To know "pure nonsense, or nonsense for nonsense's sake, one must consult the English," the British historian and diplomat Harold Nicolson wrote in 1946.

		Related article 'Spamalot' fulfills quest by DuPrez and Idle

"It is true that the appreciation of nonsense at least is a phenomenon which can rarely be found except among the English people."

Sixty years later, with the success of 2005 Tony Award winner "Monty Python's Spamalot," English absurdity clearly has a foothold with American audiences, too -- punctuated by dancing medieval knights, an evil bunny and clip-clopping coconut halves.

English humor is traditionally quite different from the American sort -- both more erudite and broader. Male performers often appear in drag. Class- and economic-based themes are common.

"If there's one thing I've observed in British culture, it is that there is almost an ineffable fear ... that someone else will succeed and do well and that you will be judged by that standard. Americans don't have that particular hangup," said Randy Auxier, a philosophy professor at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale and contributor to "Monty Python and Philosophy" (Open Court, 2006).

"There is so much tacit information in British humor, so much context, that it goes over the heads of Americans -- not because they're not smart enough, but because the context is unfamiliar to them," Auxier said.

Still, from the first Python episodes on PBS in 1974, four films and now the musical "Spamalot," the troupe has always been popular in the United States, and arguably even more popular in the U.S. than the U.K.

The humor shouldn't work so well with American audiences, but at least in the case of Monty Python, it does.

"I think American fans have always been more devoted -- 'fanatical' is a good word," the group's former manager and publicist, Nancy Lewis, said in 1999. "People who discovered Python felt they had made a major discovery."

"It's high-brow slapstick. We don't have anything like it in our culture," Auxier said. "Steve Martin might come as close to anything we have -- this physical humor combined with a really razor wit and a very sophisticated keen observance of the ways things are."

There's also the nonsense.

Nonsense and absurdity may be funny but have their roots in something else: anti-intellectualism and a rejection of logic and reason, Nicolson, the British historian, wrote in "The English Sense of Humour."

"The humiliation of logic fills the English, even the most erudite English, with unmixed delight; but in countries where logic is reverenced, and reason esteemed, the love of nonsense appears primal, infantile and below the dignity of the developed man," Nicolson wrote.

He's talking about the French, of course, which is all the more reason for Python to make fun of them. ("I don't want to talk to you no more, you empty-headed animal, food trough wiper," says French Taunter, a character in both "Spamalot" and its inspiration, the film "Monty Python and the Holy Grail.")

Five of the six Pythons were educated at Oxford or Cambridge, but their humor still targeted pompous, upper-class intellectuals. That has appeal with Americans, despite the different class structure in the ex-colonies. It helps that Python makes fun of so many more things than just intellectuals, too.

"The idea of a successful kind of comedic representation has a lot to do with being able to hit different constituencies -- the Pythons hit the drag scene, sexuality, they were great on media. They clobbered the BBC. They also had a lot of American-based humor, though in a satiric way," said Marcia Landy, the author of "Monty Python's Flying Circus" (Wayne State University Press, 2005) and a film studies professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

"The word most used about them is 'surreal.' They take everyday life, make it strange and really poke fun at things that people might privately think is problematic," said Landy,

John DuPrez, co-writer of "Spamalot" with Python Eric Idle, pointed to the deeper subjects of some of the musical's humor: casually sending men off to die in war, getting rid of the old through euthanasia and so on.

"The coconuts are silly," he said, but satire can dig deep.

Python's broad and unique appeal is especially evident in the song "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life." Sung by a crucified Idle at the end of the film "Life of Brian," the song has proven so popular that it's sung twice in "Spamalot," including as the closing number. Torpedoed British sailors were known to sing it during the Falklands War, as well as pilots a decade later during the Persian Gulf War.

It all gets back to nonsense.

"One of the key tenets of irrationalism, which is associated with playing around with the real, is precisely the sense of there must be something else -- this can't be all there is," Landy said of the song.

"It really reaches the fundaments of people's private discontents. ... For different layers of the audience, that resonates."

Or maybe it's just the coconuts.