Posted on 09/17/2017 2:34:00 PM PDT by nickcarraway
The comedy legend on Monty Pythons legacy, political correctness, and the funniest joke he ever told.
I want to murder this thing, says John Cleese, fiddling with a medical contraption thats attached to his leg. The 77-year-old founding member of the Monty Python comedy troupe arguably humanitys greatest comedic endeavor and the star and co-creator of perennial best-sitcom-ever contender Fawlty Towers, is in his office on a cool London summer morning, going about things with what I suspect is his usual air of amused irritation. Ive got a leg infection and now have a X cube Cleese, sitting in a brown leather chair, pulls up a leg of his jeans and taps on a pump with his index finger sucking out the scunge. Its quite annoying.
So, it seems, are a great many things for the charmingly cantankerous Cleese, who still performs regularly, both onscreen and onstage, the latter typically as a one-man show. Were living in the age of assholes now. Its breathtaking, he says, eyes wide with wonder. Theyre running everything. His leg beeps. The cube does that when its been unplugged, Cleese explains, before disconnecting the device entirely. Thats much better, he says, stretching out. Now lets talk.
I have a bit of a morbid question. Please.
Youre 77 years old. I am.
You have a scunge pump attached to your leg. I do.
Is death funny? It is. Death is certainly present in my life, and theres humor to be mined from it. Somebody was saying to me last week that you cant talk about death these days without people thinking youve done something absolutely antisocial. But death is part of the deal. Imagine if, before you came to exist on Earth, God said, You can choose to stay up here with me, watching reruns and eating ice cream, or you can be born. But if you pick being born, at the end of your life you have to die thats nonnegotiable. So which do you pick? I think most people would say, Ill give living a whirl. Its sad, but the whirl includes dying. Thats something I accept.
So has what you find funny changed as youve gotten older? Well, I could easily rattle off a rote answer for you.
Would you mind not? Okay, let me really try and think about my answer. I do think my sense of humor has expanded but thats to do both with age and with being in therapy.Cleese has been a proponent of therapy for decades, and has co-written, with Robin Synner, two books of self-help psychology: Families and How to Survive Them and Life and How to Survive It. Ill give you an example of what I mean: In the 70s, I went to see a play by a man named Alan Ayckbourn.Known for his comedies playing on middle-class anxieties and splintered marriages, the 78-year-old Tony Lifetime Achievement winner has written over 70 plays, though only 10 have made it from the West End to Broadway. Hes not very well known in America and I think thats because his humor is all about rather ineffectual men, and in America when men go wrong they become psychos, whereas in England they become wimps. So Americans dont respond to his work. Anyway, in addition to comedy, Ayckbourn used serious emotions in his work, and the first time I ever saw that, I was uncomfortable because I would be feeling sad for one of his characters and then suddenly something funny would happen and I found the emotional back-and-forth confusing. I dont have that problem anymore. I used to think of comedy as its own separate bracket, and the less attractive parts of life were to be kept away from it because they stopped the comedy from being bright. Over time, therapy expanded my comfort level with emotional areas that otherwise wouldve made me uncomfortable things like death, for instance. So Im less hesitant about more material, if that makes sense. But thats about me specifically. I dont have an answer for what has changed generally about what the culture finds funny.
Why is that? Are you just disinterested? I dont know much about contemporary comedy. I dont watch any. Im 77. I will almost certainly be dead within 10 years maybe Ill get 15. So to sit down to watch a sitcom seems to be a rather futile way of passing the time. Its as simple as that. If I have a free evening, Ill read, because there are so many things I dont begin to understand and that Id like to try and get a handle on before Im dead. Id rather do that than watch comedy.
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John Cleese Brought the Monty Python Character Anne Elk Back for a New Sketch John Cleese Revisits His Pre-Monty Python Time in New York Given your own disinterest in watching comedy, is it at all weird to you that people still want to talk about Monty Python? The more interesting thing to me is seeing how different types of people respond to Monty Python. People always say the English have a different sense of humor than Americans, but I think America itself has two senses of humor. There are the folk in the Midwest and in the South who are much more literal-minded in what they laugh about, and then once you go to the coasts you get an audience thats totally at home with irony and absurdity.
