stylistic:style_transfer, information:extraction, linguistic:voice_change, information:classification, structural:expansion
Cultural influence and legacy

By the time of Monty Python's 25th anniversary, in 1994, the point was already being made that "the five surviving members had with the passing years begun to occupy an institutional position in the edifice of British social culture that they had once had so much fun trying to demolish". A similar point is made in a 2006 book on the relationship between Python and philosophy: "It is remarkable, after all, not only that the utterly bizarre Monty Python's Flying Circus was sponsored by the BBC in the first place, but that Monty Python itself grew into an institution of enormous cultural influence."

Ron Devillier, the PBS programming director who put Monty Python's Flying Circus on US television, states, "they brought through a kind of phony baloney surface ethic that we all lived under and shot right through it and split it in half. If you really let it happen, you could laugh at yourself. All the things that they were doing were really funny like playing on our sensibilities and making fun of them in a very funny way, pointing out how pompous we can be and making fun of themselves at the same time." Danny Gallagher of the Dallas Observer writes, "Monty Python has also been good to American comedy. If America's television viewing public had never seen "The Lumberjack Song" or "The Dead Parrot" sketch, we might still be holding up The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour as a supreme example of cutting-edge TV comedy."

A self-contained comedy unit responsible for both writing and performing their work, Monty Python's influence on comedy has been compared to the Beatles ' influence on music. Author Neil Gaiman writes, "A strange combination of individuals gave us Python. And you needed those people, just in the same way that with the Beatles you had four talented people, but together you had the Beatles. And I think that's so incredibly true when it comes to Python."