Unlike the media recreations of [Lenny] Bruce, Monty Python doesn't care about being loveable. If Monty was, say, a traveler on a train, he would be someone to avoid. Python is as cheerfully mindless, cruel, vulgar and gross as any cross-sampling of midwest auto dealers. They create grotesqueries of monumental distastefulness (on [Monty Python Matching Tie & Handkerchief], an unlikely British mum skinning and deep-frying a dog while a media-modulated doctor's voice compares the human brain to a fish), but they make you laugh. They turn the most threadbare—and for Americans, obscure—of comic conventions (Australians as hard-drinking blockheads, actors as idiots) into some of their best routines.

The force that makes this kind of inanity work is their vision of a conventional world gone mad—a sophisticate's slapstick landscape, laughed at from a cynic's remove. Priceless routines which first surfaced on their two largely unnoticed … releases, Another...