The Best Easter Movie of All Time: LIFE OF BRIAN

Easter is obviously a major Christian holiday. Every single year it rolls around and for millions and millions of people it is one of the most important observances in the Christian faith.

It celebrates the resurrection of Jesus Christ three days after the crucifixion, the victory over sin and death, the culmination of Holy Week, the end of Lent, the empty tomb, the Last Supper on Holy Thursday, the crucifixion on Good Friday, and then the rebirth and celebration of Easter Sunday.

It happens in the spring, which is kind of perfect when you think about it, because everything already feels like rebirth. The weather starts to change, flowers start to bloom, the gray ugliness of winter begins to disappear, and even if you are not particularly religious, there is something in the air that feels ceremonial, fresh, and loaded with symbolism.

And then, of course, because human beings can never just leave anything alone, you’ve got all the other weird traditions piled on top of it. You decorate eggs, which symbolize new life. You get the Easter Bunny hopping around delivering candy. You do Easter egg hunts.

There are sunrise services, special masses, processions, giant dinners, Easter bonnet parades, pastel colors everywhere, chocolate rabbits, jelly beans, marshmallow nonsense, and all of the usual strange cultural mash-up that happens when an important religious holiday becomes tangled up with commercialism and family tradition and childhood memory.

That’s just the way it goes.

Now, when I was growing up, the Christian faith was not a huge overwhelming part of my childhood, but Easter absolutely existed as an event. We colored eggs. We hid eggs. The Easter Bunny showed up. Candy got consumed in grotesque quantities.

And, maybe most importantly for me, we watched Easter movies. That was a big part of it. And it is very funny when you think about what somehow became “Easter movies” in American culture.

There were the animated specials, of course. The Rankin/Bass stuff, Easter Bunny cartoons, It's The Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown, the kiddie rabbit material, all of that. Over the years you got things like Hop, Peter Rabbit, Rabbit Academy, Winnie the Pooh Easter specials, The Waltons doing an Easter thing, and on and on and on.

But when I was a kid, Easter movies really meant biblical epics. Big, lumbering, solemn, prestige pictures that networks would trot out every single year like some sacred television obligation.

The Ten Commandments was the king of that mountain. No question. That was the big one. In Chicago, on ABC Channel 7, they would show The Ten Commandments every Easter weekend, and because the movie is over three and a half hours long, once you added commercials and television edits, it took over your life. It aired over two nights. Two nights.

That’s not a movie, that’s a hostage situation. But it was an event.

Ben-Hur was always around. The Greatest Story Ever Told. King of Kings. The Robe. Jesus Christ Superstar. Later on there was The Passion of the Christ. I always had a soft spot for Godspell. And these movies, whether they were huge and stately and self-important or weird and musical and shaggy, became part of the Easter atmosphere.

And yet, for me, none of them, absolutely none of them, even comes close to the greatest Easter movie of all time.

That movie is Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

Without question. Without hesitation. To me, it is the best Easter movie ever made.

And yes, I know that sounds provocative to some people, and yes, I know there are still people out there who hear that title and immediately clutch their pearls and start muttering about blasphemy and sacrilege and all the idiotic misunderstandings that have followed this movie around since 1979.

But the truth is, and it has always been the truth, that Life of Brian is not a movie that mocks Jesus. It does not ridicule Christ. It does not attack faith. It does not spit on religious belief.

What it does, brilliantly, hilariously, and with astonishing precision, is satirize dogma, organized religion, factionalism, blind faith, and, most of all, the giant, pompous, overblown biblical epics that so many of us grew up watching around Easter every year.

And it does that while also being, in my opinion, the best film Monty Python ever made.

Yes, I said it. Better than Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Better than The Meaning of Life. I love both of those movies. Holy Grail is legendary, obviously. It is one of the funniest films ever made and one of the most quotable comedies in history. The Meaning of Life has moments of absolute genius and some of the funniest stuff the group ever did.

But Life of Brian is the most complete movie. It is the most consistent. It is the most controlled. It is the sharpest satirical piece they ever pulled off. It works as a narrative, it works as a parody, it works as a political satire, it works as a religious satire, it works as an absurdist comedy, and it contains some of the greatest comic dialogue and some of the most memorably insane set pieces the Pythons ever created.

