The Use of Humor

Spamalot tells the tale of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and of the quest for the grail that all of these men went on. It is identical to the movie Monty Python in words and songs with dances were added to make it a musical play. The play, like all Monty Python, is in the style of a sketch-comedy, a very low budget sketch comedy. Some examples of the cheapness were the lack of horses, but this added to the comedy in the play. The movie was so low budget that the makers did not have enough money in their budget to fund horses, so they used coconuts to sound like hooves on a road; this held true in the play. The play is difficult to relate to a Shakespearean play, but the use of comedy in both can be linked in purpose and effect.

This past Saturday night I saw this play, “Spamalot” at the Hippodrome Theatre in Baltimore as part of Loyola’s Best of Baltimore. The show itself included pretty terrible acting; none of the actors or actresses could hold a note. However, Monty Python is Monty Python and the comedy, while very stupid and irrational, was still humorous to me.

The plot of the story starts with King Arthur setting out to try to find Knights for his Roundtable. On his way he has to convince many of his stature of King of England. The king recruits five knights, a peasant-turned-knight named Sir Galahad, Sir Bedevere, Sir Robin, Sir Lancelot, and Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Play. The five knights assemble at Camelot and agree to stick to the idea that “what happens in Camelot stays in Camelot,” a clear joke towards the Los Vegas motto. While the knights are partying it up, God contacts them telling them to find the Holy Grail.

The knights then set out on the quest to find the Holy Grail and meet many interesting characters along the way, including some very stereotypically rude Frenchmen. On their quest they are given other tasks, but the most notable and prominent task they are given is that they must create a Broadway musical to achieve their goal of finding the Holy Grail. The dilemma, as they see it, is that they are lacking the essential quality of making a Broadway show. This flaw was pointed out by Sir Robin and states that in order to make a Broadway show, one must have Jews. The knights are set in to a panic and set off on another quest, this time for Jews.

In the end the knights find out that they don’t need Jews and that they were in a Broadway musical the entire time. Also, Sir Lancelot marries a young boy named Herbert whom he saved from a forced marriage to a girl. Other side-plots include King Arthur’s defeat of a man-eating rabbit that turned out to be a puppet, and his marriage to The Lady of the Lake, who had been guiding him all along.

Humor is put to many different uses in plays; sometimes it is used to mock reality and sometimes it has no purpose other than to make you laugh. While the play Spamalot employs both, Shakespeare’s The Twelfth Knight mainly uses comedy and comedic characters to poke fun at reality and at the stupidity of the other characters. For example, the clown is perhaps the most intelligent and well-informed character in the play. His use of comedy jests at the ignorance of most of the other characters in the play. Also, the maid of Lady Olivia uses comedy to poke fun at the other characters.

In Monty Python’s Spamalot, one could argue that there is a clear mocking of the upper-class and their mindset. Similarly, in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Knight, it is the characters in the lower echelons that seem to be the wisest and most rational. In both of these cases the lower-class individuals use humor as a way to express their mental superiority over the “higher” class. However, the humor is usually lost with the slow minds of the individuals being made-fun-of and is only usually understood by the audience. This lack of understanding by the characters also helps point out their inferiority or their slowness.