The endlessly quoted 1975 comedy remains both a clear product of its era and a timelessly funny masterworkIt was with some surprise, as I gathered my recollections of Monty Python and the Holy Grail before its 50th anniversary this week, that I realised I had seen it in full only once, back when I and the film were both considerably younger. It felt like more. The first fully narrative feature by Britain’s best-loved TV sketch troupe is among the most fondly, frequently and recognisably referenced comedies in all cinema; the film’s best scenes are hard to separate from various everyday quotations or pub impressions thereof. Some comedy is made not so much to stand as individual art than to be absorbed into our collective comic language, and so it is with Monty Python, their best work a stew of endlessly imitable idioms and accents, to be relished with or without context.In all truth, I remembered laughing at Monty Python and the Holy Grail more vividly than I remembered exactly what...