![]() ![]() JOHN CLEESE: (As Tim the Enchanter) What?ĬHAPMAN: (As King Arthur) You got us all worked up.ĬLEESE: (As Tim the Enchanter) Well, that's no ordinary rabbit. GRAHAM CHAPMAN: (As King Arthur) You silly sod. (SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL") MARTIN: So we knew that the '70s movie "Monty Python And The Holy Grail" is a classic, but we didn't know how classic. Rather than having humans and dogs hunting rabbits, you have rabbits hunting humans. WADE: The premise is that it turns the world upside down. INSKEEP: The "Heege Manuscript" also shows us another old trope used by the minstrel - tales of a killer rabbit. So we see these kind of techniques that apparently have a very long history. So typically, we're talking about things that happen either in the bedroom or the bathroom. Another way to make people laugh is you take things that should be private and you make them public. WADE: A common way to make people laugh is you take people in authority - politicians, celebrities, in this case priests - and you make them seem ridiculous. MARTIN: Wade finds the similarities with comedy today striking. The second text is a mock sermon, and then, finally, a nonsense poem which imagines a feast in which various absurdities happen, and everyone gets too drunk, and it all ends badly. So it's a narrative account of a bunch of peasants who try to hunt a hare, and it all ends disastrously, where they beat each other up and the wives have to come with wheelbarrows and hold them home. One is what we now call a burlesque romance. Now we know some of the topics that one of them used in a set. INSKEEP: Wade recently published a study of the "Heege Manuscript" and says it's the closest thing we have to a minstrel's own notes. He was the only one sober enough to remember it, and therefore, he could write it down. ![]() WADE: What really struck me was a signature line that said, by me, Richard Heege, because I was at that feast and did not have a drink, the joke being that he was at a feast the night before. We know this because someone in the audience took notes, and Wade, who studies medieval literature, found them in an old manuscript.
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