By Luaine Lee

Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, the zanies from the Monty Python troupe will be back in select theaters nationwide for the 50th anniversary of their historical, hysterical hit, “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” on Sunday and May 7.

The movie is a take-off of the Arthurian legend with the klutzy knights in their pyrrhic search of that ever-illusive Holy Grail.

The British comedy troupe first gained North American attention when the Canadians began airing the show, “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” The U.S. enthusiastically followed, when the series thundered onto PBS. The Python team was made up of John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Eric Idle, Graham Chapman, and cartoonist/director Terry Gilliam. The source of their unconventional humor rose from an odd place: British upper-crusty universities.

“Mike Palin and I knew each other at Oxford,” Terry Jones explained in an interview shortly before his death in 2020. “We’d written together, and in ’66, ‘67 I was asked if I’d like to do a children’s television program called ‘Do Not Adjust Your Set.’ So Mike and I did that, and Eric Idle had also been involved,” he recalled.

“We’d actually met him once when he was at Cambridge,” Jones continued in the interview. “Then Terry Gilliam came along and started doing cartoons in the last series. We knew of John Cleese and Graham Chapman and what they were doing. … John wanted to work with Mike Palin. At that time we decided not to do another series of ‘Do Not Adjust Your Set,’ and we all came in the package — Mike and me and Eric and Terry Gilliam. We said, ‘Let’s do it together.’ And we all liked what each other did”.

Jones co-directed “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” with Gilliam and went on to direct two more “Python” movies, “Life of Brian,” and “Monty Python’s Meaning of Life.”

Eric Idle, known for his wit with word puzzles and tongue twisters, remembers, “We were two groups of two: Graham and John Cleese wrote together and Michael Palin and Terry Jones would write together and apart. And I’d write alone. And Gilliam would do the sketches and ideas. Then we’d go away for two weeks, write, then meet at Terry Jones’ house and sit around the table and read what we’d written. If they laughed, it was funny and went in the show.”

Michael Palin, who’s memorable from some of Python’s most wacky sketches like “The Dead Parrot,” “The Lumberjack Song,” and “The Argument Clinic,” says he’s not sure what makes people laugh, though he does say, “It is a mysterious process, but it is something very spontaneous to make people come out with this strange gurgling sound that passes for laughter.”

The trick, he says, is often shock or surprise. “That can be done through anger, or it can be done by putting together two extraordinary contrasting moments or characters or whatever. This can make you just cry out because it’s so amazingly odd, like driving cars straight into a wall.”

Talk about driving into a wall, John Cleese, who says part of his humor rises from anger, remembers, “I started to make harder jokes before anyone else, and the producers would get anxious: ‘That’s a little bit hard-edged, isn’t it?’ I’d say, ‘Let’s try it and see how the audience reacts, and if they don’t like it, let’s cut it out.’ They’d say, ‘Oh, all right.’“The audience roared with laughter, so I learned you could do this harder humor. People loved it. I think I learned that while most people were doing a safer kind of humor.”

Cleese’s “harder jokes” included bits like “The Ministry of Silly Walks,” “Cheese Shop,” and his supercilious announcer who declared, “And now for something completely different.”

Chapman, who died at 48 in 1989, plays King Arthur in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” chosen because his mates considered him the best actor among them. And Gilliam, the only American in the crowd, not only created the stills and animations for the show, he also directed. “I have a lot of energy and always have,” he says./Tribune News Service

Visit fandango.com for theaters and showtimes.