8 / 10
Official trailer
Life of Brian is an 8, and it’s the Python film with the best script. Brian Cohen is born on the same night as Jesus, in the next stable over, and spends thirty-odd years being mistaken for somebody important by people who aren’t listening to him.
Terry Jones directed. The six Pythons play most of the speaking parts between them, with Graham Chapman anchoring the film as Brian, the only person in it who wants to be left alone. I laugh harder at this film than at anything else the Pythons made, and I think it’s the smartest thing they ever did. There’s an actual argument under the jokes, and the argument still holds. A few draggy stretches in the middle are what keep it at an 8 for me.
EMI pulled out of the financing days before shooting, and George Harrison mortgaged his house to fund it through his new company HandMade Films. He called it the most expensive cinema ticket ever bought.
The Story
Three wise men turn up at the wrong stable, hand over gifts, realize their mistake and take them back. Thirty years later Brian is selling snacks at a stoning, gets involved with the People’s Front of Judea to impress a woman, and ends up running from Roman soldiers into a crowd of prophets.
He starts speaking to cover himself, abandons a sentence halfway through, and the crowd decides the unfinished sentence is scripture. From there he can’t get rid of them. Half the followers believe in the gourd and half believe in the sandal, and they’re ready to fight about it.
He’s arrested, and the film ends with a crucifixion and a singalong. That ending is the reason people still argue about the film, and it’s also the funniest thing in it.
What It’s Aiming At
The most common accusation was blasphemy, and it isn’t. Jesus appears twice, delivers the Sermon on the Mount straight, and is treated with complete respect. The joke in that scene is that the people at the back can’t hear him and think he said blessed are the cheesemakers. The target is the followers. People who need a leader, who invent doctrine out of nothing, who split into factions over a detail, and who are certain they’re the true believers while the man himself is telling them to go away. This is the choice I admire most. The Pythons could have gone for the cheap blasphemy gag, and they aimed at the crowd instead, the people who’d follow a sandal if somebody dropped one. That aim is why the film still feels sharp to me. That’s why it lasted. Every generation has the People’s Front of Judea, sitting in a room passing motions about direct action while nothing gets done.
For Writers
The film never mocks Jesus and spends ninety minutes on the people who follow anyone. Choosing the right target separates satire from cheap shots. When you write comedy about a subject people hold sacred, aim at the behavior around it instead of the thing itself, and the work will survive the argument. Write down what you’re angry about. Then check your jokes are hitting that, and not the nearest easy thing standing next to it. The easy target is always the one that dates fastest.
The Set Pieces
The Latin grammar lesson, where a centurion catches Brian writing graffiti and corrects his declensions instead of arresting him, is the best scene in any Python film. John Cleese plays it as a schoolmaster and Chapman plays the terrified pupil. I laugh until it hurts at the Latin lesson. Cleese never lets the stakes rise above a grammar correction while the actual crime sits there ignored, and Chapman’s terror of getting the declension wrong is the funniest reaction in British comedy. The People’s Front of Judea meeting, where Reg asks what the Romans have ever done for us and gets a detailed and growing list, is the most quoted political joke in British comedy.
There’s also the stoning, run by a bearded crowd of women disguised as men, and the haggling scene with the gourd. Each one is built the same way: a serious institution followed to its logical end.
The Bans
Several British councils banned it outright, some of them in towns with no cinema. Norway banned it for a year, and Sweden used that in its advertising: the film so funny it was banned in Norway. Ireland kept it out for eight years. Cleese and Michael Palin appeared on television opposite Malcolm Muggeridge and the Bishop of Southwark, who had arrived late to the screening and missed the opening scene establishing that Brian isn’t Jesus. The debate is on record and does the film’s argument no harm at all.
The controversy sold tickets and it also cost the film its original financing. EMI’s chief executive read the script and pulled out, and that’s how George Harrison ended up in the film business.
The Pythons
Chapman is the reason it works. He plays Brian completely straight, an ordinary man in a spiral, and lets everyone else be ridiculous around him. It’s the best performance any of them gave, and he’d stopped drinking to do it.
Cleese, Palin, Jones, Idle and Gilliam take multiple parts each, and the multiple-casting is part of the joke: the same six faces run the revolution, the empire and the crowd.
Terry Jones’s direction is better than it gets credit for. The film looks like a real historical picture, shot in Tunisia on Zeffirelli’s leftover sets, and the comedy works better because nothing on screen is winking.
For Writers
Shot for shot, the film looks like a serious historical epic, and the comedy is funnier because the production never signals a joke is coming. A straight face makes absurdity funnier than any amount of nudging. When you write comedy, describe the ridiculous with the same care you’d give a serious scene, and let the reader find the joke themselves. Take your funniest paragraph and strip out every word that tells the reader it’s funny. What’s left usually gets a bigger laugh, because the reader got there on their own.
Why It Still Works
Nearly fifty years later, the film’s subject hasn’t moved. People still need somebody to follow, splinter groups still split over a detail, and committees still pass motions about taking action instead of taking it. That’s also why the Latin lesson works. Everyone has met the person who corrects your grammar while the building is on fire, and Cleese plays him with total conviction.
What dates the film is small: the pace of some middle scenes, a couple of sketches that outstay their welcome, and a running gag about a man who won’t stop talking. The structure and the targets are untouched.
That running gag wears on me. By the time the man who won’t stop talking comes round again I’m ready for him to stop, and I’d have trimmed a few of those middle scenes to keep the pace up. It’s a small complaint, and it’s the reason this sits at an 8.
For Writers
The film’s targets are behaviors, factional in-fighting, wilful misunderstanding, the need to follow someone, and behaviors don’t date. Jokes built on fashions and personalities expire; jokes built on how people act don’t. When you write comedy meant to last, aim at the pattern instead of the person who currently embodies it. Take your sharpest joke and ask whether it still works in thirty years. If it needs a footnote to explain who somebody was, rebuild it around what they did.
The Ending
Brian is crucified alongside dozens of others, abandoned by everyone, and Eric Idle’s character starts singing Always Look on the Bright Side of Life. The whole row joins in. It’s a gag about English stoicism and it’s also the bleakest ending in any comedy of its era. Nobody is rescued. Idle wrote the song in an afternoon, and it has since become a football terrace standard and a fixture at funerals, including Graham Chapman’s memorial. The ending is my favorite thing the Pythons ever put on film. A row of condemned men singing a cheery song while nobody comes to save anybody is savage and silly at the same time, and it leaves me grinning at something very dark.
That’s why this is an 8 and not a lesser film with a few good sketches in it. It commits to its ending, and the ending says something.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Life of Brian survives its own controversy because it picked the right target. It never touches the man at the center; it spends ninety minutes on the crowd that needs somebody to follow. Aim your satire at behavior you can prove, and the argument about whether you were allowed to make it becomes free publicity.
Is Life of Brian worth watching?
Yes. It’s the best-written Python film, the Latin lesson and the People’s Front meeting are as good as comedy gets, and it treats a subject everyone expected it to insult with more care than its critics did.
It’s an 8. The middle sags, and the man who won’t stop talking wears out his welcome with me long before the script lets him go.
Everything else is aimed with care, and the crucifixion singalong is as brave as British comedy gets. I’d hand it to anyone who thinks satire has to be cruel to be funny.
