How to change fonts in matplotlib (python)?

Say you want Comic Sans for the title and Helvetica for the x label.

csfont = {'fontname':'Comic Sans MS'}
hfont = {'fontname':'Helvetica'}

plt.title('title',**csfont)
plt.xlabel('xlabel', **hfont)
plt.show()

I prefer to employ:

from matplotlib import rc
#rc('font',**{'family':'sans-serif','sans-serif':['Helvetica']})
rc('font',**{'family':'serif','serif':['Times']})
rc('text', usetex=True)

The last line ensures that tick labels are also in the correct font.

You can also use rcParams to change the font family globally.

 import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
 plt.rcParams["font.family"] = "cursive"
 # This will change to your computer's default cursive font

The list of matplotlib's font family arguments is here.