues into each other (I hope I spelled "segue" correctly).
Many of the bits have become iconic standards. The funny walks, which isn't one of my favorites, is now a clock face. The lumberjack, which is my very favorite, has a cult following, too, and would be great to sing at a bar if you had the mounties in the back doing their thing.
If you don't laugh at one skit, you'll probably laugh at the one following it.
It is mostly slapstick, and very much nonsense, with the humor coming out of nowhere, instead of based on straight lines. That's the Monty Python way.

This review may as well act as a placeholder for the vast majority of British comedy, but we often mistake sanctimony and dull punchlines for 'sophisticated' humour. Comedy does not exist for us Brits to critically examine individual psychologies, institutions (even if it may trick you into thinking it is) or dare I say it, to actually make you laugh. Instead it is an exercise in exceptionalism which we impose upon our own people, and in recent times, export to the rest of the world as a kind of post-colonial 'gift' to the world's unwashed. Never mind the fact that the Americans long surpassed our feeble notion of comedy (who in their right mind would suggest Chaplin or even Keaton were overshadowed by the unfathomable comedic genius of Stan Laurel?). It should come as a surprise to no one on the planet that Palin has devoted his post-Python career to Empire apologia disguised as somnambulist travel TV nor should Cleese's pretensions of being a genuinely maverick and 'offensive' figure rather than the melting old bat he actually is. This legacy is simply an extension of the essential nature of British comedy. I will gladly take a number of Sandler's films over the so-called 'monoliths of British comedy'