Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, the zanies from the Monty Python troupe will be back in select theaters nationwide for the 50th anniversary of their historical, hysterical hit, “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” on Sunday and May 7.

The movie is a take-off of the Arthurian legend with the klutzy knights in their pyrrhic search of that ever-illusive Holy Grail.

The British comedy troupe first gained North American attention when the Canadians began airing the show, “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” The U.S. enthusiastically followed, when the series thundered onto PBS.

The Python team was made up of John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Eric Idle, Graham Chapman, and cartoonist/director Terry Gilliam. The source of their unconventional humor rose from an odd place: British upper-crusty universities.

“Mike Palin and I knew each other at Oxford,” Terry Jones explained in an interview shortly before his death in 2020. “We’d written together, and in ’66, ‘67 I was asked if I'd like to do a children’s television program called ‘Do Not Adjust Your Set.’ So Mike and I did that, and Eric Idle had also been involved,” he recalled.

“We’d actually met him once when he was at Cambridge,” Jones continued in the interview. “Then Terry Gilliam came along and started doing cartoons in the last series. We knew of John Cleese and Graham Chapman and what they were doing. ... John wanted to work with Mike Palin. At that time we decided not to do another series of ‘Do Not Adjust Your Set,’ and we all came in the package – Mike and me and Eric and Terry Gilliam. We said, ‘Let’s do it together.’ And we all liked what each other did”.

Jones co-directed “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” with Gilliam and went on to direct two more “Python” movies, “Life of Brian,” and “Monty Python’s Meaning of Life.”

Eric Idle, known for his wit with word puzzles and tongue twisters, remembers, “We were two groups of two: Graham and John Cleese wrote together and Michael Palin and Terry Jones would write together and apart. And I’d write alone. And Gilliam would do the sketches and ideas. Then we'd go away for two weeks, write, then meet at Terry Jones’ house and sit around the table and read what we’d written. If they laughed, it was funny and went in the show.”

Michael Palin, who’s memorable from some of Python’s most wacky sketches like “The Dead Parrot,” “The Lumberjack Song,” and “The Argument Clinic,” says he's not sure what makes people laugh, though he does say, “It is a mysterious process, but it is something very spontaneous to make people come out with this strange gurgling sound that passes for laughter.”

The trick, he says, is often shock or surprise. "That can be done through anger, or it can be done by putting together two extraordinary contrasting moments or characters or whatever. This can make you just cry out because it's so amazingly odd, like driving cars straight into a wall.”

Talk about driving into a wall, John Cleese, who says part of his humor rises from anger, remembers, “I started to make harder jokes before anyone else, and the producers would get anxious: ‘That's a little bit hard-edged, isn't it?’ I'd say, ‘Let's try it and see how the audience reacts, and if they don't like it, let's cut it out.’ They'd say, ‘Oh, all right.’

“The audience roared with laughter, so I learned you could do this harder humor. People loved it. I think I learned that while most people were doing a safer kind of humor.”

Cleese’s “harder jokes” included bits like “The Ministry of Silly Walks,” “Cheese Shop,” and his supercilious announcer who declared, “And now for something completely different.”

Chapman, who died at 48 in 1989, plays King Arthur in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” chosen because his mates considered him the best actor among them. And Gilliam, the only American in the crowd, not only created the stills and animations for the show, he also directed. “I have a lot of energy and always have,” he says. I was never ‘hyper.’ It's just that the spring was wound up really tight when I was a kid, and it's still not wound down yet. I love doing things, making things, building houses, painting. There was a lot of energy. You get used to it, and it's very enjoyable as you get older.”

Tickets may be obtained for the film by going to www.FathomEntertainment.com or participating theater box offices.

Nicholas Cage hangs 10

Nicolas Cage is battling it out with a group of bullying Aussies in his new film, “The Surfer,” opening in theaters Friday. Cage plays a father who wants to share with his son the site where he executed his passion for surfing when he was young. But that simple idea turns out to be an explosive event in this thriller, which costars Julian McMahon and Nic Casim.

Cage, who’s starred in a passel of good movies like “Peggy Sue Got Married,” “Leaving Las Vegas,” “Raising Arizona” and “Color Out of Space,” tells me that he’s had a hankering to be a writer. “I wanted to be a master of one trade, not a jack of all trades,” he says.

“I thought that's foolish when you consider what Leonardo da Vinci did. I could’ve been writing, but I guess I got satisfied with acting on many levels — creatively and as a channel for any passion or anger I may have had — also financially. So perhaps I became satisfied. Maybe I lost some hunger on that level. But I do feel I’m not utilizing every aspect of my mind. I need to do more; just discipline.”

The Judds are subject of a documentary

It was a shock to the world when, two years ago, singer Naomi Judd committed suicide. She’d been enormously popular both as a soloist and in concert with her daughter, Wynonna. What really went wrong? On Mother’s Day weekend, May 10-11, Lifetime will attempt to answer that question with a four-part documentary, “The Judd Family: Truth be Told.”

The popular performer had struggled as a young single mom with two kids, but made her way to success through determination and talent. Medical analyses later reported she was suffering from PTSD and a bipolar condition.

The last time I interviewed her she seemed candid. She told me: “You have to know yourself because as women we don’t know how to be straight. We’ll say, ‘There’s nothing wrong, leave me alone, I don’t want to talk about it.’ (But it’s) the antithesis,” she said.

“We are in psychic pain. We WANT to talk about it. We want someone to be demonstrative. We want someone to be in charge, to come to us when we’re weak. I think, first of all, you have to know who you are because you can't know what makes you happy — you have no idea what makes you happy unless you really know who you are.”

Someone's in the kitchen with Hamlin

Becoming an actor is always a struggle because there are more performers than there are jobs. So if someone makes it big in show biz, it’s understood that considerable sacrifice was required to get there. But for Harry Hamlin it was more than that.

Hamlin earned his kudos in “Veronica Mars,” “L.A. Law,” “Shameless,” “Mad Men,” “Mayfair Witches,” and now he’s found his way into the kitchen with his niece, Chef Renee Guilbault.

In Season 2 premiering on AMC+ and IFC Wednesday, Hamlin and Guibault roast up a prime rib for his former “Mad Men” costars, Ben Feldman and Kevin Rahm.

Growing up, Hamlin hid his desire to act from his parents, who would disapprove. But after he graduated from Yale he was given an acting scholarship.

“My parents thought I was going to New York to work as a production assistant. I just walked into the room one day and said, ‘I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm going to San Francisco next week and go to acting school.’

“And they took the distributor cap off my car. I had my own bank account with about $100 in it, and they took all my checks and tried to tether me to the house in Pasadena. But I hitchhiked to the airport and I bounced a check and flew up there and enrolled in the school. I actually didn’t speak to my parents for a while after that because they were not happy about it. When I started paying their taxes they weren’t quite as against it.”

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