John Cleese; is he funny?

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

apart from anything else I don't know how they convince themselves that by repeating the most low effort conservative talking points over and over that they're somehow doing something new and brave and radical

I don't think it's really any different from any other generation - the difference between this and olds in the 60's/70's is cosmetic, half remembered counter cultural norms means they need to cast themselves as edgier, but the substance is pretty much the same, the youth is radical, unthinking, won't listen to them.

wide swathes of gen x already on their way to this too

I always wondered where the jokes about leftism in the python films were coming from - is the butt of the joke the peasant's anarchism or arthur's presumption of ruling him, or both? is the sectarian stuff in brian anything more knowing than "look how ridiculous the left is" which is how it tends to be used? is it ultimately all just the "we all know the establishment is full of shit but look how ridiculous the people who oppose it are" style of elite british satire that gave us hignfy?

I don't expect people with these backgrounds to be sympathetic to the views they're making fun of but there's something almost apolitical in the form-over-content focus of those python jokes - they don't offend me at all (unlike some of the others) and could be coming from just about anywhere politically

idk what I'm saying really just wondering if something curdled or if it was always there just in a cleverer package or whatever

xp tbh I blame gen x (probably unfairly) for making this kind of nihilistic conformism that mainstream conservatism is now converging with seem like something edgy and rebellious. in their defence they had even less to work with than millennials (afaict). but boomers had so much more going on that they really should have no excuse

caveat that maybe cleese isn't actually a boomer and the generation stuff is mostly just a diversion

Not "probably" unfairly.

IMO most of the poking fun at the left in old Python was funny and came from a fair and informed place. Cleese just seems increasingly out-of-it, and acts like he's King Arthur and everyone with a Twitter account is the socialist peasant.

(xxp) In the Arthur film I think the joke is the incongruity of having a middle ages peasant up to his knees in dung breaking into wordy abstruse political theorising - I'm not sure there's any great satirical intent behind it. The various factions in the Brian movie are playing on the proliferation of Palestinian terrorist organizations with very similar names in the 1970s I think

Cleese is whatever the opposite of a Napoleon complex is

The scene in the Holy Grail strikes me as being pure Palin/Jones.

(xp) A de Gaulle complex?

xp And Idle, who was the naif of the group.

tom otm re the peasant in grail. sectarianism joke is p boilerplate even on the left. "what have the romans ever done for us" is the one that bugs me lol. complacent imperial sniggering imo.

what gets me in life of brian is the sustained bit about the hilarious absurdity of a trans woman existing

fwiw I caught the tail end of a Terry Jones history show once and it seemed to be making a "who were the REAL barbarians when u think of it" case

peasant thing can be read as a (presumably accidental) commentary on nationalism and peasant anarchist resistance to incorporation into the national body but I'm sure it's intended to be more incongruous than it actually is (they obviously wouldn't be talking like a student activist in any case)

otm that the romans joke is far more offensive than the others - we built your railways you know etc

Their humor turned vicious in "The Meaning of Life."

what gets me in life of brian is the sustained bit about the hilarious absurdity of a trans woman existing

Not defending this in any way, but I don't think any cis person would've considered mocking trans people problematic or offensive prior to the Millennium. So given Life of Brian was made in 1979 this feels historically revisionist.

sounds like the problem is cis people not revisionism

Their humor turned vicious in "The Meaning of Life"

Which bit, specifically? Mr Creosote?

Guess if you were a devout Catholic you wouldn't much like Every Sperm is Sacred.