What accounts for that difference? To be perfectly honest, the people on the coasts and in the big cities are a lot smarter. Whenever youre out in the sticks with a slower audience, its not that they enjoy the comedy less, because theyre still laughing, its that they dont enjoy it as quickly. Its always a bit disconcerting when people are laughing three seconds into the next joke because they just got the last one.
Whens the last time someone who you thought was stupid made you laugh? That would be the film director I worked with two days ago.
What happened? Just things he wanted to cover with the camera. It was a complete waste of time.
Im glad you were able to find the humor there. Theres wonderful humor everywhere. Ill give you an example: I was in Miami, only about four or five months ago, and I had a massage in the hotel spa. Afterward they called me: Mr. Cleese, you left your shoes in the spa. Can we send them up to your room? I said, Oh, how nice of you. So, five minutes later, knock knock, someone opens the door. Mr. Cleese, heres your shoes. Thank you. Could I see some form of identification? Now, you know Im Mr. Cleese because you just called me Mr. Cleese, and you know the room that Mr. Cleese was in because you came to my room number. So what are we doing asking for identification? And the guy said, Well, Im sorry, I still need to see some form of identification. So I went over and I got a copy of my autobiographyIn The New York Times Book Review, Michael Ian Black wrote that Cleeses 2014 memoir So, Anyway ambles along in loose fashion, taking its time, stopping to admire the view here, and there The effect is a bit like having a long lunch with an amiable slightly loony uncle. and I said, Thats me there on the cover. And down there it says John Cleese. You know what he said to me? He said, Im sorry, thats not good enough. You couldnt write something as wonderful as that.
Does comedy have any surprises for you anymore? Not many. Jesus is said to have never laughed in the Bible, and I think its because laughter contains an element of surprise something about the human condition that you havent spotted yet and Jesus was rarely surprised. I still laugh, but many of the things that would have made me laugh 30 years ago paradoxes about human nature wouldnt make me laugh anymore because I just believe them to be true. Theyre not revelations.
Just to go back to subject of American audiences: Youre lecturing at CornellCleese joined the Ivy in 1999 as a professor-at-large bringing guest speakers like screenwriter William Goldman to campus for public talks. In 2006, he was appointed the title of visiting professor. in September. Have you been following any of the controversies over free speech on college campuses? Youve talked often in public about your frustration with the idea that political correctness has run amok. I havent spoken at Cornell for eight years, so I cant say I have firsthand experience of how receptive students are to having their thinking challenged. Id planned to go back to the school sooner but I was hit with a divorce and didnt have time to return because I was busy doing money-grubbing work to help pay for the settlement. So Im quite curious to see how things are now. In fact, other comedians have tried to warn me off of speaking at colleges they tell me its not worth the trouble. Jon Stewart said something like that to me about two years ago. But the thing about political correctness is that it starts as a good idea and then gets taken ad absurdum. And one of the reasons it gets taken ad absurdum is that a lot of the politically correct people have no sense of humor.
Because theyre scolds? Because they have no sense of proportion, and a sense of humor is actually a sense of proportion. Its the sense of knowing whats important. In my stage show I tell jokes that make the audience roar with laughter, jokes about the Australians or the French or the Canadians or the Germans or the Italians. I make all these jokes and everybody laughs and we dont hate those groups of people, do we? Take this joke: A guy walks into a bar and says to the barman, You hear the latest Irish joke? The barman says, I should warn you, Im Irish. So the guy says, All right then, Ill tell it slowly. Thats funny! But if you tell that joke and replace Irish with barman who isnt very intelligent it isnt funny at all. Why should we sacrifice laughter to the cause of politically correctness if that laughter isnt rooted in nastiness? This actually reminds me of an idea I had: Every year at the U.N. they should vote one particular nation to be the butt of the joke.
This year, all cultural jokes will henceforth be made at the expense of the Danes. Thats right. They would just have to accept that theyre the butt of the joke for a year. People find it hard to believe this, but unless were talking about puns and wordplay, all humor is essentially critical. So to eliminate jokes that are at the expense of other people is to eliminate most jokes. If you laugh at someone, its because his behavior is inappropriate. Thats why you cant really be funny about Jesus Christ or St. Francis of Assisi, because everything they do is pretty appropriate.
