Nearly Dead Already

Rating: Null/10 (13 July 2000)

I was smack in the center of the target demographic for this film 25 years ago. I thought it was liberated, sacrilegious, self-referential, anarchic, all the things we liked.
Seeing it now, only a few parts are funny. I suspect they are all written by Cleese: the bit about swallows and coconuts, the two episodes with the French guard, and the skit concerning anarchy. These are precious.
The rest is getting worse with each passing day. The problem is that so much of their humor depended on being outrageously, either with the unexpected or the taboo. But we've evolved, and these guys who were out of bounds before are rather well-behaved now. Can you imagine them doing a semen in the hair joke?
You want funny, check out old tapes of the Goon Show, of whom these guys were always a lesser copy anyway. Those old shows are still outrageous, most of them.