Why is the Monty Python story so interesting?

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image credit: pythonline.net

Arguably the most famous comedy 'troupe' of all time, more than 40 years after its first TV broadcast, Monty Python still commands respect and fanaticism over its millions of fans. Discuss...

There are obviously many reasons, so I am going to be pretentious enough to put forward a few ideas of my own:

• They were born at just the right time. Just watch any British Pathé or Movietone News from the 40s and 50s and you will be able to see, straight away, how stiff, pompous and stuffy society was at that time. Perfect fodder to point out and ridicule. For example, the Royal Society for Putting Things on Top of Other Things sketch (episode 18 of Monty Python's Flying Circus - The Complete Boxset [DVD] [1969]),
  

Royal Society for Putting Things on Top of Other Things sketch (4:18-6:40)

• They never realised they were changing the face of British comedy (make that, Global comedy) forever. They were just college students having a laugh and getting some things off their collective chests. They had no idea that they would be called iconoclasts and that what they were doing then, would make it impossible for sketch show writers to ever come up with anything original.

• Their style is a unique and peculiar mix of smutty school boy humour involving a lot of burping and farting and jokes about botties and people's private parts (for example, Are You Embarrassed Easily? on Another Monty Python Record) with highbrow, intellectual thought about about history, art, philosophy and countless other disciplines (for example, the whole movie Monty Python's 'Meaning of Life' [DVD] [1983])
  
  

I could go on but I think that will do for now.

To be continued...

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