Monty Python’s big screen adventures came to a close with a disappointing return to the sketch format of the original television series, strung together in a vaguely themed “plot” supposedly trying to offer the ever-elusive meaning of life. It was a big step down from the glorious
It begins well enough with the satirical The Miracle of Birth sketch that leads into one of the Python’s funniest song-and-dance numbers, Every Sperm Is Sacred which proved to be as much of a dog whistle to the religious (it concerns a Roman Catholic family (Michael Palin, Terry Jones and a host of stage school kids) and their huge, ever-growing number of offspring) as their previous film, Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979). Things start to unravel with amusing but merely functional sketches about public schoolboys having live sex education lessons from a stuffy master (John Cleese) and his wife (Patricia Quinn) and a less-than-memorable couple of skits about the futility of war. A burst of head-scratching surrealism in the ”Find the Fish” is followed by customers at a Hawaiian restaurant being as confused as the audience by a waiter’s philosophical discourses. Things take a turn for the extremely gruesome with a sketch about a pair of paramedics calling on Mr Brown (Terry Gilliam) and forcibly removing his liver because he carries an organ donor card. At which point, the short film that accompanied the film, Gilliam’s The Crimson Permanent Assurance (1983) “attacks” the feature… The revolting highlight of the film is the appearance of the morbidly obese Mr Creosote (Jones) who vomits his way through a huge meal at a posh French restaurant, messily exploding in a shower of gore when he has one “wafer-thin mint” too many.
Very much the definition of the curate’s egg – only good in parts – The Meaning of Life suffers the same problems as the original series. When it’s good, it’s very good indeed but too many of the gags fall flat. Good taste is pushed to its outer limits by the organ donor and Mr Creosote sketches but other skits are strangely rather anodyne and almost entirely forgettable. The old magic seemed to have gone, the exuberance of youth and the hunger to succeed long since faded away. By 1983, the Pythons had nothing left to prove and there was a feeling of laziness about The Meaning of Life. Cleese had scored a massive hit with the ever-popular sitcom Fawlty Towers (1975-1979), animator and occasional actor Gilliam had become a director with Jabberwocky (1977) and Time Bandits (1981), Eric Idle had given the world the fake pop band, the “pre-fab four” The Rutles, an offshoot of his TV series Rutland Weekend Television (1975-1976), Jones was just starting out on his successful career as a writer of children’s books and with Palin had co-created the Ripping Yarns (1976-1979) TV series, with Palin forging a successful career as an actor in Time Bandits and The Missionary (1982), which he also wrote and produced, and was only a few years away from his string of popular small screen travel documentaries. Only Chapman had been less than successful in his solo career, his 1975 BBC pilot Out of the Trees co-written with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy‘s Douglas Adams having failed to be commissioned for a full series and his feature film The Odd Job (1978) was met with only moderate success.
It all added up to a group whose heart no longer seemed to be in the Python project. Indeed The Meaning of Life would be the last time that the full troupe worked together – following Chapman’s death in 1989, the surviving members of the team regrouped rarely, lending their voices to the animated adaptation of Chapman’s autobiography, A Liar’s Autobiography: The Untrue Story of Monty Python’s Graham Chapman (2011) and did the same for Jones’ comedy film Absolutely Anything a year later. Partly in response to a lawsuit by Mark Forstater, producer of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, who successfully won his case against the group over royalties owed from Spamalot, the five surviving members gathered one last time for ten live shows at the O2 Arena in London in July 2014. Jones’ diagnosis with primary progressive aphasia, a form of dementia the following year has sadly probably put a halt to any further collaborations.
The Meaning of Life is a disappointing end to the Python career, not by any means a dreadful film, but a less than impressive one. Of all of their big screen outings – including And Now for Something Completely Different (1971) – it’s the one that stands up least well to repeat viewings. It hasn’t aged at all well and is looking ever more like a footnote to the troupe’s career. Its virtues are impressive but few (Every Sperm is Sacred is hilarious and Mr Creosote teaches lesser comedians just how to do gross-out comedy properly) but it’s too patchy and inconsistent to be regarded as among the team’s finest work.
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