I’ve been writing a whole bunch for DC Theater Arts lately. One of my recent reviews focused on the Vienna Theatre Company’s (VTC) The 39 Steps. The play, by Patrick Barlow, is a 1996 parodic adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 film, which is then based on a 1915 John Buchan novel.
And to be clear, the VTC cast did a fantastic job, especially with the ridiculously energy-intensive material of the parody, but the material they had to work with did not set them up for an easy run of things. Among making for an enjoyable Sunday afternoon, this production was wonderful for starting a conversation between the two wolves inside me — the academic wolf and the trashposting wolf — about what makes a parody work. What makes The 39 Steps only mostly work, while Monty Python and the Holy Grail has a cultlike status and also a musical?
Essentially, while the 1915 book and 1935 film were quintessential mystery tales of their time: fit with a dashing mustachioed hero, femme fatale, crafty professor, and tamed shrew, the stage adaptation also has these things, even if it’s making fun of them. And that’s the problem.
The script tries to make fun of these tropes while also relying on them for moments of triumph and relatability with the audience. As a work, it feels unfocused. It is a mediocre show walking because of its premise: it sets out to parody one specific property instead of a genre.
It’s far more difficult to parody a single property rather than a collection of tropes. Parodying a single property gives you far less real estate to work with to start, and when you do inevitably reach outside that property to criticize something else — a genre at large, a current entry in that genre, a political figure, social phenomenon—your parody seems unfocused, or at best, like you’re doing a drive-by joke (which is an actual term I learned in a late-night writing class once), which has a punchline about a target different from the setup. Usually drive-by jokes use second punchlines after the primary one.
While drive-by jokes can be done right (see “we don’t hire women” at the end of Norm MacDonald’s legendary “Women Drivers” joke, which targets organizations who don’t hire women, or at a minimum isn’t a punch line with the same argument as the last piece of the joke), they can come across as unqualifiedly mean-spirited or detract from your comedic thesis.
![Women Can't Drive. Norm Macdonald Can't Drive Women Can't Drive. Norm Macdonald Can't Drive](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9e53078b-1ce1-4f55-ae4b-d1f1ffab3656_480x360.jpeg)
Few productions directly parodying a specific existing property besides Airplane! (1980) and Young Frankenstein (1974) are consistently successful and hilarious in meeting their satirical objectives. Airplane was apparently primarily parodying a 1957 film called Zero Hour!, but because it was also borrowing from some other singular specific films like one called Airport 1975 it was immune from being confined to parodying one particular film. It also sounds like Zero Hour! was generic and trope-based enough that by parodying it, Airplane was basically a genre parody. Someone will have to actually be the first to watch Zero Hour! and let us know.
The Austin Powers series is another parody of a specific film series, and it has its moments but largely takes three movies to tell the same joke. And if I criticize Spaceballs I’ll be shot. The Austin Powers movies and Spaceballs (1987) generally have not earned spots any top-ten lists for critical achievement, and from what I’ve seen, are often beloved in spite of themselves. I’ve seen some pretty great Spaceballs costumes made by people who are completely aware of what that movie is.
Meanwhile, critically-well-received parody properties like Avenue Q (2003) (am I supposed to put the debut year next to musicals?), Blazing Saddles (1974), Hot Fuzz (2007), Puss in Boots (2011), and Galaxy Quest (1999) are parodies of particular genres–they’re not just stories that use the same background as an existing property to tell jokes mostly unrelated to that background.
Most crucially, these properties center their own well-argued theses about their respective genres. That sounds pretentious, but the joke can come down to ideas as simple as, respectively, “Sesame Street is wrong about New York,” “racism just doesn’t make sense,” “law enforcement are people too,” “musketeers and also cats are people too,” and “it’s just a show.”
