10 Best Life of Brian Moments
5. Lining up for Crucifixion
“Crucifixion? Good. Out of the door, line on the left, one cross each.”
An affable Roman bureaucrat (Palin), who looks like he’s wearing a Harpo Marx wig, prepares an influx of prisoners for their execution by crucifixion.
None of the other Pythons could play polite and approachable like Palin, and it’s a stroke of dark genius, similar to what Terry Gilliam had him do in Brazil, to see him smilingly ushering prisoner after prisoner to a slow and painful death like he’s merely pointing them towards a holiday coach.
As Palin’s character sticks to his simple queries and attempts to keep the incredibly long line moving, he is momentarily thrown by Idle’s Mr Cheeky character from the Sermon on the Mount scene, pulling his leg and saying he’s to be set free, before laughing it off to re-join the queue for death.
4. Brian Addresses the Crowd
“He’s not the Messiah. He’s a very naughty boy!”
After spending the night with fellow revolutionary Judith (Sue Jones-Davies), Brian wakes up to a crowd of hundreds of worshippers gathered outside, much to the fury of his mum.
After putting her supposedly divine son firmly in his place, Brian’s mum forces him to address “his friends”. They parrot back to him his thoughts on individuality and independence, including some weirdo responding to the statement that “you’re all individual… you’re all different” with “I’m not!”. After she judges Brian’s time in the spotlight is up, she has a pantomimey back and forth with the ringleaders in the crowd, refusing to answer questions on her virginity but insisting (while further infantilising him) that her son is nothing special.
This is a great scene following on from Brian’s accidental achievement of finding a devoted following, and it shows that he is already way out of his depth. No amount of polite dismissal and half-arsed theologising will convince the zealous mob that he isn’t the Messiah. Nor will countless new friends convince his mum that he’s not her little boy in need of a scolding.
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3. What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
“All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order…”
People’s Front of Judea leader Reg (Cleese) attempts to drum up some passion among his crew for bringing the Roman occupation crashing down, but his rhetorical questions prove to have inconvenient answers.
It’s a classic debating or improvisational comedy technique: ask a question, and if you don’t like the answer, you add a caveat to bring the narrative over to your side. Unfortunately for Reg, the Romans actually did quite a bit for the culture, infrastructure and quality of life of the many countries they conquered, so the drawn-out scene becomes an increasingly exaggerated “yes, and…” routine which makes Cleese’s character steadily more apoplectic and in denial of reality because his argument has too many holes in it.
And number eleven I want to be a woman