1. We attended two performances of Spamalot in New York City. On 8 June 2005, we saw the musical with its original cast, except that Alan Tudyk had replaced Hank Azaria in the role of Lancelot. On 12 January 2006, we saw a second performance. By this time, Simon Russell Beale had replaced Tim Curry as Arthur, Lauren Kennedy had replaced Sara Ramirez as the Lady of the Lake, and Azaria had returned. Since an authorized script has not yet been published, quotations from the musical's book are based on our notes from these two performances.

2. Figures reported by the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com).

3. Jacob Hale Russell, “The Great Green Way,” Wall Street Journal, 22 October 2005, http://online.wsj.com/public/article (accessed 25 May 2006). Corporate musicals like The Lion King and Beauty and The Beast posted almost identical costs, around $15 million for each; see Wollman, Elizabeth L., “The Economic Development of the ‘New’ Times Square and Its Impact on the Broadway Musical,” American Music 20 (2002): 446–65, at 448CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Susan Aronstein explores the antimonarchical basis of Monty Python's satire in “‘The Violence Inherent in the System’: Anti-Medievalism in Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” unpublished paper delivered at the Congress for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 2003. Monty Python and the Holy Grail has been widely discussed in terms of its postmodern deconstruction of genre and authority; see especially, Murrell, Elizabeth, “History Revenged: Monty Python Translates Chrétien de Troyes's Perceval, or the Story of the Grail (Again),” Journal of Film and Video 50.1 (Spring 1998): 50–63Google Scholar; and Aronstein, Susan, Hollywood Knights: Arthurian Cinema and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Palgrave, 2005): 110–16Google Scholar, and 235 n. 32.

5. Eco, Umberto, “The Return of the Middle Ages,” in Travels in Hyperreality, trans. Weaver, William (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 59–86Google Scholar.

6. Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 28–9Google Scholar.

7. Ibid., 29.

8. Althusser, Louis, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Brewster, Ben (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127–88Google Scholar; see 162 and 165.

9. Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 6–7Google Scholar. Knapp, Raymond, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 8Google Scholar. Several other scholars of the musical have explored the nationalist ideologies of Broadway musical comedy, including Altman, Rick, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987)Google Scholar, Mast, Gerald, Can't Help Singin': The American Musical on Stage and Screen (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1987)Google Scholar, Walsh, David and Platt, Len, Musical Theater and American Culture (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003)Google Scholar; and Most, Andrea, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

10. Knapp, 8; Most argues that the musical is “particularly well suited” to representing the complexity of assimilation in America, 1.

11. Idle notes that parts of Spamalot derive from the tradition of “panto,” a quintessentially British form of inexpensive entertainment. However, that genre has been thoroughly absorbed by the melting pot of Broadway; see Eric Idle, “The Tale of Spamalot.” The full text is available, in three parts, at Monty Python's Daily Llama, www.dailyllama.com/news/2004/index.html (accessed 14 May 2007).

12. Wollman, 445–65; Nelson, Steve, “Broadway and the Beast: Disney Comes to Times Square,” Drama Review 39 (1995): 71–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Although it is true that conservative musicals of the past, like Oklahoma! and The Sound of Music, were positively cheap by comparison to today's musicals, the mounting cost of musical theatre on Broadway favors the production of hit shows with wide mass appeal, shows that confirm rather than challenge their audience's assumptions. By the 1960s, the average musical required a run of nearly two thousand performances to amortize its costs, compared to only five hundred in the 1920s and 1930s; see Walsh and Platt, 2–3).

13. Galbraith, John Kenneth, The Culture of Contentment (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992)Google Scholar.

14. The titles identify the Historian as “not A. J. P. Taylor.”

15. See the reading of this scene by Laurie Finke and Martin Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations: The Middle Ages on Film (unpublished MS).

16. Eric Idle, “The Tale of Spamalot” (part 3).

17. Miller, D. A., Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 71Google Scholar.

18. Knapp, 9; Altman, 28–32, makes much the same point.

19. National heterosexuality creates “a familial model of society [that] displaces the recognition of structural racism and other systemic inequalities”; see Berlant, Lauren and Warner, Michael, “Sex in Public,” in Intimacy, ed. Berlant, Lauren (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 311–30, at 313Google Scholar.

