MOVIE · 1983

Monty Python's the Meaning of Life

ComedyMusical107 min

Life’s biggest questions get “answered” through a chain of musical sketches, beginning when a staid London insurance office suddenly turns into a pirate ship. John Cleese and Michael Palin are among the Python members hopping from childbirth and Catholic family planning to war, middle age, organ transplants, old age and death, with songs cutting in between. One sketch turns hospital doctors into liver thieves circling a still-living donor; another follows a restaurant glutton toward the film’s most infamous gross-out sequence. The structure keeps swerving, with fourth-wall breaks, abrupt shifts in setting, and the troupe’s mix of satire, slapstick, and religious mischief.