College film staple written and performed by Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, Eric Idle and Michael Palin (Monty Python) has a miniscule budget – which through droll wit and memorable sight gags – becomes one of the movie’s best jokes, in a spoof the legend of King Arthur, British history and epic movies.

This is the work most Americans know Python by (according to Cleese, Brits prefer Life of Brian). It’s nowhere near masterpiece and feels half an hour too long at 91 minutes, but its reputation as a comedy classic is richly deserved.

Holy Grail soars when making a joke of its z-grade budget (stuffed flying cows and a rabbit are used to memorable effect), or when it goes into Python-esque animation, or when the performers unleash “Who’s On First?” inspired bits of lunacy, such as King Arthur (Chapman) debating the finer points of European swallows with a castle keep, or a peasant giving Chapman a political science discourse.

Cleese – who probably gets as much credit for Python as John Lennon got for The Beatles and does tend to stand out in the bits – is hilarious as a peasant who claims a witch turned him into a newt (”Well .. I got better!”) and the Black Knight (”Tis only a flesh wound!”)

The film has memorably witty opening credits, but sequences featuring a castle full of temptresses or Cleese slaughtering a wedding party bring the movie to a grinding halt. Co-directed by Gilliam and Jones, the film really runs low on petrol toward the end, where the screen literally goes black for three minutes, as if the lads ran out of money while the cameras were rolling.

Still, it’s hard not to spot the lunatic influence this movie had on American comedy in the 1970s, namely, the early casts of Saturday Night Live or Airplane!