John Cleese; is he funny?

Cleese was funny, once upon a time. But why is it that most comedians from TV shows always end up in the shittiest movies? Or become "serious" - hi, Jim; stop acting, would ya? Bill Murray's the only one that's bucked the trend. Of course, Bill Murray's classic, without a doubt.

And why Ally gives me lip about Mira when she's touting Nic Cage as GRATE boggles my mind.

But it's still a good series. It gets praised a lot of the time for its character work but all the above, not to mention Likely Lads, are much better on character comedy - Fawlty Towers though is one of the few sitcoms that works as farce. There's not been much demand for sitcom-as-farce recently (Father Ted is a recent example) after Allo Allo and Terry And June pretty much killed it in the 80s so maybe thats why its reputation seems to be sinking a bit now.

(Christ, I'm turning into Ally's bitch. I'll shut up now.)

My first encounters with Mr. Cleese were Muppet-related, actually -- hosted an episode of the show and has a brief, quietly funny role in the second movie -- and then there was his hilarious turn as Robin Hood in Time Bandits. A couple of years after that I first started watching Python, and there we are. Fish Called Wanda is genius, but I was never bothered to see Gentle Creatures or whatever it was called.

My favorite Cleese story happened in 1989, when in fact he stopped by UCLA to pick up the Jack Benny award, given out every year to 'a comic legend' or something of the sort. That they've given it out to a few hacks along the way is unfortunate, but hey, Cleese got it that year and I was attending UCLA at the time, so off I went to the award ceremony and question and answer session. Had some great tales and funny stories, the best being this extemporaneous riff on Alexander the Great. Reason: somebody had asked if the Pythons were getting back together to do a bio of said historical figure (uh, no), and that was enough! "He was taught by Aristotle! Can you imagine what that would have been like? 'Master Aristotle, what are we learning today?' 'Oh, zoology, biology, history, geography, psychology...'"

I find the idea of Ally thinking Cleese is the second best man who ever lived funnier than the majority of his actual work. But 'Clockwise' and 'Fawlty Towers' were good.

FT is farce in a stricter technical sense, tho, isn't it (Feydeau => Rix): not just cheeky slapstick idiocy, but people running in and out of dfft doors the whole time, and hiding in cupboards

David: Sooner or later, I turn everyone into my bitch. You might as well go for it now.

And his last series on the Beeb, that human face thing, I know the BBC fucked him over on it, but God! I just found it embarrassing.

http://images.dailyexpress.co.uk/img/covers/257x330front/2011-09-02.jpg

The irony being that Cleese has been here recently scrounging up some cash to pay his alimony (or some other BS).

Short Q&A, including:

What song would you like played at your funeral?
Tchaikovsky's 1812, sung by Barry Manilow.

Just saw that he was in a series Charles McKeown wrote this year. Is it any good? Reviews are quite poor.

Saw him 'perform' last night and the answer to the question in the thread title is emphatically, painfully "no"

he's nearly 80. Chaplin wasn't funny then either.

Even accounting for his age, his long routines about how annoying it is that "the blacks and mexicans" want to be called 'people of color' but you can't say 'colored people' anymore, or about how hotel maids need to learn to speak english, made for one of the most queasily uncomfortable shows I've ever sat through. Afterward my GF confessed that she initially thought he was doing an 'old clueless racist guy' character bit, and then began to have the sinking realization that no, this was his actual material. Super depressing.

hooo boy

is this the Basil Fawlty tour?

was this dinner theater in Youngstown?

I only saw a couple of episodes, but the sitcom he did with Alison Steadman a couple of years ago wasn’t the long awaited return to form.

Xp Alfred Close, it was a fancy theater in my upstate ny town. it was billed as a one-man show/monologue thing, presented as a kind of ted talk format with slides, lots of him talking about popular social science books that he'd recently read, really strange. We were expecting something super halfassed like you usually get with old showbiz lions doing shows like this & would have been fine with that, just kind of wanted to see him live before he croaks, but was not expecting all the racial stuff. (He also did another weird digression about how evolution alone cant explain consciousness that was very hard to parse but seemed like was going to get into creationist stuff?) Also lots of pandering anti-Trump jokes, but then he seemed totally unaware that his routine about how Mexicans are invading the US could have been lifted straight from a MAGA rally. Just a really bizarre night.