Didnt Monty Python make a whole movie satirizing Jesus? Not Jesus, his followers.Monty Pythons Life of Brian follows Graham Chapman as a man born a stable down from Jesus, whose followers mistake Brians everyday life for miracle works. He eventually dies in a mass crucifixion, as the condemned sing the Python hit Always Look on the Bright Side of Life. Days before production began, EMI Films dropped funding due to the movies blasphemous tone, but George Harrison founded a production company to will the Holy Grail follow-up into theaters in 1979. Thats the key difference.
I get what youre saying here but if a certain group of people says particular jokes are offensive to them, do you really want to be in favor of reinforcing power dynamics that those people find hurtful? I cant help but think that when certain people today are saying everyone else is too sensitive and maybe this is a straw-man example but its akin to certain people 80 years ago saying, Blackface comedy is just affectionate teasing. Whats the big deal? There are reasons certain forms of entertainment get challenged. Its not that simple. At what point are we allowed to make a joke? After the Charge of the Light Brigade,During the Crimean War, in 1854, a miscommunication in the chain of command caused a brigade of British cavalry to rush into Russian artillery fire and suffer massive casualties. Six weeks later, British poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson published The Charge of the Light Brigade commending the cavalry for their valor by following suicidal orders. say, how many years had to pass for it to be acceptable to make jokes about the dead British?
Seven years. Of course, seven years. How foolish of me. In A Fish Called WandaIn this 1988 hit comedy co-written by Cleese, he plays a lawyer who defends a diamond thief betrayed by his crew after a heist. He won a BAFTA for Best Actor, and earned an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. my character says to Kevin Klines character that the North Vietnamese won the Vietnam War. Kevins character then says that the Americans didnt lose that war it was a tie. So clearly, enough time had passed to allow for us to make jokes about the Vietnam War. And similarly, if I can make jokes about Americans or English or Germans but I cant make jokes about black people, then the question is this: When will we be able to treat black people in the same way that we treat Germans?
When theyre treated equally outside of comedy. I dont think anyone would seriously argue that Germans are dealing with systematic oppression. Well thats right, but when will be able to say things are equal? Wheres the line? Heres another example: Americans love jokes about English dentistry. Now thats not very nice, is it? Have you ever heard an Englishman saying, Stop persecuting me? So wheres the line about whats allowable? Its very thin, wherever it is.
I think the line is actually pretty thick: The people who historically have had more power in a society dont get to decide whats offensive to those who historically have had less power. Eighty percent of people out there on the sidewalk will tell you they are oppressed by the system. All Im saying is that all these definitions and rules are not cut-and-dried. Let me tell you something my wife told me which I thought was very funny: Its the difference between a black fairy tale and a white fairy tale. You know this one?
No, I dont. The white fairy tale starts, Once upon a time; and the black fairy tale starts, You X aint gonna believe this X. Is that in any way unpleasant about black people? What theyve said in the latter joke is much more fun and humorous than white peoples once upon a time. The problem is that people are knee-jerk in thinking something is offensive. Sometimes in my show I say, There were these two Mexicans and immediately the whole audience goes, Oooh. People think something is going to be offensive before its even been said. The story I then tell involves an American patrol boat in the Gulf of Mexico. The guy on the boat is cruising along, and suddenly sees two Mexicans going for the border. The guy says, Hey, what are you doing? And the Mexicans say, Were invading America. And the guy on the boat says, What, just the two of you? And the Mexicans say back, Oh no, were the last ones. The others are already there.
Oy, John. But is that a nasty joke? Think about the content of it. The Mexicans are actually the heroes! Theyve won! There are millions of Mexicans in America. Are we trying to pretend that isnt the case? So is that a nasty story to tell? I dont think it is. And isnt it condescending to say that certain people cant take a joke? But when there is a nasty quality to the joke, then thats not good humor. Thats cruel, and thats something we need to avoid.
Lets shift gears a little. Youve lived in America part-time for decades. Did Donald Trumps election change your thinking about Americans? Mm-hmm. What I found surprising was that the least successful people supported Trump. You understand the wealthy wanting tax cuts, but why on Earth did the less successful people think Trump was going to do anything he said he was going to do to help them? Ill give an analogy: I remember going to see professional wrestling when I was 18 wonderful entertainment, obviously rigged. The thing that astounded me as I looked around Colston Hall in Bristol is that quite a lot of the audience thought what they were seeing was for real. Thats whats incredible to me about such a large swath of the American people: They cant see that Trump is fake. And if they cant see that when its right in front of them, how can you convince them of anything critical about the man? Its like holding up a red sign to a person and the person says its blue. You cant logically argue them into seeing red. The inability of people unable to intuit what was going on with Trump I was impressed by it, not repelled. It was extraordinary to me that people couldnt see how clueless he is.
