Monty Python's Life of Brian - Legacy

Legacy

Life of Brian has regularly been cited as a serious contender for the title "greatest comedy film of all time", and has been named as such in polls conducted by Total Film magazine in 2000, the British TV network Channel 4 in 2006 and The Guardian newspaper in 2007. Rotten Tomatoes lists it as one of the best reviewed comedies, with a 96% approval rating from 44 published reviews. Internet Movie Database includes the film in its list of the top 250 movies of all time. A 2011 poll by Time Out magazine ranked it as the third greatest comedy film ever made, behind Airplane! and This is Spinal Tap.

The BFI declared Life of Brian to be the 28th best British film of all time, in their equivalent of the AFI's original 100 Years...100 Movies list. It was the seventh highest ranking comedy on this list (four of the better placed efforts were classic Ealing Films). Another Channel 4 poll in 2001 named it the 23rd greatest film of all time (the only comedy that came higher on this occasion was Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot, which was ranked 5th).

The line, "He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy!", spoken by Brian's mother Mandy to the crowd assembled outside her house, has been voted by readers of BOL.com the funniest line in film history. This poll also featured two of the film's other famous lines ("What have the Romans ever done for us?" and "I'm Brian and so's my wife") in the top 10.