He’s been like it for ages

the early funny stuff was largely written by others but he did have a good bodyshape for physical comedy once upon a time

fawlty towers was a documentary

I use to piss myself watching this bit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwqJzCG9qr0

"He also did another weird digression about how evolution alone cant explain consciousness that was very hard to parse but seemed like was going to get into creationist stuff?"

lolled at reading this, so I guess that makes it a form of comedy - but i don't think i'd listening to it 1st hand would have had the same effect

Haha yes true, i did spend the whole show confused and baffled with no idea of where things were going to go next from moment to surreal moment, so in that sense it could be located within a grand python tradition

so, the trend I'm seeing in these answers would be "is funny? no. was funny? yes.".

It’s been, what, 30 years since he was even a bit funny? Closer to 40?

A Fish Called Wanda was his last successful fling at funny. Calculate from there.

Fierce Creatures had its moments iirc

a fish called wanda hasn't been funny for more than 30 years

& it’s probably about 10 years since I first noticed him popping up to do weird morrissey-style interviews about how England isn’t England anymore cause all the foreigns are doing white genocide by existing

He is *terrible* at Twitter

Re Waitrose ducklings...

I've been digging, and have discovered that the family who first made chocolate in the 15th century, chose to produce white,dark and milk chocolate in order to stir up racial disharmony. They especially abhorred chocolate-coloured people

Apology......

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) April 10, 2019

A post that has always stuck with me from this Monty Python thread:

Maybe six or seven years ago, I heard an interview with Cleese in which he more or less said he felt he'd lost his edge in terms of humor. What he said was kind of sad and the gist of it has stayed with me since then, something VERY loosely along the lines of "When you're young, you notice all these little inconsistencies in the world, things that aren't quite right, people who don't quite seem to know what they're doing, and you can derive humor from that. But when you get older, you start to realize that nothing is really right at all, that no one has any idea what they're doing, and then it stops seeming as funny."

^^^ funny man

it's interesting that he argues people become political 'extremists' because they are filled with rage and frustration and seek out enemies to direct that rage at, when Cleese himself seems like someone filled with rage and frustration, it's what 90% of his comedy is about, and it's led to him becoming a self-described moderate, feels like he's projecting his own issues.

(didn't Cleese have therapy at some point in the 80s, and himself attribute the drop off in quality in his work to the fact that he was now better adjusted and less angry?)

Cleese going from the SDP to GB news is more evidence that fascism is a political movement of the centre rather than the right (or left)

xxxp

Person who is a dick unsurprisingly good at portraying a character who is a dick.

― Being cheap is expensive (snoball), Sunday, 6 March 2022 12:28 (seven months ago)

I found him pretty funny as an addled romantic lead in A Fish Called Wanda but I might be the only defender of that one these days; he's at his best when performing silly shit like stripping while reciting Russian.

He's meant to be a terrible person!

Yeah, but the show is meant to be a comedy. It isn't funny.

answer to thread question still out of reach

Someone upthread said it best. Cleese alone = generally not funny. Cleese as part of the Pythons = funny.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_7DMk3oeOE

Me saying that the transphobia in Life Of Brian gets me angry does not equate to historical revisionism (I said nothing about thinking it's atypical for its time) nor does it have anything to do with whether I think Cleese is funny or not. Don't think my expressing an emotional reaction merits all this laywering tbh

Fwiw tho when I was in middle school I said something homophobic and my dad (who also introduced me to Monty Python) sat me down and gave me a talk about why bigotry is wrong that did indeed include trans people. I am aware that is not particularly common but still, maybe let's hold off on sweeping statements like "I don't think any cis person would've considered mocking trans people problematic or offensive prior to the Millennium."

Good thing nobody said that then

I don't think trans people were a complete unknown in the 70s. Jan Morris had a bestselling memoir about her transitioning for a start.

Even in 1970, when I was 15 and resources like wikipedia were a utopian pipedream, I knew who Christine Jorgensen was.

I always thought all the left stuff in Python was the result of them(Terry Jones especially) encountering it at university, and the various Trot splinters that were going on, esp by the 70s

Christine Jorgenson was referenced a number of times on 70s Match Games.

