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Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life Movie Review

Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life is a 1983 British musical sketch comedy film directed by Terry Jones and starring the Monty Python troupe. It’s my favorite Monty Python movie.

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“Is it a boy or a girl?

I think it’s a bit early to start imposing roles on it, don’t you?“

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The Monty Python team explore life and its different stages in a satirical way through various people and situations. I am not a fan of ‘Holy Grail’ and even ‘Life of Brian’ disappointed me. This one, however, appealed to me for the most part and it’s the only one of their movies that I genuinely liked. This is because it felt like the most contemporary and timeless take on their formula and by far the funniest one.

This is a sketch comedy, so of course it was always going to be chaotic in pace and structure. But for the most part it worked due to the success factor of the different segments being quite high. It also helped that the film is very artistically inclined – the sets are superb, the cinematography is very good and the animated segments were so well done.

I strongly disliked that first segment that obviously functioned as a short movie that was forcefully and needlessly put into the feature, but even that sketch worked to a degree due to its amazing visuals and evident imagination. The score of the movie is eclectic and fun while the editing and directing are surprisingly competent for what is essentially a disorganized sketch comedy.

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The Meaning of Life is very much a musical and all of its numbers were a joy to behold. Every Sperm is Sacred is clearly the best of the bunch. This song is not only a hilarious riff on Catholicism in its lyrics, but it’s also genuinely entertaining and featuring choreography and production values that could rival anything produced in the Golden Age of Hollywood. This is where the troupe showcased their high reverence for the art of cinema. The Not Noel Coward Song is another highlight that is amusingly sung and delightfully silly in writing.

Let’s talk about some of the best sketches. The WWI sketch was hilarious and it resembled some of the best absurdist and gory humor from South Park itself. For every such superbly executed sketch, there is another that did not quite work with the tiger one feeling way too long for what is basically a one-punch line joke.

The sex education lesson was unexpectedly edgy and mostly for the better. There are moments in this film where good taste was abandoned in favor of brutal honesty and nobody is safe policy. I appreciated that even though the most morbid jokes were a bit too much for me. But the doctors scenes were both hilarious – the birth sequence was ridiculous and the organ donor scene was brutal in the best way possible.

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That scene where a morbidly obese man basically eats himself to death was grotesque, but very entertaining. Another highlight is that final Grim Reaper sequence. This one included numerous very funny lines of dialogue that poked fun at the British and the Americans. For a film that is all about the meaning of life, it’s not all too existentialist, which was definitely an issue. But the post-modern meta elements in its structure worked and the movie is a lot of fun for the most part with longer stretches of entertainment and shorter stretches of boredom, which is all you can ask for in a sketch comedy.