Well, there's a certain totally inexplicable element to great comedy. It works because it just WORKS, and it's sort of magic and mysterious and that's what is so exciting about it.

But I do think that one thing Python does better than any other comedy group ever is mix high and low comedy. Their scenes are simultaneously esoteric and juvenile. They use elevated vocabulary and allusions to play out concepts that are beyond ridiculous.

For example, the All-England Summarize Proust Competition:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwAOc4g3K-g

Goofy...and yet it relies on at least a basic familiarity with the work of Marcel Proust just to GET the joke. I mean, these guys went to Oxford and Cambridge. Terry Jones is a Chaucer scholar. And yet he's best known for playing a piano naked.

http://urbanfrontiersman.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/terry_jones_portrait.jpg

It's that ability to blend clever, satiric wit with bawdy physical comedy and schtick that really stands out about the best of Pythons work all these years later, to me. My favorite sketch of all time, "Argument Clinic," provides another ideal illustration. The surreal nature of the scene, and the amazing performances of Cleese and Palin, are what draw the immediate laughter, and yet it sticks with you because it is so imaginative. Thoughtful, even. It makes you reconsider the very nature of conversation and argumentation. What IS an argument? Why do we have them? IS it something beyond simple contradiction?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teMlv3ripSM

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