Monty Python's The Meaning of Life
1983 · Directed by Terry Jones
Original language: English
- comedy
The story
Life's questions are 'answered' in a series of outrageous vignettes, beginning with a staid London insurance company which transforms before our eyes into a pirate ship. Then there's the National Health doctors who try to claim a healthy liver from a still-living donor. The world's most voracious glutton brings the art of vomiting to new heights before his spectacular demise.
What it’s like
Bright, flat, theatrical daylight over sets that look like painted postcards: stiff British suburbs, cut-price studio interiors, a dinner-party table that could be a stage. The camera mostly sits back and holds still, letting the gags arrive at their own pace, while the occasional sudden animated cutout from Terry Gilliam bursts across the frame in collage-paper colour. Sound is brisk and jaunty, with brass-band marches, a few sung numbers, and sudden silences that let a punchline land. The vibe is giddy, irreverent and deliberately unpolished, a cheerful sketch-show mess with a mock-philosophical spine that wanders between gleeful grossness and gentle absurdity. It suits a lazy evening with friends, a comfort rewatch, or anyone who wants to laugh at pompous institutions and the sheer indignity of being alive. Its intensity runs from mild to strong: there is frequent crude bodily humour, a long and grotesque sequence of gluttony and vomiting, bloodless but hard-edged deaths, and a few brief sexual jokes. Not gentle, but never truly menacing. For people who enjoy anarchic British comedy, sketch-form surrealism and irreverent, knowing silliness.
More films like Monty Python's The Meaning of Life
Closest in mood, pacing and theme. Tell us why you loved Monty Python's The Meaning of Lifeand we’ll explain which ones fit you.