And coming from Monty Python, that’s saying a hell of a lot.

I was already a huge Monty Python fan when I saw Life of Brian in 1979. And my love for Python goes straight back to my father. I will never forget this. I was about nine years old, maybe ten, sitting in the living room laughing my head off watching Welcome Back, Kotter. I thought it was the funniest thing in the world. I was howling.

My father came into the room, sat down on the couch, looked at me, and basically said, “You think this is funny? Seriously? You think this is funny?” He was offended, truly offended, that I was laughing at something as pedestrian and disposable as Welcome Back, Kotter. So he said, “All right. Sunday night at 10:30, put on PBS Channel 11. I’m going to show you something that’s actually funny.”

And that something was Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

That was it. That was the beginning. Once I got a taste of Python, I never looked back. I dove in headfirst. I became obsessed. I watched the show every Sunday night. I memorized sketches. I absorbed their rhythm, their anarchy, their intelligence, their silliness, their complete refusal to follow any conventional comic structure.

They were doing experimental television unlike anything that had ever been on before, and frankly unlike anything that has really been on since. A brilliant group of British comedians and writers making something that was at once literary and lowbrow, political and childish, surreal and razor sharp.

People have been trying to imitate Monty Python for decades, and nobody has really done it, because nobody had that specific combination of minds. Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin. Each one with a totally distinct sensibility, all of it blending together into this one miraculous, deranged comic organism.

I saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail multiple times in theaters. I followed each of the members into the rest of their work. John Cleese doing Fawlty Towers, which is, in my opinion, still the funniest sitcom ever made.

Michael Palin’s travel shows. Eric Idle’s songs and stage stuff. Terry Gilliam’s visual madness. Terry Jones’s writing and directing. Graham Chapman’s strange wounded brilliance. I loved all of it. But Life of Brian hit me differently.

When it came out in 1979, it caused a massive uproar, which of course only made me love it more. It almost didn’t get made at all. EMI got cold feet at the last minute because they were terrified of the subject matter. They read the script and panicked.

And if not for George Harrison, yes, that George Harrison, Beatle George Harrison, the movie might never have existed. Harrison loved the Pythons, wanted to see the movie, and essentially put up the money through HandMade Films to make it happen.

Terry Jones later called it the most expensive cinema ticket ever purchased, which is one of the great lines in movie history. And Harrison actually appears in the film in a little cameo, which just makes the whole thing even better.

So the movie gets made, it comes out, and a bunch of people completely misunderstand it. There are protests. There are bans. There are town councils banning it without even seeing it. There are religious groups picketing screenings.

There are television debates, most famously John Cleese and Michael Palin absolutely wiping the floor with Malcolm Muggeridge and the Bishop of Southwark on Friday Night, Saturday Morning, in one of the great examples of smug authority figures not having the faintest idea what they’re talking about.

The movie was banned in places like Norway and Ireland. Sweden advertised it as “So funny it was banned in Norway,” which is genius. In some parts of Britain local councils either banned it outright or raised the rating. It became a cause célèbre.

And the whole thing was ridiculous because the people screaming the loudest about blasphemy were usually the people who either had not seen it or had completely missed the point.

Because the point is not “ha ha, Jesus is dumb.” Not even close.

Jesus appears in the film, and he is treated with total respect. Kenneth Colley plays him absolutely straight. He is giving the Sermon on the Mount. The words are the words. The lighting and the score make it clear that there is a genuine spiritual aura to the moment. The joke is not on Jesus.

The joke is on the people standing way in the back who cannot hear what he is saying properly. “Blessed are the cheesemakers” is funny not because Christ’s teachings are being mocked, but because people are idiots. People misunderstand. People mishear. People distort. People turn wisdom into dogma and dogma into nonsense and nonsense into violence and conformity and stupidity.

That is what the movie is about.

The Pythons themselves always said it: the film is heretical, not blasphemous. That distinction matters. It attacks the church, the institutions, the followers, the pettiness, the factionalism, the idiotic need human beings have to fight over doctrine and symbols and technicalities while missing the actual message entirely. Terry Jones said as much.

