Where comedy meets the table - the nonsense of Monty Python

There is a kind of humour that does not work if you explain it. You cannot say why a knight pretending to ride a horse with coconuts is funny. He just is, and the moment you dissect it, the joke is gone. Monty Python built a whole body of work on exactly that elusiveness: nonsense that feels logical, seriousness that suddenly tips into the absurd, a world that refuses to take itself seriously and lingers precisely because of it.

There is a roleplaying game that dares to catch that humour in rules. And the clever part is: it admits, right away, that this cannot really be done.

A game that refuses to be a game

It is called Monty Python's Cocurricular Mediaeval Reenactment Programme, published by Exalted Funeral and officially licensed by the Pythons themselves. The title alone is the joke. This is not a roleplaying game, the book insists with a straight face, it is an educational programme for mediaeval reenactment. That very posture, deadly serious about something utterly nonsensical, is the heart of Monty Python.

And the game keeps it up right into the rules. The game master is not a game master but the Head of Light Entertainment, with a personality of their own, and if the players complain they can literally receive a letter of complaint that swaps them out for a new one. You do not choose a character class but a "situation", from knight to oppressed peasant. There is even a daft minigame, based on backgammon with dice catapults and farm animals, called Fetchez la Vache.

What the films and the game share

Beneath both lies the same engine: the collision between serious and silly. In the films you see it as a knight who stays polite while his arms are hacked off. In the game it has become a rule.

Every trait of your character sits on a line between Serious and Silly. And that position is not fixed, it moves throughout play. How silly an action is even decides which die you roll, from a d4 to a d20. A critical roll can trigger "dire consequences", after which you roll on a table for a range of surreal outcomes. So the game turns Python logic not into a layer of mood, but into a mechanic: the sillier it gets, the differently the game behaves.

But the most important invention is a choice the designers made on purpose. They pointedly did not want you to reenact the films. No redoing the Holy Grail scene by scene, because a joke you repeat is no longer a joke. Instead, the game gives you the tools to make your own Python-esque nonsense. It draws on the complete catalogue, from Flying Circus to the films and the albums, not as a script but as a tone.

In this way the game translates not the plot of Monty Python, but its spirit: that comedy is not a text you recite, but an attitude you take on. The films did not give you a world to reenact, they gave you a way of thinking to play with yourself.

Where it grinds

Honesty first: humour at the table is the hardest thing there is. A game can give you every tool, but it cannot make the joke for you. If the group is not in tune, or if no one dares, the nonsense just hangs in the air. This is not a game that becomes funny by itself; it is a game that becomes funny when you and your fellow players dare to be funny together.

And Python humour is a taste. Not everyone loves the absurd, and anyone who would rather play a tight story with tension and stakes will find the loose, anything-goes structure frustrating. The game embraces the chaos, and that is exactly what some players do not want from it. That is not a flaw in the game, it is the point, just as it is with the source.

Who should try this

If you have ever ruined a joke by explaining it, and kept laughing anyway, you already understand this game. Where the earlier pieces in this series brought horror, ruin, and wonder to the table, this one does something rare: it tries to make you laugh, and honestly admits that this is the hardest thing a game can attempt. Open the book, choose your situation, and make up your own nonsense.

The knight has no horse, only coconuts. And yet he rides. That is the whole game: pretending, with full conviction, until everyone at the table goes along with the joke.

Monty Python is loud, laughing nonsense. The next piece is its opposite, a quiet and wistful world seen through a child's eyes: where childhood meets the table.