I'll have your Spam, dear -- I luv it!

I finally got to see Monty Python's Spamalot on Broadway last week -- hoorah! It feels like I've been tormented for aeons by the existence of this show and its exhorbitantly-out-of-reach-for-a-starving-writer ticket prices, but it hasn't even been playing a year yet. (A very good, very geeky friend of mine found a pair of tix on eBay -- under face value! -- and made a gift of one to me, for which I shall be enternally geekily grateful.)

The show is a riot, the third funniest thing I've ever seen in the theater. (The first is Fool Moon; the second, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Abridged, which is -- I can't believe it -- available on DVD.) It's much more than merely a revue of good bits from the Flying Circus and various Python flicks -- it's its own creature, familiar bits woven into new bits and spiced with a lot of parodizing of Broadway conventions and clichés. It is, as you should expect from anything with the Python name on it, wickedly irreverent.

It's so irreverent, in fact, that I was suddenly struck by its popularity: How did a culty little TV show end up being the hottest ticket in town? And then it occured to me that the previous hottest ticket in town, The Producers, also sprang from a cultish little film. What's going on?

What's going on, of course, is that Generation X, with its snarky attitude and tendency to embrace all things weird and funky and geeky, is not only working to bring these strangenesses to us, the audience -- Spamalot's Hank Azaria is an Xer, born 1964, and certainly a geek icon for his work on The Simpsons alone; The Producers' Matthew Broderick is an Xer, born 1962, and certainly a geek icon for his performance in Ferris Bueller's Day Off alone -- but the audience itself is now heavily Xer and geeky and doesn't see anything particular outré in Trojan bunnies and stream-of-consciousness insults ("Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries!"), or in making fun of Holocaust-seriousness or theatrical excessiveness.

Maybe, if we're very good, their gods of geekitude will bring us Star Trek: The Musical next year...