This hilarious screen play is great for any Monty Python fan. I would reccomend buying the movie before you get the screen play but if you don't feel thats necessary then there won't be anyone to stop you. My favorite parts are the musical descriptions. "Possibly, atmospheric music playing in background." Even though I had already memorized the whole Monty Python and the Holy Grail movie this still entertained me for hours and hours.

Yes! Finally! The screenplay! Without all those colour pages! Without all of those annoying photographs! Without all of that jettisoned material! Without the accountants statements! Without any of that boring old "extra" rubbish!

It's just the screenplay.Or is it? Not exactly. Of course to the new Python fan,this is sold gold treasure.( Rightly so! ) So newbies...purchase away,without question!

BUT....what's in it for the jaded old "been there,seen that,tired of the tumultuous deluge of boring reprints",Monty Python fans? Well....firstly it has a NEW Cover!( Including four(!) reviews from some fine media sources! ).Secondly...it includes the full script to the recently re-edited in...."Missing 24 Seconds"! Thirdly....it has some alternate photos from the film! And perhaps most collectable of all....PAGE 75! Not just any Page 75,mind you. This Page 75 has an error! It has a full page photo of.....STAND INS! Yes,Brother Maynard and his friend,Eric Idle & Michael Palin,are missing,but a photo of their stand-ins IS included! How's THAT for a bargain?

Whether using it to re-enact the film with your Insurance Salesman,or beating the neighbour's terrier,or simply using it to balance that wobbly coffee table in your foyer; This is the book for you!

A funny, useful little companion. Including classics and unknowns. This is definitely something Python fans will love. This outrageous, must-reread, book has tasty tidbits of Python humor, song lyrics, and some not-as-well-known sketches. If you're a follower of Monty Python, You have to read the Pocketful of Python series. Definitely worth ordering.

Spamtastic! It's so nice and little, I can carry it around with me in my purse and backpack! It's great when I need a Python fix. It has "The Lumberjack Song" and "Spam" and "Every Sperm is Sacred" Lyrics, but it also has really funny, lesser known skits like "Constitutional Peasants" (from Holy Grail) and "What Have the Romans Ever Done For Us?" (from Life of Brian). I was really torn between this one and John Cleese's Pocketful of Python, but the "Truth About Protestants" skit (from Meaning of Life) made me get it. Every Python fan should own this. It's a funny and wonderful mix of popular and unpopular Python and will make you [at least] giggle every time you read it.

In an age when children are all fed the same diet of movies and TV shows, Eric Idle's work speaks to the individual, the special creative person in each child. The story, the style, the humor lets me laugh while reading it to children, and lets them laugh while hearing it (not to mention the laugh they get watching me laugh). The point? This is a wonderfully written story that pleases and amazes children and adults. If there is a person on AMAZON who hasn't already enjoyed Eric Idle's other work (not to mention his Monty Python work), then this is a great start

Eric Idle is a man to be worshipped. This is not an excuse for him to get naked, this is a great work of comedic satire. Mr. Idle wowed the masses in Monty Python, now he'll wow you again with this very funny book. Not as deep as The Road to Mars of course, but exceptionally enjoyable. Plus, it features some real great pictures of Eric in the nude, that are often nearly artistic and always steamy hot. (If that's your thing.)

This book shows quite clearly exactly what Chapman's role in Python was: to show up late, do very little work, but contribute one or two outrageously out-there ideas to really stir things up. The Our Show For Ringo Starr script (too bad this was never produced!) reads much more like Douglas Adams than Python, but with occasional bizarre Chapmanisms to keep things interesting (and completely absurd.) The rest of the book echoes things that Chapman has worked on before, and even includes a few lines lifted directly from Python sketches. All that said, however, the book was a bracing, inspiring read -- a refreshing blast of insanity that makes for great (easy) (...) browsing.