Tell me more about your impression of Trump. What also appalls me is the language of him and his cronies people talking about sucking on their own X and such. I dont know if its universal or distinctly American, but the vulgarity of the language of powerful men: It all comes down to penises and pissing and X. They talk like out-of-control 6-year-olds. I was thinking yesterday about a Chinese blessing. Can you guess which one?
May you live in interesting times? Close. Thats the curse. The blessing is to live in uninteresting times. But Im glad to be alive now. I wouldnt swap these times for any other, because even though the whole world is a complete madhouse, its never been more interesting to me, even if stupidity has become rampant.
I was just looking back at some old Monty Python photos from the early 70s, and it struck me that while the other guys sort of looked like rock stars with long hair and groovy clothes, you had short hair and dressed conservatively. Were you as engaged with the politics and social dynamics of that period as you seem to be with whats going on today? Oh, I was interested in a lot of the 60s and 70s but not the counterculture. Where I grew up, in Weston-super-Mare,Sitting on the Bristol Channel in southwest England, Weston-super-Mare is home to 76,000 residents, the Helicopter Museum, and a popular beach for middle-class day-trippers. our life was very proper and middle class. So the counterculture was very much counter to my culture. I never read Jack Kerouac or anyone like that. I just wasnt terribly interested. I did find, though, that on the West Coast of America there were a lot of people who, like myself, do not like the materialist reductionist view of the world.Reductive materialism suggests that only the material world exists and that all observations in the universe can be explained by physical reactions. For example, a reductive materialist would consider love to be the result of chemical firing in the brain. I was more interested in that than I was in Haight-Ashbury, though Haight-Ashbury is somewhere I wouldve liked to visit.
Thats interesting, because there was always such a strong link between rock culture and Monty Python: John LennonIn a radio interview, a revved-up Lennon said, Part of me would sooner have been a comedian, I just dont have the guts to stand up and do it. But Id love to be in Monty Python rather than the Beatles. Fawlty Towers is the greatest show Ive seen in years. said he wouldve loved to have been in Monty Python and I know that members of Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin helped finance Monty Python and the Holy GrailMonty Pythons best-known film follows King Arthur and his knights through medieval perils and a maze of absurd events a monster stops pursuit when his animator suffers a heart attack, and the knights are arrested by modern police for killing a historian documenting their quest. Its the source of countless Python bits coconut halves imitating horses galloping, the knights who say Ni, the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow and considered one of the best comedies ever written. . The admiration there wasnt reciprocal? I didnt know at the time that John Lennon was a fan. But Im very strange about music, and for some reason I dont really like rock, which is almost heresy. I remember coming back home once when Python were on tour I think wed just been in Newcastle and the next morning Eric Idle said, I went out to a dinner and David Bowie was there! He was really excited. But if someone had said to me, Want to come and meet David Bowie? I wouldve just thought, why? I didnt quite understand the assumption that I had an affinity for the counterculture.
Maybe its because the Ministry of Silly Walks and Dead Parrot sketches seemed like they could only have been the product of someone who was stoned. Yeah, there were a lot of people that thought we were on pot when we were writing.
Were you? No, and the suggestion vaguely irritated me. A prim part of me wanted someone to acknowledge that the humor we were doing in Python was quite clever, and instead it was always oh, you obviously must just smoke pot and go crazy. Id think, Well, no, its a bit more skillful, actually. It requires more thought than that. [Graham] ChapmanChapman played the lead in Holy Grail and Life of Brian, struggled with a destructive alcohol problem, and was one of the few openly gay actors at the time, coming out in 1972. At his funeral in 1989, Cleese gave a moving, hysterical eulogy for his friend. I guess that were all thinking how sad it is that a man of such talent, of such capability for kindness, for such unusual intelligence, a man who could overcome his alcoholism with such truly admirable single-mindedness, should now so suddenly be spirited away at the age of only 48 before hed achieved many of the things in which he was capable, and before hed had enough fun. Well, I feel that I should say, Nonsense! Good riddance to him, the freeloading bastard. I hope he fries. And the reason I feel I should say this is he would never forgive me if I didnt. If I threw away this glorious opportunity to shock you all on his behalf. Anything for him but mindless good taste. and I would spend an entire day deliberating over the right word for a sketch.
