Monty Python's the Meaning of Life: Absurd Vignettes and Outrageous Sketch Comedy

Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life is an interesting Python film entry. It is more of an outright satire than the bizarre and farcical Holy Grail, and is pieced together as a series of vignettes more than a linear storyline. With its signature humor, great characters, and outrageous musical numbers, The Meaning of Life is a solid sketch comedy film.

The film is prefaced with a “mini movie” that manages to incorporate pirate freebooting with corporate accounting. After we see the victorious elderly money crunchers sail off into the sunset, we begin to examine life from its beginnings. What follows are the sketches that make up the majority of the film. We see a hospital staff treat birth as less of a miracle and more as a showy product, a preparatory school that teaches its students about sex in a firsthand way, and a wartime birthday celebration staged during a battle. The sketches are varied and inventive, each one more outrageous than the last.

Once again, the heart of the successful Monty Python movies rests with the comic versatility of the actors. John Cleese plays a professor who brings his wife into class to demonstrate the sex act, reprimanding his students who fail to pay attention. Graham Chapman gives a great turn as a World War I commander who tries to stall the giving of gifts until the enemy has ceased shooting at his unit. 

And Michael Palin kicks off a ridiculously outlandish musical number spinning the virtues of Catholics opposed to contraception. Hearing a little girl sing “every sperm is sacred, every sperm is great,” is to listen to a work of pure genius.

Monty Python never takes itself seriously, which allows the laughs to pour forth freely. The actors are fearless and combine shocking humor and physical antics with subtle absurdities. In one of the final vignettes, Death himself barges in on a crusty dinner party to retrieve the doomed patrons.