If there is any doubt left that Graham Chapman could write effective comedy outside of his partnership with John Cleese, this delightful collection of unreleased scripts should do the trick. Sadly, unlike Cleese, Chapman could never get his solo projects truly off the starting blocks (we'll skip the sub-par flop that was YELLOWBEARD), and as a result he never had the solo success each of his fellow Pythons have enjoyed in various degrees. Nevertheless, this book is a vivid demonstration of the uncompromising comic spark Graham brought to Python and to Cleese's writing in particular. Without Chapman's brilliantly intuitive and raging insanity, Cleese's humor became safe, formulaic, smug and user-friendly (as in FIERCE CREATURES and -gulp! - WANDA). By the same token, Cleese's shrewd grasp of language and structure were sorely missing from Chapman's undisciplined, inaccessible and scattershot script for YELLOWBEARD. Still, if you're a fan of the blond, pipe-smoking doctor, this is a must-own. There are four separate pieces here, each compiled by Jim Yoakum, who collaborated with Graham on and off in the years before Chapman's death. Graham's longtime companion, David Sherlock, also offers commentary. "Our Show For Ringo Starr," a TV special written by Chapman with Douglas Adams kicks things off, and it is by far the longest piece. It's awkward in places, but the best of it has a manic narrative feel that would not be out of place in a series four Python episode. The story concerns Ringo's adventures with a robot that behaves like an early version of Marvin the Paranoid Android. In fact, Adams recycled the B-Ark sequence from this script for one of his Hitchhiker books, "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe." Ringo is mistakenly given powers by this robot, who confuses him with a Rinog Trars. The script is punctuated by proto videos featuring songs from Ringo's (so-so) album GOODNIGHT VIENNA. Some of it is very funny, but after a while the story begins to chase its own tail. The pilot script for "Jake's Journey" is next, and it is my favorite piece in the book. The story centers around an American teen who is sucked into a surreal adventure with a crusty old knight called Sir George (who comes across as a wised-up, more assured version of Chapman's King Arthur from "Holy Grail"). It has a warmth and gentleness that's unique for Chapman, whose humor was usually more aggressive and disturbing. He'd clearly come a long way since the "The Undertaker Sketch". Graham wrote this with Sherlock, who no doubt played a hand in toning down his partner's excesses. It would have made an imaginative TV series, had CBS had the nuts to put it into their schedule (and Graham not had the gall to die from cancer). "The Concrete Inspector," the script for a surreal short film, was mainly penned by Yoakum, but Chapman's touches are nevertheless distinctive. The 'It's technical' joke came directly from Terry Southern's novella MAGIC CHRISTIAN (the film version of which Chapman contributed material to). According to Yoakum, Chapman conjured a scene involving the unfolding of an "actual size" map of the Earth on his own. "Concrete Inspector" tells the story of a man who records cracks in concrete sidewalks. An original idea, but the story's shaggy dog aspects (what's the deal with that pink cabinet anyway?) don't really come off. Frankly, this reads like more of a Yoakum solo project than a true collaboration with Chapman. Finally, there's "Tonight: VD", a short sketch in which a TV announcer tries to dispell myths regarding sexual diseases, only to be cut off by TV censors. Oddly, the collection omits the script from OUT OF THE TREES, Chapman's one-shot BBC comedy special from 1976. It's a shame, for sketches like "Peony" and "Ghengis Khan" (penned with Douglas Adams and Bernard McKenna) would fit in perfectly here. All in all, a mixed bag, but as Chapman's output (barring LIAR'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY) is the most obscure of all the Python alumni, it's a godsend to all of us fans who wondered just what happened to him after YELLOWBEARD.

This is a really funny book. No kidding. Really funny. I haven't laughed so hard in a long time. Why doesn't some clever producer snap up these sketches and put them on TV then we'd be spared another season full of dreck!

Well, the Python Fellows have done it again! They have produced a book so funny, so rue to nothing, that it could be just a figment of a madman's imagination. If they think that someone will want to buy this book, they are definetly right on, chaps! I hope everyone will buy this book, read it, and then send it to me! (Just kidding!)

This is the companion book to Monty Python's most outrageous film. Great color photos illustrate the script, but the REAL reason to own this is that it is the only place you may ever get to read/see some sequences cut from the film. These are "The Adventures of Martin Luther," in which Jones plays a very randy Martin Luther making the Jewish parents of two young daughters (mother Chapman and father Palin) quite nervous and an extended version of the "Middle Age" sequence featuring Carol Cleveland as a waitress in the Dungeon Room waiting on Idle and Palin. The text to these scenes is what warrants the high rating - otherwise, it's simply a souvenier.

The format is a mass-market paperback, but this isn't a novelization but rather the screenplay as the movie was made. You'll notice that last has a subtle distinction. Oftentimes screenplays differ notably from the movies as you see them--scenes are cut because they didn't work, cost too much to do, or just because of the limits of time. The screenplays of Brazil and Monty Python and the Holy Grail are full of wonderful little tidbits that didn't make it to the screen. Unfortunately, for Life of Brian, there's only the parts that did get made, which are funny indeed, but you've already seen them.

Eric Idle has written a very entertaining book. Plot twists at the end? Come-on. As far as I can tell, there was no plot twist, maybe I'm just stupid. But look, the narrator get's more and more opportunistic/careerist throughout, did you expect that he wouldn't get his comeuppance? The whole Carlton/Comus/Wallace plot was straining to a denoument. And it was a very perfect denoument at that. What do you want? BTW 'Comus' was the Latin god of comedy, was he not? I really see a movie in this: I see Max von Sydow as Keppler, Tammy Faye Baker as Wooley, Peter O'toole as Charles Jay Brown, Catherine Zeta Jones as Katy Wallace, and two relative unknowns as the two comics. David Bowie has to be Carlton, of course. The comic theory spottily presented has many unattributed references to Desmond Morris, maybe others. All of which Eric Idle would deny, of course.

When I first began to read the book, I was expected more silly humor along the lines of "Monty Python". Mr. Idle, and the rest of the world have matured a bit though. Nevertheless, as I settled into the novel, I truly enjoyed it. Carlton, the Bowie-class robot, is truly the hero of the novel in his attempt to define what comedy is, and save his human masters from terrorists. I can picture this as a movie, as Mr. Idle has referred to in his interview, but the book is a good, easy read. If you like Douglas Adams, then you will like "The Road to Mars".

Good lord! Such venom over a pleasant little book. Come on people, it's not supposed to give you the meaning of life. If you hated the "theory of comedy" theme, hated the characters, hated the plot and hated the setting what the hell were you doing picking this up in the first place? My suggestion: read the liner notes next time so you can run away screaming when you disagree with the content. Idle has done a good job of writing a funny sc-fi book. Not a Python sci-fi book, but simply a funny one with all of his usual clever verbal humor. yes, he bungled the ending and didn't manage the competing plots very well, but my book reading satisfaction isn't derived wholly from the ending! It's an amusing read and I look forward to his next effort. But I'll read the liner notes first.