Does a different kind of person prefer Fawlty TowersThe formally elegant, 12-episode BBC Two sitcom (the first six-episode season aired in 1975; the second in 1979) takes place in a hotel on the English Riviera, where Cleese plays the beleaguered Basil Fawlty, an innkeeper constantly on the verge of a meltdown. to Monty Python? There are so few comedic similarities between the two. Theres tremendous overlap of fans, but, you see, there are some people who just dont get Python and I think thats a function of education. Theres some subtle stuff that makes Python as funny as it is, and you have to be able to catch it. The thing about Fawlty Towers is that almost anyone can understand the comedy of it. Its just about people getting frightened or scared or trying not to get blamed. A child of 8 can follow everything in it.
The emotion in Fawlty Towers is so much more acute, though. Basil Fawltys behavior makes me cringe in a way that nothing in Monty Python does. People get embarrassed when they watch Fawlty Towers. I was in a therapy group once with a judge; when he joined the group he had no idea who I was. Most of the other people in England at that time would have some idea but he didnt. When I told him what I did for a living, he said hed watch Fawlty Towers. When I saw him next he said hed started to watch it and had become so embarrassed by everybodys behavior that he had to leave the room. The vicarious embarrassment was too much for him. I thought that was just perfectly funny.
Thats the second time youve mentioned therapy. Does the fact that youve been married four times suggest the limits of the practice for you? I dont know how to answer that. I think as you go along with therapy, you gain insight into yourself, hopefully, and also into other people, and you begin to see that there are better ways of handling both yourself and of handling other people.
Has being in therapy for so many years affected your work? Certainly. I had a very friendly argument about a year or two ago with [Terry] Gilliam,The only American-born member of Monty Python, Gilliam drew the troupes intersketch, Dalí-esque cartoons, and generally played the parts no one else wanted to, like the knight in armor with the whole chicken that ended sketches. After co-directing Holy Grail with Terry Jones, Gilliam went on to direct postmodern mousetraps like Brazil, 12 Monkeys, and the adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. because he felt that becoming more self-aware made you less creative. I said no, it makes you more creative but less productive.
Why less productive? Because you become less driven. The neuroses and anxieties that make you driven become reduced.
I have another perhaps slightly morbid question, if you dont mind. Why stop now?
Excellent. Just last night, I reread the infamous eulogy you gave at Graham Chapmans funeral. Have you ever wondered what the other Pythons might say at your funeral? Yes, I have, and I dont think it would be particularly complimentary. I mean it would be affectionate, but were like brothers who squabble and fight and a vast majority of it is pretty good-natured. Gilliam and I pretend to hate each other more than we do.
So many books you read about Monty Python including ones written by members of the group suggest that the other guys found you controlling. Is that characterization fair? Those things usually come from Gilliam and am I right in thinking hes a film director? Am I right in thinking that film directors are among the greatest control freaks on Earth? So there might be a bit of denial and projection going on. Gilliam is one of the worst judges of psychological matters Ive ever come across. Hes very intelligent in a lot of areas, but psychologically he just doesnt get it. If he experiences me as controlling, it probably just meant that I had different ideas from his. And you can ask Terry JonesJones had a gift for physical humor, and was the go-to Monty Python member for drag, like the beloved Spam-lady. After directing Holy Grail and The Meaning of Life, Jones hosted BBC history documentaries and wrote prolifically against the Iraq War. In September, 2016, Jones announced that he had been diagnosed with dementia and was no longer able to give interviews. about controlling, because while we were making Holy Grail, he and Gilliam were supposed to be directing it together, but they would sneak into the editing room at night when the other one wasnt around and change things. Thats controlling.
So controlling was just the other Pythons word for when you expressed opinions? The thing about my being controlling is there were times that we would do stuff and Id say, I dont think thats funny. Is that controlling? Because if expressing an artistic disagreement to people who are about to do something that you dont think is good enough is being controlling, then perhaps I am. And we did used to squabble about scripts, but I cannot remember a nasty fight about who should play what part. In all the Python years I cant remember that kind of argument.
