YMMV / Spamalot

• Awesome Music: The entire soundtrack will have you in awe when you're not floored with laughter, but the shining star goes to Sara Ramirez—the original Lady of the Lake—and their performance of Diva's Lament. Dayumn.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • "Finland".
  • A BLAM within a BLAM, "Fisch Schlapping Dance". It's not referenced again for the rest of the song or the show.
• Cliché Storm: Of the parodied sort. Spamalot mocks every Broadway trope in existence, from love songs to happy endings and weddings.
• Crosses the Line Twice: It's Monty-fucking-Python! What'd you expect?
  • Patsy mentions how telling someone you're Jewish "isn't the sort of thing you say to a heavily armed Christian."
  • The French Taunters play La Marseillaise on trumpets. With farts.
• Fridge Brilliance: Sir Robin finding his grail in musical theatre becomes this when one realizes that the actor who played him in the original film — Eric Idle — is the librettist/co-composer of this show.
• Genius Bonus: Patsy saying he's Jewish on his mother's side. According to Jewish tradition, your Jewishness is passed matrilineally (i.e. you're a Jew if your mother was Jewish), so that's the only way you can be Jewish.
  • You technically can be Jewish through your father's side, but it's a lot more work and there is a test. It's practically the same as a non-Jewish person converting, just slightly simpler.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The Lady of the Lake complains about being replaced by Britney Spears. The musical came out just before Spears' Creator Breakdown.
  • One of the suggestions offered by Robin in "You Won't Succeed in Broadway" is to have Nigerian girls in stays. This became less funny when hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls were kidnapped by terrorists in early 2014.
  • The jokes about Nokia's success in the playbook can cause dismay as they failed to adapt to the smartphone era and its cell phone business ended up being sold to Microsoft.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The Lady of the Lake's "Diva's Lament" originally included the lyric "I've no Grammy, no reward/I've no Tony awards!" Spamalot then won three Tony awards ^specifically Director Mike Nichols won Best Direction of a Musical; the production as a whole won Best Musical; and—in truly ironic fashion—The Lady of the Lake won Best Performance by a Featured Actress. and the Grammy for Best Musical Show Album, requiring the change to "All our Tony Awards/won't keep me out of Betty Ford's!"
  • Last time Galahad accused Lancelot of being gay, he denied it. Here, he's actually gay.
  • King Arthur having a snarky, long-suffering manservant with a secret that could get him killed is particularly funny in light of the later popularity of Merlin (2008), which centered on a young Merlin as Arthur's manservant hiding the fact that he has magic. Several content creators have made fan edits with clips of Merlin set to songs from Spamalot.
• Moral Event Horizon: For Lancelot, it's Herbert's father trying to kill his son twice, first by cutting a rope he's dangling from and then attempting to run him through with a spear. He gets righteously furious, delivers a brilliant Calling the Old Man Out, and then dances to a disco number.
• Narm Charm: The entire musical runs on it, taking what was irreverent about the film and making it reverent:
  • "A Song That Goes Like This" is an Affectionate Parody of love ballads, but is artfully constructed. The reprise is similar, with the Lady reminding Arthur to realize that she and Patsy are beside him, and always will be, while lamenting that she hasn't done much in Act Two.
  • "Always Look on the Bright Side Of Life" is a Pep-Talk Song in this version, with the comedy played up, but it truly does cheer up Arthur.
  • "His Name is Lancelot" is a rowdy disco number that celebrates Lancelot coming out of the closet and saving Herbert from his murderous father. It's both hilarious and sweet that Lancelot after dancing along decides to accept this new side of himself and decides to marry Herbert, who has fallen in love with him.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • John Cleese, despite appearing only as a vocal recording, does a very amusing performance as God.
  • One scene near the end has two: Tim the Enchanter and Brother Maynard.
• Tear Jerker: "I'm All Alone".
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Acting as Arthur's right hand man in the original film, Bedevere noticeably gets Demoted to Extra here, possibly because Patsy essentially fills that role here. He's noticeably the only principle role who doesn't get a song focused on them, originally having one based on his recruitment scene which wound up being dropped before the Broadway run. Not only that, but the Broadway doubling only has him as Mrs. Galahad and Concorde, two pretty minor parts.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • Not Dead Fred's reference to getting "shot by Michael Moore" in "He Is Not Dead Yet". At the time the musical opened on Broadway, Moore was still making documentaries but his career faltered big time before The New '10s. The 2023 revival changes the reference to mention TikTok.
  • The jokes about Nokia's success in the playbook became this when they failed to adapt to the smartphone era and wound up being sold to Microsoft.
  • The joke about being replaced by Britney Spears, who was at the height of her popularity at the time, but since then suffered a Creator Breakdown and has been mostly out of the public eye. While many pop stars have temporarily stepped into Broadway roles, Spears has never done Broadway theatre at all.
    • Given a meta quality in the 2023 revival. Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer, who plays the Lady of the Lake, was one of the stars of Beetlejuice, which closed at the Marquis Theater to make way for Once Upon a One More Time, a jukebox musical based on Spears’ music.
  • The line in the finale where Lancelot and Prince Herbert remark that "in 1000 years time, [their marriage] will still be controversial." While same-sex marriage is certainly still controversial in many places today, even where it's legal, there was probably more progress made in the 10 years that followed Spamalot's opening than in the 1000 years prior.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The Black Knight scene used brilliant effects and visual trickery in the dismembering of the titular character.
  • By costume design standards. The lady of the lake was able to transform her huge magical blue gown into a completely different white wedding dress, seamlessly, on stage, without moving, in a split second.
• The Woobie:
  • The man that Lancelot knocks out twice with a shovel, who keeps insisting he's "Not Dead Yet".
  • Patsy, especially in "I'm All Alone." He's stood by Arthur's side the whole time and invokes Dude, Where's My Respect? when Arthur ignores him for most of the song.
  • Prince Herbert. His Arranged Marriage is played for slightly more drama, though fortunately Lancelot and he tie the knot.
• Woolseyism: The UK tour changed the song "You Won't Succeed on Broadway" to "You Won't Succeed in Showbiz", since England doesn't have quite the history of Jews in the theatre that the US does.