Humor & Life Quote by Eric Idle

Eric Idle is making a partisan case for the musical as an engine for jokes, not just feelings. Coming from a Python, that bias isn’t accidental; it’s a worldview. He’s arguing that song-and-dance works best when it’s in service of comedy because comedy is where theatrical artifice stops being a liability and becomes the point. When characters break into song in a serious show, the audience has to be convinced the heightened reality is emotionally necessary. In a musical comedy, the leap is baked in: of course it’s ridiculous, and that shared recognition becomes the bond.

The repetition of “very, very funny” and “funny songs” is doing more than emphasis. It’s a quiet rebuke of musicals that mistake volume for wit: big belting, big feelings, big production, thin punchlines. Idle’s standard is craft, not genre snobbery. A “funny show” isn’t just a show with jokes; it’s a tightly engineered machine where dialogue, rhythm, rhyme, and performance style all conspire toward laughter. “Very good, funny songs” implies something even harder: comedy that survives melody. A gag can die when you elongate it into a chorus; a truly comic song gets funnier as it repeats.

Context matters: Idle helped create Monty Python’s Spamalot, a Broadway hit built on the insight that musicals already flirt with parody. His intent is less “musicals should be light” than “musicals excel when they admit what they are: joyous, artificial, and shamelessly designed to entertain.”