Were you inflexible? Perhaps to a degree. I was much more rigid in those days about what constituted good comedy. But a lot of younger people are a bit rigid about what they think is good.
I was struck by a paragraph near the end of your memoir where you describe looking out from backstage at the massive crowd at one of the massive Monty Python reunion showsIn July 2014, the surviving members of the troupe put on the greatest-hits show Monty Python Live (Mostly) at The O2 Arena in London, in part to pay legal fees and royalties owed to Holy Grail producer Mark Forstater. The performances were a massive success with fans. in 2014, and you recalled feeling no excitement in that moment. Does that mean you were ambivalent about the reunion? Thats been misunderstood, including by Michael Palin.Palin often played the straight man to Cleeses meltdown characters, and was featured in some of Monty Pythons most famous sketches, including Dead Parrot and the Spanish Inquisition. After Python, he worked on several of Terry Gilliams films including Brazil, won a BAFTA for his role in A Fish Called Wanda, and hosted a series of BBC travel docs. Eric and I were briefly keen to do a tour after those reunion shows and Palin didnt want to do it. That was okay, you cant force people to do things they dont want to do, but when we asked him why he was opting out he said he had other plans. Fine, but then I think he felt guilty about saying no and started suggesting that the reason we didnt go on tour was that I didnt enjoy the reunion shows. That wasnt what Id said. Id said I wasnt excited by it. I enjoyed it a lot. I make a distinction between being excited and being happy. Theres a moment of excitement in creative things, which is where the addiction to doing them comes from. When Chapman and I suddenly saw the comic possibilities of an idea, the excitement was like a shot of something very special. Happiness is something else. Im happy when Im eating a wonderful meal, but Im not excited by it.
Would you be happy, then, performing with some version of Monty Python again? Im sure, but maybe this helps: If I didnt get a buzz out of 20,000 people watching me at the reunion shows, then that says something about my attitude to performing. Does that make sense? Today I can say that Monty Python ended in a very satisfactory way, and the ending taught me something about performing, which is that it doesnt give me a high like the writing can.
Have you seen Terry Jones since he was diagnosed with dementia? I havent seen him for quite a long time. I saw him at a funeral probably 18 months ago. And he hes not getting any better. He has a full-time caregiver, he goes for walks, enjoys his food, he can watch things on the box and read, but he cant adjust to a conversation. He can be going down one conversational track and if you say something thats not on that one track he derails. Its very sad. Hes a sweet guy, and very talented.
You also wrote in your memoir just in passing that you believe youre considered passé in England. Why is that the case? Deliberate neglect by the press. Once youve made a name for yourself, which I did a long time ago, the British press will always try to cut you down. And also, which is very strange, the BBC hasnt put Python out for years. In America, the younger generations keep rediscovering us and here its gone quiet. Its ludicrous: Weve done something that is basically recognized all over the world as being special and, to give one example, during the run of the reunion shows, a British paper ran a piece asking, Is Monty Python really funny? Not for everyone, no; but for an awful lot of people, yes. That ingrained negativity toward us is quite different from the rest of the world, who still see it as important and not just historical.
Can you see Monty Pythons influence anywhere? The work you did together has obviously lasted, but even though youll read things like how Lorne Michaels originally envisioned Saturday Night Live as a cross between Monty Python and 60 Minutes, it doesnt feel like you can point to very much post-Python comedy that really displays the groups sensibility. I dont see our influence. When I look at English comedy, which I dont do very often, I never really saw any Python in it. I dont know why there arent at least more attempts to copy us. Not that it bothers me it puzzles me, because it violates the rule that if you do something successful then people will try to replicate it. When I was in the midst of Python, and even for a while after, I used to watch other comedy very carefully to see who was coming up on the rails. I was interested in seeing if there was good competition coming along, and there never was.
Were you a fan of Saturday Night Live? I liked it. They asked me to host it, but I used to be much too purist. I never wanted to do a show where you had to rehearse an hour and a half of stuff in a single week. I dont believe you can do all the material well given that deadline. So I declined offers from them two or three times.