The movie is about what happens when peace, love, and tolerance get mangled by dumb people over the course of two thousand years. And that is exactly what makes it such a brilliant Easter movie. It’s not just funny. It is spiritually relevant in a completely sideways, satirical, and unexpectedly insightful way.

And on top of all that, it is just unbelievably, relentlessly hilarious.

There are scenes in Life of Brian that are among the funniest things ever put on film. The People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front and all the splinter groups with their absurd acronyms and endless infighting, which is not just funny as a satire of ancient revolutionary politics but also a perfect swipe at modern leftist sectarianism, trade union meetings, activist factions, guerrilla organizations, and every self-serious ideological group that spends more time fighting with people on its own side than addressing the actual enemy.

That scene where Reg asks, “What have the Romans ever done for us?” and then is forced to concede sanitation, medicine, education, roads, irrigation, public health, wine, and peace is one of the greatest comic reversals ever. It’s brilliant writing. It’s silly and sophisticated at the same time, which is Monty Python in a nutshell.

Then you have the Latin graffiti scene, “Romani ite domum,” which is one of the best classroom jokes ever turned into a set piece. You have Pontius Pilate and the speech impediment material, which is so stupid and so funny that I still laugh like an idiot every time.

You have Terry Jones as Brian’s mother, Mandy, one of the all-time great drag performances in comedy. Not some wink-wink camp act, just a full-throttle comic character, sharp and irritated and gloriously overbearing.

You have Eric Idle doing Stan/Loretta, which is one of those bits that somehow still works because it is really making fun of ideological jargon and group-think more than anything else. You have Michael Palin in a bunch of roles, all wonderful.

You have John Cleese barking and pontificating in that unmistakable way only John Cleese can. You have the ex-leper complaining that Jesus cured him and ruined his begging business, which is one of the darkest and funniest bits in the whole movie.

You have a completely insane alien spaceship sequence that arrives out of nowhere for absolutely no reason other than that Terry Gilliam thought it would be funny, and it is. It is pure Python chaos inserted into a biblical satire, and somehow it fits because the movie has created a universe where anything can happen.

And at the center of all this madness is Graham Chapman.

The late great Graham Chapman was always, in some ways, the secret weapon of Monty Python. There was something about his authority, his stiffness, his ability to play straight through complete insanity that made him perfect for this material.

As Brian, he is confused, exasperated, increasingly desperate, and completely overwhelmed by the lunacy around him. He is not a hero in the traditional sense. He is not particularly gifted or important. He is, in essence, an ordinary guy trapped in a giant historical, political, and theological misunderstanding.

That is what makes the movie work so beautifully. It is a mistaken-identity comedy on an epic scale. Brian is born next door to Jesus, on the same day, and from there his entire life is a cascading series of misunderstandings, projections, accidents, and desperate attempts to get out from under expectations he never wanted in the first place.

And that gives the movie something more than just sketch-comedy energy. It has a real theme. In fact, it has several. It is about dogmatism, certainly. It is about the idiocy of group behavior. It is about the way institutions calcify around misunderstanding.

It is about politics and religion and how people can turn anything, absolutely anything, into a doctrine, a slogan, a movement, a war. It is about individuality too.

That scene where Brian pleads with the crowd, “You’ve got to think for yourselves. You’re all individuals,” and the crowd shouts back in perfect unison, “Yes, we’re all individuals,” is one of the greatest satirical moments in the history of cinema. It is hysterically funny and also weirdly profound.

It distills the entire film into one exchange. Human beings want authority. They want certainty. They want someone to follow. Even when they are told not to follow, they follow that instruction as a commandment.

That’s why Life of Brian gets under people’s skin. Because beneath the silliness and the drag and the accents and the dirty jokes and the sight gags, it is saying something very sharp about religion, politics, institutions, conformity, and the absurdity of existence itself.

And let’s talk about that ending, because the ending is one of the greatest in movie history.

The crucifixion finale is, again, one of the things that caused endless idiotic controversy. People said it was mocking Christ’s suffering. No, it isn’t. Crucifixion was a routine Roman method of execution.