![Leche | WikiShrek | Fandom Leche | WikiShrek | Fandom](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd2434e09-029e-4ca8-9889-97e61ce55048_1918x791.png)
Oh, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) has it both ways in the best way: it benefits from a marketing perspective and character-archetype-shortcut perspective thanks to its use of known IP (albeit public domain IP) of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, but it doesn’t shackle itself to any element of their story besides the fact that he’s a king, they’re knights, and they occasionally walk up to castles and yell at them.
The jokes in these genre-based properties are usually less circumstantial ideas — less situationally comedic, if you will — and more about ideas, even if they’re silly or obvious. One reason Monty Python were so consistently good was because they were doing both at once: most of their sketches were ultimately about British society told with incredible circumstantial humor. We didn’t always notice the former, but it was there, and it’s a big part of why we feel deep down that they’re so great.
And that term I’m throwing around — “comedic thesis” — might seem like too pretentious a term for movies like this, but comedic theses are crucial to any comedic text succeeding. Why did Holy Grail work so well, but that last scene is such a downer?
The film’s best sketches — and again, the fun of operating in an economy of theses is that it’s your own special argument and others will have theirs — are about how not only have humans been dealing with the same political and social questions and ills for hundreds of years, but we have also been deeply incompetent at doing so. The “witch” sketch, along with most sketches featuring King Arthur, are about the dangers of populist takeovers and, in turn, dimwitted, undemocratically selected authority.
![From Salem to Monty Python: Witch hunt in pop culture | Salon.com From Salem to Monty Python: Witch hunt in pop culture | Salon.com](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fef40f7e3-0a09-4a25-b2c1-c6c86a615c8f_1200x797.jpeg)
At the end of the day, Monty Python and the Holy Grail is about how regardless of the power that a system says you have, you are probably bad at your job. And the Pythons get those ideas in your head by having knights say they plan to fart at their enemies to make them leave. Genius.
But the last scene of Holy Grail, in which the King Arthur and Patsy we’ve come to know and love are shown to be modern-day reenactors, sics a killer bunny on that argument by suggesting that none of what we’ve seen here is reflective of humanity pre-1975. These are jokers, clowns — filthy cosplayers, even — who thought they might dare impersonate these great titans of Western civilization, and their best attempts resulted in fart jokes and several people dying. This awful last scene is ridiculously, notoriously unsatisfying.
This points to why “random humor” is often so unsatisfying in general: if we’ve been given a premise, we want it to pay off, and unrelated pieces of a work feel like distractions from the work’s central idea, whether it was consciously added or not, and whether we realize that’s why we’re unsatisfied or not.
To John Cleese’s credit, he has said that Holy Grail “ends the way it does because we couldn’t think of any other way.” If the Pythons couldn’t come up with a fitting conclusion I doubt anyone could.
The fact that The 39 Steps is based on media from 89 and 109 years ago would give it a leg up if it were not trying to parody that media directly, which would require that it get a different title. Unfortunately, the crucial damning flaw of the theatrical 39 Steps is that the jokes often just don’t matter to us. We either don’t understand what it’s referencing — because it’s referencing a film and/or book that audience members may not have seen — or we’ve heard the jokes in it before, made better. This show was written in the 90s for an audience not yet subjected to decades of beating the dead meta-humor horse, as well as the dead “adventure movie tropes are often really silly to begin with” horse.
The last reason The 39 Steps isn’t successful is that the show takes swings at turns of phrase meant to be funny but don’t quite stick the written landing and can’t be helped by earnest performances. This is especially true of the show’s jokes about stock female characters whose supposed talkativeness or preference to not be involuntarily cuffed to a stranger makes them ridiculous. I guess the 90s hadn’t caught onto that trope yet.
But Monty Python and the Holy Grail parodied a genre — not a specific story about King Arthur and the knights, but a genre — not only were the tropes and their most common criticisms as widely understood, nor did the show ground its thesis in a criticism of those tropes. It was a secret third thing: it focused instead on an entirely separate argument about how people since the beginning of time have been bad at their jobs. And maybe that’s how you parody something: having your own opinion.