You and Palin did eventually do the Dead Parrot sketchIn 1997, promoting the Wanda follow-up Fierce Creatures, John Cleese and Michael Palin reprised their classic Dead Parrot skit to a dead audience on SNL. Palin later wryly explained the silence by saying that the audience was mouthing the words to the sketch. on Saturday Night Live, though. Howd that come about? Only because we wanted to publicize something, Im sure. We did the Dead Parrot sketch in some strange corner of the studio where the audience couldnt really see us properly. Wed asked the show to let us do new material and they said no. I remember Michael and I were sitting at a steakhouse in New York with our wives before the show trying and failing to recall lines from the sketch. I said to him, Do you realize we could go out onto the pavement and stop people and they could tell us the lines? But we just dont know it anymore. Of course, the sketch went down like a lead balloon.
On the idea of success breeding copycats, Im curious about whether or not after A Fish Called Wanda you had Hollywood opportunities that you never followed up on? Looking back at your filmography, theres no clear sense that you tried to capitalize on how well that film did for you. One of my sadnesses is that I had a real Hollywood moment and didnt take advantage. Im just remembering something from that time: I was in the swimming pool at the Four Seasons and they brought to me one of those old mobile phones, one of the huge ones. I took the call and it was Frank Oz,Oz directed Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Death at a Funeral, though he may be more famous for his work as a puppeteer. He brought to life characters like Miss Piggy and Fozzie Bear on The Muppet Show, Cookie Monster and Bert on Sesame Street, and was the puppeteer and voice of Yoda. in London, offering me Michael Caines part in Dirty Rotten ScoundrelsMichael Caine and Steve Martin play English and American con men in the French Riveria who agree to a gentlemans bet: The first person to swindle $50,000 from a mark can stay, the other must skip town. Caine was nominated for a Golden Globe for his role, and the comedy was a hit, earning $42 million at the box office. . My second marriage was a mess, and I thought, Can I really go off and do a movie without resolving whether I was going to stay married or not? So I turned the part down. I think if Id done it, I wouldve gotten lots more Hollywood offers. Around Wanda I was hot for a year or so, but having a chaotic private life takes its toll. I also just didnt have a sufficient commitment to film. I feel dead sitting in a trailer waiting for things to happen. I remember one of my friends, Michael Winner,Winner directed the Charles Bronson vigilante-action trilogy Death Wish, and was a restaurant critic for the Sunday Times. saying to me back then, typical Englishman: you have a big hit and then you go off and sit on the top of a mountain instead of getting on with another movie. That was true. Thats what I did.
Certainly as far as American audiences are concerned, youre best known for Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, and A Fish Called Wanda. Is there a correlation between the work youre known for and the work youre proudest of? Work and notoriety is a funny thing. It has always seemed to me that there are two types of work. One is the work you do because you need money, and theres another kind of work a more enjoyable kind where money is absolutely not the key thing. When Ive worked for money its been fine, but I dont often feel anything like as involved as when I do things that were not for money. But, you see, after that very expensive divorceCleese has a stormy relationship with relationships. In 1968, he married Fawlty Towers actress and co-writer Connie Booth and divorced a decade later. In 1981, he married Rollerball actress Barbara Trentham, and divorced in 1990. In 1992, Cleese married psychotherapist Alyce Faye McBride, whose divorce in 2008 cost him a £12 million settlement he joked that his subsequent one-man show was his Alimony Tour. Cleese married his current wife, jewelry designer Jennifer Wade, in 2012. I mentioned earlier, I was basically forced to go and earn money. I had to earn $20 million, and you dont get that sitting around drinking coffee and reading a good book. So I went off and I did all these one-man shows and I enjoyed it, but if I hadnt needed the money I wouldnt have done it. Instead Id have gone off and written something that was more original. But I needed the money.
What are you working on now? I have a show Im working on at the moment called Why There Is No Hope.
Sounds funny. It is funny. Some people immediately see the title as funny and other people go what?! There is no hope that well ever live in a rational, kind, intelligent society. To start, most of us are run by our unconscious and, unfortunately, most of us have no interest in getting in touch with our unconscious. So if the majority of people are run by something they dont know anything about, how can we have a rational society?
