9Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

It’s a quest movie that gave us the line, “It’s only a flesh wound.” A send-up of Middle Age barbarity and “Sir Arthur, King of the Britons” (crickets), the movie further embedded the Pythons into the American comedy consciousness after their TV series Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Michael Palin told Playboy in 2000 that Python’s anti-authoritarian world view could be traced to the surreal comic outlook of Lewis Carroll and the satirical tradition of Shakespeare and Jonathan Swift. “University comedy, political satirical comedy, had been dormant for the first part of the 20th century, when people were either killing or being killed and economies were failing,” Palin said. “When we got through the war and we'd all grown fat on American milk and bread and orange juice, we felt the time had come to laugh at those who were supposed to be telling us what to do.”