Ok, I’ve mentioned Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life” (1983) a couple of times now, and so I thought I’d finally get around to writing a kind of review of it. Mind you, I rarely, if ever, write reviews of anything, so this’ll probably be a badly constructed one.

The first thing that struck me, was that this film was a hell of a lot funnier than I thought I remembered it to be. I seemed to recall it as a bunch of decent or mediocre gags, with a few hilarious ones mixed in along the way. Not so. Every gag made me laugh out loud, up until “The Autumn Years” and some of the “Death” gags, and even those had their moments.

“Meaning of Life” was, like all of Monty Python’s works, a the lovechild of slapstick and more subtle humour. One one level, Mr. Creosote puking on the cleaning lady is funny because it involves, well, just people being puked on by a very, very, very fat man. On a different level, though, you can see the scene as a representation of the relation between different classes in society — with Mr. Creosote as the upper class, and the cleaning lady as the working class. In this way of looking at it, the joke’s ratings on the amusement-o-meter only increases when it turns out that the cleaning lady is an anti-semite. (”Oh well, it could have been worse. At least I’m not working for Jews,” says the cleaning lady. At which point the head waiter, played by John Cleese, up-ends a bucket of vomit over her head, and begins apologizing to the camera for this ignorant person’s racist comment.)

As always, Monty Python does their job extremely well, and end up with a rating of 8.5/10.