Brains are Very Silly

Every semester, I show my Creative Writing classes the Monty Python and the Holy Grail scene where the knights discover Joseph of Aramathea's writing on the wall in the Cave of Caerbannog-- and I do this to show the illogic of having a first person narrator who dies at the end of a narrative, because Aramathea carves his last words into the wall: "he who is valiant and pure of spirit may find the Holy Grail in the castle of aaarghgh" (perhaps he was dictating?) but I always show the entire sequence leading to this scene, with the killer rabbit and the Holy Hand Grenade and even though I have seen it many, many times (I usually have multiple Creative Writing classes each semester) the rabbit and Brother Maynard's speech before the lobbing of the holy grenade make me laugh every time I watch, which seems strange to me-- I should get inured to the images-- but I'm wondering if something else is at play when we rewatch things, if our brain anticipates the joy from laughing and knows that this thing is associated with laughter, and so we laugh despite knowing exactly what is going to happen, or even perhaps because we know exactly what is going to occur . . . weird but also wonderful.