Indeed, Pythonia is his joy to reign, the purity of intellect transposed with sheer lunacy, the adroit bawd of it all. “I really understood certain aspects of Python and the forever unspoken things that are underneath,” he will say of this epic convergence, having known Idle and John Cleese socially for many years. (“Eric is a philosopher,” he told the Chicago Tribune, admiringly. “He writes as low as fart jokes and as high as Heisenberg. He covers the spectrum.”) That he finds himself charged with executing sublime shitting-of-pants theatrics, he suggests, has only refreshed his psyche. “Eric said the most wonderful thing. Because people are starting to say, ‘How do you feel about being told that this show is politically incorrect and in questionable taste?’ And Eric said, ‘Proud and a little aroused.’ Taste is the enemy of art altogether. I’ve thought about this a lot. People with good taste are constantly worrying about what other people will think. Don’t put that couch over there! It’s the wrong thing to be thinking about, because it squashes expression. Of life and vitality of all kinds, and sex—all the funny things! Did you see Team America? It’s hilarious—the puppet blow job in it. One goes down on the other one in the shot, and you’re just looking at the strings bouncing! It’s so expressive, it’s brilliant!”

Um, nudge-nudge.

And so rain would drench the city on the day and night of St. Valentine, just like Scotland in 1974 when wet Pythons first sought the Grail. Finally, the Shubert preview curtain would part on all that which Idle and Du Prez had begun three years earlier, and had moved from Chicago three weeks before. Still, whatever it had thus far become was owed entirely to that most sullen of drupaceous fruit—the lowly coconut—without which Monty Python and the Holy Grail would have never existed. Utter truth! “The coconut gag was the original gag that sparked the whole thing off,” said Terry Jones of the film, in the massive coffee-table Rashomon that is The Pythons Autobiography by the Pythons, published in 2003. “We did talk about having horses at one point, and then we quickly dismissed it, because we thought it would be funnier not to and because we couldn’t afford horses anyway.” Such was the bounty of budgetary constraint! Armored knights without horses, prancing forth on foot, trailed by servants clattering empty coconut shells, so as to idiotically simulate hoofbeats! Sight gag nonpareil! Cinema comedy history! This unrelenting image of noble impotence, in fact, was their only reason for bothering to make the film. “Thank God for coconuts,” Idle writes in his Greedy Bastard memoir, pondering the logistics of loosing his movie knights upon Broadway. “That means most of the scenes can be fairly easily reconstructed onstage.”

Tim Hatley’s fanciful set and costume design, based in part on Terry Gilliam’s original graphics from Holy Grail, keep the mock heroic quest jauntily apace amid castles and coots and Very Expensive Forests (as wooded tableaux are referred to onstage). Camelot itself appears as a florid, splashy Las Vegas hotel—à la, perhaps, Excalibur by the animation department at Warner Bros. Indeed, nearly all the original silly business, rudimentary to begin with, translated to the theater with newfound wit and vibrancy. The beloved bit, for instance, where Idle carted bodies through a blighted village and hollered “Bring out your dead!” is now so much the peppier with querulous dancing corpses performing the crowd-pleaser “I Am Not Dead Yet.” Said Nichols not long ago, “A friend asked me to explain how we were adapting the movie for the stage, and I thought about it and said, ‘Okay, you know how, in the movie, there’s a cow that flies out of a castle and lands on a page? Well, in the musical, the cow has a singing part.”

Alas, that is no longer true, for the cow (as sexily played in the manner of Marlene Dietrich by Sara Ramirez) was silenced in Chicago—although listen for “The Cow Song” as a cast-album bonus track. Nichols, who happened to adore this number, applied his scalpel nonetheless. “It broke the most important rule—she wasn’t a cow,” he says patiently. “If you’re going to catapult a cow toward the audience, then a hot lady dressed in a black-and-white thing is not the same as an actual cow that lands on a guy.” (A cow, by the way, still lands on a guy, just not a hot cow.) An elaborately choreographed witch-hunt sequence—“Burn Her!”—was similarly, and summarily, excised from the first act after much futile tinkering. “There was something about it that never quite worked,” says David Hyde Pierce, who bravely plays Idle’s original role of Bravely Bold Sir Robin. “Maybe that it was a song that was supposed to be funny about burning somebody at the stake?” But, according to all involved, the most rigorous cuts by Nichols are tiny and elegant and expertly peel away hambone artifice, the smallest hint of actor’s excess. “It’s what Mike calls ‘dead babies,’ ” says Curry, happily chastened. “He says every performance has babies—your favorite bit that you think is so funny but actually stops being true, and you do it anyway because you can’t bear to miss the laugh. Mike’s great note all the way through has just been: ‘That’s very funny. Now make it true.’ He says, ‘I want to see some dead babies.’ So when we left Chicago, I went off on sort of a rampage of serial infanticide.”

Herewith, the comic mind-meld of Nichols-Python meshes ever consistent. Hyde Pierce, whose teen years were also corrupted by Python Love abiding, professes, “They were maybe the biggest influence on my development as an actor. What I responded to in them was that combination of absurdity played with utmost sincerity.” Idle himself thoroughly approves of the symbiosis at hand. “What’s interesting for these guys is they’ve got this show going on, which is very silly; they are instinctive people doing very silly things,” he says. “And then you’ve got Mike talking to them about proper acting, even to the chorus people. He’s always pulling it back, which is really nice. It’s easy to go after a big laugh and make it bigger and bigger. But you’ve then got mugging very, very quickly.”

“Comedy is brutal,” says Nichols, all but spattered with its cherry blood. “It’s powerful, though. And the wonderful thing is—the thing I had forgotten about—pure comedy is so simple: If it’s funny, it stays; if it’s not, it goes. You have to be very careful of things you particularly love. It’s the killing-babies thing.” Idle, who has been listening to this, virtually beams: “He’s the biggest baby killer of all time!” he crows, as only he might. “Mr. Nichols the Baby Killer, they call him on Broadway!”