10 Best Life of Brian Moments
2. Bigus Dickus
“Anybody else feel like a little… giggle… when I mention my fwiend… Biggus… Dickus? “
As the captured Brian is brought before Pontius Pilate (Palin), a casual mention of an acquaintance with an amusing name causes both his authority to erode and a breakdown of professionalism among the Roman guards to occur.
This really is the Michael Palin show, and he completely commands the scene, taking centre stage as chief biblical baddie Pontius Pilate, ready to make an example of the last survivor of a group of dissidents, poor old Brian.
Palin was given two instructions for the scene: play it with a pronounced rhoticism and try his hardest to make the actors playing his stoney-faced guards laugh. Everyone loves spotting an unintentional corpser, and Pilate (and Palin) keeps whirling to spot the source of the snickering and eventually comes nose to nose with one (Chris Langham) scrunching his face tight to stop the giggling. Not knowing exactly what was scripted and who was supposed to laugh where (probably not Palin, all credit to him mostly holding it together) makes this one all the sweeter.
1. Always Look on the Bright Side of Life
“For life is quite absurd, And death’s the final word, You must always face, The curtain with a bow, Forget about your sin, Give the audience a grin, Enjoy it, It’s your last chance anyhow…”
Unable to escape his fate of certain death, and with the People’s Front of Judea unwilling to free him and give up a martyr to their cause, Brian is crucified along with many of the minor characters we’ve seen throughout the film, who all begin to sing a catchy tune.
The most bittersweet of bittersweet endings to a comedy film sees a crowd of crucified prisoners cheerfully singing themselves to the next life. It was a bold gambit that in lesser hands might not have worked at all. This is songwriter and lead singer Eric Idle’s greatest single gift to the film, and the gallows humour paired with an undeniably uplifting ditty has understandably made this song a very popular one at British funerals.
Idle’s belated decision to sing this in a chirpy cockney dialect adds a whimsical air to something that could have been so easily tonally misjudged.
As a sendoff for the film, it’s near perfect, taking stock of the good time we’ve all had but acknowledging life, death, comedy and pathos all at once in everyday human existence.
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Nothing in Life of Brian trivialises Jesus Christ or Christian beliefs. Jesus is a character in the film and his divinity as shown in the text is in no doubt. Brian was just an ordinary man in the wrong place at the wrong time, unlucky enough to be born next to, and to be mistaken for, Jesus, without the benefit of divinity. There are many great moments in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, but maybe that’s one extra: it still remains just as funny and strangely hard-hitting today as it ever did.
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And number eleven I want to be a woman