"does anyone still watch Fawlty Towers and think John Cleese being an asshole and treating everyone like shit is funny?"

yes

I don't think trans people were a complete unknown in the 70s. Jan Morris had a bestselling memoir about her transitioning for a start.

― Zelda Zonk, Monday, October 10, 2022 11:50 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

And Michael Palin did an excellent profile of Morris for the BBC about a decade ago, which included a sensitive discussion of her transition. He at least seems not to have curdled in his views in the way Cleese has.

Good thing nobody said that then

It's a literal quote from upthread dude.

Not has Idle. Was reading an interview with him yesterday.

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2022/oct/03/i-didnt-cry-until-i-knew-i-was-going-to-live-monty-pythons-eric-idle-on-surviving-pancreatic-cancer?

"What does he think when he hears Cleese claiming that comedians are no longer free to make jokes without fear of being cancelled? “He’s who he is now. The thing I try to remember is the good times when we were young and funny. And we are no longer those people or speaking to today’s generation. We’re old farts. We should be left to go quietly to bed and watch the telly.” He giggles.

xp

Anyway, soref otm (haven't watched the video). Whenever someone says "free speech" that's the key to this. Plus a fear of what young people are going to do.

If they can drown a statue today..

It's a literal quote from upthread dude.

― Daniel_Rf, Tuesday, October 11, 2022 3:40 AM bookmarkflaglink

Apologies, I somehow missed Grandpoint Genie's post entirely. I'm sorry about the rude response

Understood Neanderthal, can understand how it would be galling if you read that part as me responding to you.

idle used to come across and the biggest weasel of the lot but somehow in his old age I find him a lot more sincere (than cleese anyway); Palin has always struck me a lovely man.

Yes, never thought I would favor Idle over Cleese but the world has turned upside down in many respects since a decade ago.

last two posts otm

His brains have curdled though

If I create something that becomes valuable and successful why should Jeremy Corbyn steal it and run it. That's NOT socialism, that's communism. He could take over PYTHON.... https://t.co/n1vQbxpMww

— Eric Idle (@EricIdle) November 27, 2019

Yeah, nm, I hate them both.

Neil Innes to thread.

^ was gonna say, Idle was a total dick to Neil Innes

Yes, let's not kid ourselves, Idle was always a dick and still is. Palin and Jones were the nice guys and Chapman was drunk.

I see this hasn't been mentioned yet:

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/miriam-margolyes-john-cleese-younger-b1916456.html

John Cleese is set to revive his classic 1970s comedy Fawlty Towers.

In a shock move that will likely divide fans of the original, Cleese will write and star in the show alongside his daughter Camilla Cleese. Matthew George (Wind River, A Private War), plus Rob Reiner, Michele Reiner and Derrick Rossi are executive producing the series for Castle Rock Television, which is developing the project.

The new Fawlty Towers is set to explore how Cleese’s cynical, over-the-top and misanthropic Basil Fawlty navigates the modern world. With plot details largely under wraps, the series will explore the relationship between Basil and a daughter he has just discovered he had, as the two tempt fate, and team up to run a boutique hotel.

oof that’s gonna be bad

He is currently making a documentary about cancel culture for Channel 4 and plans to host a show for right-leaning UK network GB News that will champion free speech.

a daughter he has just discovered he had

This shows such a lack of understanding of the character of Basil Fawlty that it surely proves Connie Booth was the creative force behind the original series.

it surely reaffirms the long-proven fact that etc

Well, yes.

weird that rob reiner is producing it given his history with liberal causes

Americans aren't interested in the political views of British people.

Rob Reiner also has a history with Archie Bunker, so maybe that’s the spirit in which he’s producing this.

I have nothing at all to do with this production or adaptation,. Apparently Cleese has cut the song. Of course. https://t.co/OS1X9b5w2k

— Eric Idle (@EricIdle) May 19, 2023

I guess this answers the question posted in the thread title: cleese now aggressively anti-funny

surely Cleese must be cutting out Idle's Stan/Loretta scene as well.

Nah, probably extending it and having the characters address the audience with "this is what the wokerati actually believe now!" afterwards.

Exactly.

i'll say again if you had told me 30 years ago that I would like Idle more than Cleese I would have really doubted you.