And Now for Something Completely Different

After the first two seasons of Flying Circus, Monty Python decided that it was time to take a chance on the big screen and readapt their best sketches for cinema, including “The Lumberjack Song,” “The Dirty Fork,” “The Funniest Joke in the World” and, of course, “The Dead Parrot.” Often labeled as absurdist, Monty Python were much more than that, and their metadiscursive, avant-garde humor was at once popular and massive. And Now for Something Completely Different is the perfect occasion to reunite with an experiment that took the world by storm, bring to the BBC screen not only an irreverent wager that could mock both royalty and the army, but something even more revulsive—unpredictable, demented comedy that has conventionality as its only limit and the punchline as its greatest enemy.