The movie places it in historical context and then uses it as the final setting for one of the most astonishingly funny and oddly uplifting comic numbers ever. “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” should not work. On paper it looks impossible. A cheerful whistling tune sung by a bunch of people dying on crosses.

That should be offensive, grotesque, and disastrous. Instead it is sublime. It is hilarious, yes, but it is also weirdly life-affirming in that very British gallows-humor kind of way.

Life is absurd, death is inevitable, everything is chaos, everybody is abandoned, the systems fail, the causes are stupid, the revolutionaries are morons, your family lets you down, your lover lets you down, your fellow martyrs are idiots, so what else are you going to do? You grin. You whistle. You laugh at the absurdity because absurdity is all there is.

That is not blasphemy. That’s existential comedy. And it is magnificent.

Which brings me back to Easter movies.

Look, I have affection for a lot of them. I really do. I grew up with them. The Ten Commandments is still a fun watch in all of its gigantic Cecil B. DeMille glory, even if it is more ham than theology half the time.

Ben-Hur is a genuinely great movie. Jesus Christ Superstar is fascinating and weird and terrific. Godspell has always meant a lot to me. The Greatest Story Ever Told has its moments, even if it sometimes feels like it was carved out of granite and embalmed before release. The Passion of the Christ certainly has intensity.

The Easter Bunny cartoons and the kid specials all have their place. But none of them captures the actual madness, the theatricality, the spectacle, the ritual, the pageantry, and the absurdity of Easter culture the way Life of Brian does.

Because Life of Brian understands both the biblical epic as a genre and the human need to turn faith into performance.

It is, in part, a perfect parody of the giant Easter movies of my youth. Those overlong epics we watched over three or four nights, the solemn voices, the swelling music, the huge sets, the piety, the speechifying, the endless sand and robes and proclamations. Life of Brian nails all of that.

Terry Jones directed the hell out of it. It looks terrific. Shot in Tunisia on some of the same locations used for Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth, it has the right scale and texture. The score works beautifully. Terry Gilliam’s visual instincts are all over it.

It feels enough like a real biblical epic that the satire lands perfectly. That’s crucial. If the movie looked cheap and tossed-off, it would not work as well. But it genuinely evokes those films, which makes every comic rupture even funnier.

And every Easter, I watch it.

Every single Easter, I put on Monty Python’s Life of Brian and I laugh. I have hosted screenings of it around Easter and gotten phenomenal responses. Audiences love it. It plays. It always plays. The jokes still land, the themes still resonate, and the controversy now looks even sillier in retrospect than it did at the time.

The movie outlived the protests, the bans, the pearl-clutching, the stupid moral panic, the television scolds, the local council nonsense, all of it. It endured. More than endured, it triumphed. It is now widely and correctly considered one of the greatest comedies ever made. It topped lists. It earned its canonical status.

Critics love it. Audiences love it. Scholars have written about it. Theologians have defended it. Historians have analyzed it. And all of that makes perfect sense, because it is one of those rare comedies that is actually about something while still being outrageously funny from beginning to end.

That’s hard to do. Most comedies are lucky if they get one of those things right. Life of Brian gets all of them right.

So yes, there are a lot of Easter movies you can watch. You can go with the animated rabbit route. You can go with the giant serious religious epic. You can go with the musicals. You can go with the modern grim-and-bloody version.

You can revisit The Ten Commandments for the hundredth time and settle in for a two-night commitment. You can watch Ben-Hur. You can watch The Robe. You can watch Jesus Christ Superstar or Godspell or any of the rest.

But for me, standing high above all of them, towering over all of them, is a film that satirizes all of them.

A film that is wildly funny, completely original, consistently brilliant, wonderfully performed, beautifully directed, and smarter than almost all the people who got angry at it.

A film that represents everything that was great about Monty Python.

A film that I loved when I first saw it in 1979, that I still love now, and that only gets richer, funnier, and sharper every time I revisit it.

In my opinion, Monty Python’s Life of Brian is not only one of the greatest comedies ever made.

It is the best Easter movie of all time.

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