The Monty Python octet, rooted in British university and music hall humor, likes to go after some of the fundamental ideas and institutions of Western civilization, beginning with Christianity and taking circuitous Lewis Carroll routes through politics and schizoid social behavior in which taut propriety masks an underlying lunacy.

The Python group is welcome here because it has a perspective that is generally denied American comedians, who tend to operate out of a sense of individual helplessness. With Monty Python we see the healthy comic alternative that has offshoots in Edward Lear and Gilbert and Sullivan and is part of a tradition of wit and literacy that prizes its critical remove while seeing its social object clearly….

Lenny Bruce once noted how it was the familiar that was as heartwarming to people as any sense of complicity between comic and audience. But for the uninitiated, this Python concert...