Humour in the film "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" : a cognitive linguistic approach

Abstract

Humour is a part of our daily lives. Even though we come across humour a lot, it is often not understood exactly why we laugh or what makes us laugh. Analysing humour would give us that insight. One prevalent medium of humour is film. There are many classical comedy films, but this thesis focuses on one specific film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, analysing the humour in it using different theories from cognitive linguistics. Monty Python and the Holy Grail was released in 1976, and still is one of the funniest low-budget films out there. The paper gives a short overview of the approaches and theories in humour. It also gives an overview of cognitive linguistics and three theories from cognitive semantics. The goal of this paper is to analyse the humour in Monty Python and the Holy Grail using theories from cognitive semantics. The analysis tries to explain different aspects of humour in the dialogue