John Cleese; is he funny?

everything is a noun

Worst thing about Cleese's current steez is he still pretends he's exploring the issues with an open mind, the cowardly sniveling cunt

Are wokes bothered by the lack of diversity in Putin's army ?

Just another open-minded guy askin' questions

I checked Tom’s numbers and they're in fact correct

always despised the hideous cunt. ha ha ha I'm going to hit a car with a branch and shout very loudly - instant brit comedy classic. Him and Baddiel should be dropped from a helicopter into a volcano before they make any more tv programs.

fawlty towers is good and that falls within the 50-year range but i suspect the good things about it are mostly due to connie booth

Fawlty Towers is good and I think a lot of it is due to John Cleese but nonetheless he is still a dick.

Controp: the latest series of The Righteous Gemstones is far funnier than anything Cleese ever did, including with Python.

but this puts me in the invidious position of admitting that comedy is good... grr!

cleese is for sure some of why fawlty towers is funny -- bcz connie booth knew how to deploy his silly walks and moves and also his obnoxious and stunted persona (aka the real him)

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

I could never stand that show. So shouty.

I think someone else could have played Fawlty - Leonard Rossiter for instance. The physical comedy would have been slightly different and the class based humour would have played differently but it would have been just as funny.

this crop of aging famous dudes who stroke out over woke-ism are so limp and lazy with their “zings” it seems like they mostly end up undermining their point. but then I remember who the intended audience is and it’s like oh right you really can’t fumble this

yeah, its not worth getting too het up about an eighty something yr old comedian lads if anyone that matters is listening its to stoke their own rage reactors

Idle posted several tweets about how electing Corbyn would lead to communism and how creators like him would him would have all their property and wealth stolen. He also called him a cunt. All around the 2019 election. Idle is dead to me.

None of us has any idea how the Fawlty Towers scripts were written and which of Cleese and Booth, if any, was the dominant one in the writing partnership.

i know exactly how they were written (the good funny stuff: all connie booth)

electing Corbyn would lead to communism and how creators like him would him would have all their property and wealth stolen

Unless you were in the room with them while they were writing it, which I doubt, I don't think you do. xp

no i do

there's actually going to be a whole episode of Cleese's new podcast about wokes where he confesses to this

it's clearly contrarian to write Cleese's career off. I think everything he did through a Fish Called Wanda is pretty excellent, and that includes some of the odd films he appeared in like Clockwise and Privates on Parade. His drop off post-Wanda was precipitous though. Anyway I'll just pretend he died after making that film.

Connie Booth supposedly had more to do with the plotting and making sure the scripts made sense. I imagine Cleese did the shouty bits

Wonder which of them was responsible for the badly-dated caricature that is Manuel?

didn't he start getting therapy at some point? I think I've seen people theorize that he stopped being funny because the therapy made him better adjusted and therefore less shouty and stunted etc.

xps to anagram afraid this is true, Connie Booth’s ghost appeared to me in a dream and confirmed it

he went through tons of therapy in the late 80's I believe, he wrote two books with his therapist. I read one of them (families and how to survive them).

And he's emerged from therapy a king-size wanker.

who knew therapy made you a senile unfunny bigot?

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/sep/19/miriam-margolyes-writing-my-memoir-was-terrifying-its-quite-revealing

Yes, the first person in the book she really doesn’t love is John Cleese who, with their fellow Footlights contemporaries (including Bill Oddie), she claims bullied and ridiculed her. At 19, “I’d not met studied cruelty like that before,” she writes, and the pain is still with her. “I feel awkward, admitting to such bitterness 60 years later… I should’ve got over it. But I haven’t.” She scowls, shaking her head. “They were horrid. Particularly Cleese, he’s a very unpleasant man.”

Sounds about right

there's a bit later on in the book where she meets Connie Booth and they co-write Fawlty Towers with no input from Cleese

I read one of them (families and how to survive them).

One of his relatives should write How to Survive John Cleese

randos attack his adult daughter for his opinions on Twitter and she has to ask if they’re responsible for everything their dumbass parents say

so without checking, probably too busy with that this week

Cleese recorded some commentary tracks for one of the Fawlty Towers collection, and he goes in to quite a lot of detail about the writing, and his collaboration with Booth. These commentaries are actually really interesting on the mechanics of comedy and might be one of the few worthwhile things Cleese has done in the last fifty years.

for the record, A Fish Called Wanda is risibly unfunny crap as well, I've never been able to get through more than ten minutes of it

absolutely correct.

Yeah never understood the fuss about how funny it’s supposed to be…

yet more factual evidence that Connie Booth wrote all his lines imo

Aristotle was not Belgian.

if laughter is the best medicine I think I got the wrong prescription here, doc

I'm fond of Fish, particularly the last scene b/w Cleese and Palin when trying to figure out where Wanda has gone and whenever Kline sputters about limey fruits.

kline is the best thing about wanda, the last time i watched it well over ten years ago anyway

The thing is, whether you like Fawlty Towers or not it's def a show that could've been on the air ten years before Monty Python, with only very minor adjustments. I'm as exhausted by the Python mythos as anyone else but I do think it's interesting that nothing Cleese did afterwards has any of the love for experimentation that Flying Circus did.

Speaking of, underrated sketch from that show and a moment where Cleese is undoubtedly funny for me: Mr.Hisler. "Not much fun in Stalingrad, no."

Re: Python, for Connie Booth read Graham Chapman. Worth remembering that, while doing Python, Cleese and Chapman were also writing scripts for creaky old trad British sitcoms like Doctor In The House.

xp I think there are moments of formal experimentation in Fawlty Towers, like in the 'Basil attacks the car with the tree branch' scene that was mentioned above where you get this long static shot of the car and the moment when Cleese unexpectedly turns on his heel and runs off camera leaving the car alone on the screen for a few seconds. I think what makes it funny is that it goes from looking like a standard 70s sitcom to looking like a Monty Python sketch, it's intentionally 'wrong' looking and makes you suddenly consciously aware that you're watching a tv show.

the tree branch bit reminds of the end of the Bicycle Repairman sketch where the voice-over becomes increasingly feverish talking about the communist menace and then it actually cuts to John Cleese as the voice-over guy sitting behind a microphone ranting about the dirty reds, this also has him suddenly walk off camera

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-63197829

Actor and comedian John Cleese has confirmed he will host his own GB News TV show from next year.

"people say it's a right-wing channel but it's a free speech channel"

He later walked out of a BBC interview due to what he described as the "deception, dishonesty and tone" of the conversation.

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."

Jesus christ what a stupid old cunt

was this generation always like this or did something happen