Most books published as tie-ins to newly-released movies are unnecessary things, worth only a quick flip through after an evening at the cinema. A notable exception is a two-sided, double-named large format paperback [the latest from the Monty Python group]. Open it from one side and it's "Monty Python's The Life of Brian," the profusely illustrated shooting script of [the] film…. Turn the book upside down and around and it becomes "Montypythonscrapbook," a hodgepodge of photographs, diary entries, letters, cartoon strips, half-developed ideas and trash accumulated by the six men who call themselves "Monty Python" during the years the film was being created. Study it, if you like, as an execrable example of what currently passes as humor or read it for a good laugh in the spirit of the late 1970's. In either case, the book has a raison d'être of its own.

"Schizophrenic," in The...