By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: March 28, 2005
Poor King Arthur! There he is, dressed in pristine white, a golden sun embroidered on his chest, still believing that the world holds extraordinary possibilities. Who can resist feeling sorry for him in the 1975 film ''Monty Python and the Holy Grail'' when a peasant demands an explanation of how he became king?
Arthur solemnly intones: ''The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in purest shimmering samite, held Excalibur aloft from the bosom of the waters to signify that by divine providence, I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king!''
Arthur really believes it. His servant Patsy, prancing behind him and banging coconuts together as he pretends to be Arthur's horse, may also believe it. And for a brief moment, we might wish we could believe it too. But in the film's version of the 10th century, this King Arthur is an anachronism.
''Look,'' answers Dennis, the surly peasant, confident in his superior understanding. ''Strange women lying on their backs in ponds handing over swords -- that's no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.'' It is the radical political language of 1960's Oxbridge, the world out of which the creators of Monty Python were to emerge. ''Help,'' Dennis cries after Arthur grabs him. ''I'm being repressed!''
The same dialogue is in ''Spamalot,'' the hit Broadway musical, in which Eric Idle plundered and transformed the brilliant Python film. But something happens during that act of translation and not just to the confrontation between Dennis and the king.
The musical's energy can be intoxicating, the jokes infectious, the self-references amusing, but the frame of reference has shifted.
Understanding this shift may even be worth the risk of resembling the stuffy ''very famous historian'' who enters the Grail film midway to lecture about events, only to be hacked to death mid-sentence by a passing knight. For in the film, to be professorial for the moment, his dialogue is as weighty as it is funny: Arthur's mythic world is demolished by a peasant. But how are Dennis's formulas to be understood? They create another form of mythology.
In the musical, though, such matters are irrelevant. The dialogue is not about myth and demystification. It is merely an invocation of the original Python movie. It is a ''bit,'' a piece of stage business.
The same is true throughout. In the film, when a man pushing a cart of bodies chants, ''Bring out your dead!'' and someone tries to toss a still-living man on the heap, the humor is partly in the way the scene ruthlessly strips the Middle Ages of any romance. The skit becomes at once comic and illuminating. But in the musical, this scene becomes a farcical production number, ''I Am Not Dead Yet,'' in which goggle-eyed corpses dance.
This is not a subtle difference. The deflating of myth and pretense is one of the great enterprises of humor, and the Python film goes about it with an eerie mixture of absurdity and historical hyper-realism.
A Brotherhood of Knights bound by secret doctrines and magical incantations? Of course, only here they shout ''Ni!'' over and over and demand suburban shrubbery in the middle of the forest. Regional tensions over language and manners? Of course, only here John Cleese in a ridiculous French accent taunts Arthur's noble pretense: ''Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelled of elderberries.''
But underneath the Python's demystification, there was also a great affection for this past, with all its illusions and delusions and not a little wariness about the pretense of the modern world that replaced it. That political peasant from the ''anarcho-syndicalist commune'' may even be more deluded than the king, his vocabulary coming no closer to describing his world than the Excalibur tale.
In the musical, though, there is no concern with the past or how it is understood. It no longer has any weight or purpose except to serve as entertainment. And the present, far from being warily approached, is given an affectionate, campy embrace.
So Camelot turns out to look like the Excalibur casino in Las Vegas, complete with an illuminated roulette wheel and chorus girls. The search for the Grail turns out to be Arthur's quest to get to Broadway. The show's songs, like ''The Song That Goes Like This'' and ''Find Your Grail,'' send up not Lancelot or Arthur, but Andrew Lloyd Webber and Broadway sentimentality, knowingly winking at the audience. And everybody really is having a great time, something Arthur's knights rarely did in the film as they were buffeted about by the plot's dyspeptic skepticism.
The Pythons, of course, were never above a ''nudge, nudge, know what I mean.'' They cultivated outrageous silliness: an interview with the man with three buttocks, a joke so deadly funny it becomes a weapon in the Second World War; a semaphore version of ''Wuthering Heights'' in which characters wave flags like ships at sea.
They also jabbed at a Britain of frumpy housewives watching the telly or government ministers whose walks may not be as silly as John Cleese's but whose portfolios could seem as contrived.
But there was a nostalgia mixed with the satire. That is why so many of the skits invoked an earlier Britain; even the Pythons' music had little to do with their own era but freely drew on music-hall melodies and styles.
In the musical, although Monty Python's humor has been stripped of the weighty past, of uneasy nostalgia, and of edgy skepticism, Broadway mannerisms are satirized but not really Broadway itself or its Las Vegas counterpart. That would cut too close to home. There is only the gleam of manic entertainment. Python's British humor has been turned into an American caricature resembling all too closely the world of hyped-up entertainment it has made its subject. Forget Camelot, Arthur says in the film in a moment of temporary illumination, '''Tis a silly place.'' Sure, and fun, no doubt. But it once offered something more.
Connections, a critics perspective on arts and ideas, appears every other Monday.