This reminds me of a popular YouTube video of yours where you talk about the problem of stupid people being too stupid to know that theyre stupid. Yes. Its the Dunning-Kruger effectA psych theory for our time, the Dunning-Kruger Effect is a cognitive bias where people who are inept at a certain task are unable to realize their own ineptitude. . Put aside intellectually smart, the trouble is that most people arent even emotionally smart. They cant deal with reality. If theyre not doing well, theyll blame someone else. Thats why I have no hope of our ever having a proper, well-organized, fair, intelligent, kind society. We have to let go of that idea. It is possible that in some small area you can improve things temporarily. Swedish tennisFrom 1974 to 1992, Swedish men won 24 out of 76 Grand Slam events, a bonkers run for a country with a population a little greater than New Jersey. Sports historians are fascinated by the rise and fall of the brief tennis powerhouse. is an example of that.
You mean the years from the beginning of Borgs career to the end of Edbergs? Yes, Sweden had that extraordinary crop of tennis players for 20 years and its been nothing for them since. So now and again, like with Sweden and tennis, you can get an area where the whole thing works very well. But theres no way to sustain it because people have no control over their egos and dont understand or dont care how their egos are distorting their thinking. Things always fall back into chaos. Which is why there is no hope.
Theres absolutely nothing that gives you any hope about the future of human society? Nothing.
Nothing? Nothing.
So why get up in the morning? Just because you cant create a sensible world doesnt mean you cant enjoy the world youre in. I think Bertrand RussellThe 20th-century philosopher, logician, and Nobel winner had an outsized effect on linguistics, artificial intelligence, and computer science. once said that the secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible. Once you realize that things are pretty hopeless, then you just have a laugh and you dont waste time on things that you cant change and I dont think you can change society. Ive spent a lot of time in group therapy watching highly intelligent, well-intentioned people try to change and they couldnt. If even they cant change
As someone whos spent a lifetime working in and thanking about comedy, is there one joke you can point to as being the funniest thing that you ever said? Interesting. It would probably have been something unscripted. Eric IdleIdle was Monty Pythons musical genius, who wrote Always Look on the Bright Side of Life and the 2004 musical Spamalot, which won three Tonys, including Best Musical, and grossed over $175 million. and I were performing in Florida once, taking questions from the audience, and a woman stood up and asked me, apparently seriously, Did the Queen kill Princess DianaConspiracy theories abound 20 years after her death: The British Secret Intelligence Service blinded Dianas driver with a strobe light causing the crash; the Royal Family arranged the crash so she wouldnt marry her megarich Egyptian boyfriend; the EMTS intentionally botched her treatment before she arrived at the hospital. ?
Whatd you say? Certainly not with her hands.
This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations.
The members of Monty Python get a lifetime pass from me for anything they say. Rarely does a day go by that I don’t think of some skit or scene from their movies or shows. Life is a little better (some days a LOT better) because of them.
Cleese’s reading of C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters is highly recommended.
“Life is a little better (some days a LOT better) because of them.”
“No it isn’t.”
John Cleese is on my list of the ten funniest people of all time.
Ping for later.
Sounds like John is pining for the fjords...
Ni!
By far!
He made it to 78? with his sense of humour?
There may be hope for the rest of us yet. :-)
"Yes it is."
That’s just contradiction, not an argument.
That was a good interview. Thanks for sharing!
She turned me into a newt!
Run away!
I grew up on MP. Back when it was on PBS. It was great for a teen boy going through puberty. My parents didn’t know. Wink wink say no more!
Heard Terry Jones isn’t doing well these days.
Yes, well, of course, this is just the sort blinkered philistine pig ignorance I’ve come to expect from you non-creative garbage. You sit there on your loathsome, spotty behinds squeezing blackheads, not caring a tinker’s cuss about the struggling artist. You excrement! You lousy hypocritical whining toadies with your lousy colour TV sets and your Tony Jacklin golf clubs and your bleeding Masonic handshakes! You wouldn’t let me join, would you, you blackballing bastards. Well I wouldn’t become a Freemason now if you went down on your lousy, stinking, purulent knees and begged me.
Back in the mid-70’s CBS had a regular late movie that they ran opposite Johnny Carson. Sometimes I would watch it (I was a teenager and they had a lot of good horror movies). One night the movie was Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I’d never heard of MP and in fact ALMOST switched it off. The opening credits you see were very messed up, surely a bad sign...
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