NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE E aster is a big day for Christians. Marking the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead, described by the Catechism of the Catholic Church as “the crowning truth of our faith in Christ,” it is an occasion for celebration after the penitential prelude of Lent. Growing up, I typically enjoyed this holiday at the home of one or another set of grandparents, among extended family. At these gatherings, TVs were typically tuned to the classic-film channel Turner Classic Movies, which devotes the entirety of its Easter programming to biblical epics, once a staple of Hollywood filmmaking, such as King of Kings, The Greatest Story Ever Told, and, perhaps most famous, Ben-Hur. As we were among family, these movies were typically just background noise. Though sometimes, my late grandfather couldn’t turn away from Ben-Hur, whose chariot race he considered — with good reason — the greatest set piece in all of movie history.

I don’t know if my grandfather ever saw Monty Python’s Life of Brian. I somewhat doubt it: A serious, pious man, he would likely have been unamused by the British comedy troupe’s skillful, biting satire of organized religion. The film met with both critical acclaim and considerable controversy upon its original release. But thinking about Life of Brian as a parody of biblical epics is both the best way to appreciate it and serves, paradoxically, to illuminate the aspects of the Christian faith that even Monty Python could not puncture.

Certain common qualities of the biblical epic make it ripe for parody. Deliberate pacing bordering on ponderousness; swelling orchestral scores bordering on cheesiness; serious acting approaching woodenness. Several of them, moreover, are replete with distracting celebrity cameos: Perhaps the most famous is John Wayne as the centurion who remarks, “Truly this man was the son of God” at Jesus’s crucifixion in The Greatest Story Ever Told. The Pythons’ answer to this lattermost quality in Life of Brian was not simply to cast themselves, as some of the most well-known comedic actors in the world at the time, in multiple roles (in classic Pythonesque fashion), but also to give a few-second cameo to former Beatle George Harrison, who was instrumental in the production of the film.

Life of Brian is best understood as a direct parody of Ben-Hur. Whereas the latter shows the epic life of a Jewish nobleman roughly Jesus’s age providentially intersecting with that of Jesus, the former gives us Brian Cohen, a Jewish man born at the same time and place as Jesus who falls in with Jewish revolutionaries against the Romans and inadvertently starts being treated as a messiah, even though, as his mother reminds us, he is merely “a very naughty boy.”

It is Brian’s unwitting messiahship that has generated most of the film’s controversy. Brian’s “following” quickly takes on a life of its own, willfully interpreting his haphazard actions and words as revealed Truth, fighting among themselves as to its true meaning, and too quickly accepting some source of external authority as a way to avoid thinking for themselves. Exasperated by this treatment, Brian at one point exhorts his followers, “You don’t need to follow me, you don’t need to follow anybody. You’ve got to think for yourselves.” When he elaborates that “you’re all individuals,” the crowd, in unison, shouts, “we’re all individuals.” Ditto when he says, “you’re all different.” It’s an undeniably witty and amusing caricature. Credited director Terry Jones contended that the film wasn’t “blasphemous because it doesn’t touch on belief at all,” but was “heretical, because it touches on dogma and the interpretation of belief, rather than belief itself.”

But Christians are well aware of our faith’s tumultuous history. The Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc once said, “The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine — but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight.” It is telling, moreover, that this, not the person of Jesus, ends up the target of the Pythons’ satire. Jesus himself is played straight in Life of Brian. Its opening scene shows the three Wise Men following a star to the nativity — almost identical to the depiction in Ben-Hur, until they realize they’re at the wrong manger. But even in Life of Brian, Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus get an angelic aura. The one time Jesus appears in the film as an adult, he is delivering an unaltered Sermon on the Mount; he is, however, misinterpreted by some standing far away from him, such that “blessed are the peacemakers” becomes “blessed are the cheesemakers” (itself then extended as a sanction of all involved in dairy). An ex-leper annoyed that Jesus, by curing him, deprived him of alms, his main source of income, also shows the limits of the Pythons’ satire. Eric Idle would later state that he considered Jesus “definitely a good guy” and “not particularly funny” because “what he’s saying isn’t mockable, it’s very decent stuff.”

There is one Jesus-adjacent target the Pythons couldn’t resist, however: the crucifixion. The brutal method of execution is made light of throughout the movie, and especially at its climax, when one character crucified with Brian (punished for his revolutionary activities) remarks, “Not so bad once you’re up.” Brian’s crucifixion is also when “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” a jaunty, whistling tune, legendarily embodying English resilience, is featured. Jones had little time for the idea that the movie was in the wrong here. “Any religion that makes a form of torture into an icon that they worship seems to me a pretty sick sort of religion quite honestly,” he once snarled in response to the critique. But this not only misses the point, it reveals a spiritual emptiness about Life of Brian, however much it left the person of Jesus untouched. The closest the Pythons can get to a moral statement about life in Life of Brian (aside from the earlier paean to free thought) comes in the lyrics of “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

But Christians believe that life is not absurd, but a gift. Nor do we believe that death is the final word. To quote the Catechism once more: “Christ’s Resurrection — and the risen Christ himself — is the principle and source of our future resurrection.” It is this transcendent quality that Life of Brian lacks, and that the biblical epics it mocks, for all their stolid solemness, at their best can capture. They evidence a powerful reverence for a reality Christians know to be true, and draw great power from it, whatever their flaws. Life of Brian even at its most bitter and satirical pays a backhanded compliment not just to those films, but to the events they depict, in identifying them as a target. As with much Monty Python satire, they here went after some of the most sacred cows their time offered. Even unbelievers such as themselves could recognize the power of the Resurrection, if only culturally. So this Easter, and all future Easters, let’s really look on the bright side of life: God became man to die for our sins, and to bring us to eternal life.