Monty Python and the Holy Grail was an attempt to bring the British comedy group, Monty Python, into the US. Monty Python and the Holy Grail saw some success when it first came out, but it really gained its fame years later. The internet loved Monty Python and the Holy Grail and its surreal comedy. Many of the amateur discussions about the film praise its ability to turn its lack of budget into comedy. A quote I saw on a youtube video about Monty Python was “When you can’t afford horses, just create one of the greatest gags in history.” This is in reference to the coconut gag present in the film. Most Journalistic articles talk about how the film’s comedy is nearly identical to modern-day comedy, while Academic articles talk about how Monty Python and the Holy Grail breaks cinematics and editing rules in a way that is comedic that no other movie really has done before or after to the same success or level that this movie did.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail came out in 1975. Its budget was a comparable small 400,000 dollars. It made a total of 5 million dollars, which is 12.5 times the budget. This is a small amount of money compared to the monolith that was Jaws, released in the same year. Jaw’s budget was 9 million and it made 472 million dollars or around 50 times the budget. This is not really a fair comparison because Jaws was financed by Universal Studios, while Monty Python and the Holy Grail were financed by some surprisingly well-known rock bands like Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. But, these rock bands only gave a small amount, being 43 thousand and 29 thousand dollars respectively. The budget that Monty Python and the Holy Grail had, in my opinion, made the film better.
The lack of budget required the movie to be far more creative in order to compensate. The lack of budget brought so many hilarious gags and jokes into the film that wouldn’t be there if they had a higher budget. It was stated by the crew that they could not afford a horse, so they used coconuts to make the same sounds like a horse. This might be the most famous gag from the film. This gag of coconuts isn’t just a visual gag, many characters in the film point out the lack of a horse. The film constantly sabotages itself like this, the genre of the film constantly changes, characters can change the score while in the scene, actors playing many different characters while in the same scene, the time period constantly changes, overdramatized scenes when nothing happens, and the last scene being a literal cop-out. The film’s lack of budget leads to all these hilarious jokes and gags that wouldn’t have been there if their budget was any higher.