20. Althusser, 175.; for a more detailed discussion of hailing and interpellation, see pp. 127-88.

21. Most, 197-200, describes a remarkable instance of the power of interpellation in her discussion of Michael Bennett's 1975 A Chorus Line. Bennett's attempt to represent the disillusionment and fragmentation of late twentieth-century American life through a diverse and multiethnic cast is defeated by the very expectations of the genre. The final production number, “One,” with the cast in identical gold tuxedos and top hats that submerged individual identity into the bland uniformity of the chorus line, was supposed to be a “horrifying moment.” Nevertheless, audiences loved it; “One” was the hit song of the show. Audiences read the chorus line not as “empty homogeneity,” but as a call to celebrate and join in the power of the musical to assimilate individuality into the “empty homogeneous space” of nationalism (the term is Anderson's).

22. See Chapman, Graham et al. , “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” Screenplay (London: Methuen, 2002)Google Scholar. A transcription of the film as released has been posted online at several locations, including www.intriguing.com/mp/_scripts/grail.asp and www.sacred-texts.com/neu/mphg/mphg.htm. Monty Python and the Holy Grail, d. Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam. 1975. [DVD special edition] Sony Pictures, 2001.

23. For a discussion of Arthur's (failed) attempts to interpellate subjects in Holy Grail see Murrell's “History Revenged” and Aronstein, Hollywood Knights, 112–14.

24. Song lyrics are cited from the official songbook, Monty Python's Spamalot (Milwaukee WI: Hal Leonard Corporation, 2005). In it, this song which is not titled in the cast album, is called, “King Arthur's Song,” see. 8–9.

25. This is exactly the opposite of what happens in the film, where the only ones who will answer Arthur's hail are those who, as Murrell phrases it, “wear the same school tie” (57).

26. The use of the possessive pronoun “our” distinguishes the musical ideologically from its antecedent text. In the film, this line occurs at the end of the “Bring out Your Dead” scene, where the peasants note that “he is a king,” but someone with no connection to their lives.

27. Miller, 71 and 117.

28. Knapp, 78. This is not to suggest that all Broadway songs are simple, but only that their complexities tend to emerge from a simple, often formulaic, format. On the musicological complexities of Golden Age Broadway song, see Forte, Allen, The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era, 1924–1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995)Google Scholar. Mast, 25–48, offers a useful account of the Broadway song's structure. Wilder, Alec, American Popular Song (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), xxivGoogle Scholar, and Furia, Philip, The Poets of Tin Pan Alley: A History of America's Great Lyricists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 13Google Scholar, describe the standardization and mass marketing of popular song in America.

29. Walsh and Platt, 164; see their discussion of Phantom, 165–6.

30. Frith, Simon, “Pop Music,” in Frith, Simon, Straw, Will, and Street, John, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 93–108, at 102CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31. Frith, 104.

32. Frith, 107.

33. Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor W., Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Cumming, John (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1976), 145Google Scholar. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text.

34. Andrea Most provides a detailed account not only of Jewish contributions to the Broadway musical, but of the power of the musical as a mechanism of assimilation. Among the few women in this pantheon we might number lyricist Dorothy Fields.

35. Miller, 71.

36. The film's exploration of gender and sexuality in this scene has been discussed by both Hoffman, Donald, “Not Dead Yet: Monty Python and the Holy Grail in the Twenty-First Century,” in Cinema Arthuriana, rev. ed., ed. Harty, Kevin J. (North Carolina: McFarland, 2002): 136–48Google Scholar; and Harty, Kevin J. “The Damsel ‘in Dis Dress’: Gender Bending in the Arthuriad,” Arthuriana 14.1 (Spring 2004): 79–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37. Compare with Raoul's “I'm here with you, beside you, to guard you and to guide you” in Phantom.

38. Mordred (who does not even appear in Spamalot) may strike the final blow in these tales, but the narratives frequently shift the blame for Arthur's fall to the women: without Morgana's seduction of her brother, Mordred, they argue, would have never been born, and without Guinevere's adulterous relationship with Lancelot, he could not have split Arthur's court.

39. The actual number varies from performance to performance, and the jokes are adapted accordingly. DIOI is a play on Homer Simpson's famous “Doh.”