Erudite and stupid at the same time

David Eggers, in an interview regarding Monty Python (specifically, the musical "Spamalot," based on Monty Python and the Holy Grail):

. . . . The Pythons weren’t afraid of looking smart, which isn’t allowed so much in the U.S. We like our elected leaders dumb, and we like most of our comedy dumb. Python did plenty of dumb comedy, but it had a context. They’d be talking about Genghis Khan and Marat one minute, and the next there’d be a sixteen-ton weight falling on someone’s head. Given the erudition, it actually made the stupid stuff funnier.