John Cleese Interview: “Funniness Is about People Not Being Perfect.”

I am shouting down the phone at John Cleese. Yes, bellowing at one of Britain’s most beloved comedians and a man who has made me laugh since my siblings and I fell around shrieking at the limbless Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. If hearing the voice of Nearly-Headless Nick, James Bond’s “Q”, a Knight who said “Ni!”, Basil Fawlty, Brian Stimpson, Archimedes, Lancelot, Reg, a furious farting Frenchman, the Upper Class Twit of the year and countless other characters that defined much of my film-watching childhood on the other end of the line isn’t surreal enough on its own, yelling each of my questions at him certainly makes it so. (We’re not arguing, I should add, it’s just there’s a dodgy connection when we speak over the phone in January, and he tells me off three or four times for being too quiet before we get going).

Cleese and I are chatting ahead of his new(ish) European-wide tour, Last Time To See Me Before I Die, which stops for a night at the Teatre Coliseum in Barcelona on April 13. I say “(ish)” because he’s actually been performing a version of it around the world for the past five years, taking him everywhere from Montreal to Athens, via the US and New Zealand. It’s a ludicrously long-lived and globe-trotting set of shows for one whose title predicts imminent death—a subject that, unsurprisingly, gets examined to the full.

If Basil Fawlty was a really nice, kind, efficient human being, then he wouldn’t be the slightest bit funny. Funniness is about people not being perfect.” —John Cleese

“The show is a mixture of references to stuff I’ve done in the past,” his voice booms at me down the line in those anachronistically plummy, sergeant major’s tones that were once compulsory if you wanted to be involved in British broadcast media. “Some of the things that I think are silliest of all the things I’ve done. And then towards the end we get into one or two serious things, but always with a slightly humorous slant. Nothing is completely serious, nothing is solemn … So it’s basically entertainment with support here and there about things like death, which people like very much, because if you get into areas which haven’t been explored by comedians, then the audience is refreshed by that.”

I spoke with Cleese in the afternoon of January 21st, a few hours, it turns out, before the passing of his old friend and Monty Python colleague, Terry Jones. I’m almost ashamed that we were laughing about things so macabre in retrospect, such a loss is Jones to British comedy. It serves, I suppose, as a reminder of the precariousness of the old age that Cleese now inhabits, which perhaps explains the urgency and breadth of his new tour that he is setting out on, aged 80. We didn’t discuss Jones, but in subsequent tweets and statements, Cleese’s love and admiration for the man who squeaked that immortal line, “He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy,” is clear, candid and touching.

Upending British Comedy

Last Time To See Me Before I Die is a look back on a career whose hilarious tirades and silly walks came to define British comedy in the 20th century. Born in Weston Super-Mare, but comically made at the Cambridge University Footlights Dramatic Club (a student acting society where a litany of comedic actors subsequently made their names), Cleese is most well known for his work with Monty Python, a comedy troupe whose influence on all who followed is incomparable within its form. Indeed, only the Beatles really stand up as an equivalent in any of the arts. Both were born out of the nonconformist atmosphere of the 1960s, that decade of unprecedented flux that would dispel the fusty traditions of British comedy and worldwide popular culture forever.

“When I was at Cambridge in the early 60s,” Cleese remembers, “Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett brought this show Beyond the Fringe to Cambridge. It opened in London about two weeks later, and it became the biggest thing ever. It changed British culture, because suddenly we stopped being so deferential to people in power. Getting tickets for that stage show: they were gold. People were booking up months in advance. But now nobody gets terribly excited about anything in the theatre.”

The dichotomy between the young radical and the affable curmudgeon that Cleese betrays there basically sums him up. In youth, he and the Pythons took one look at the stale, tired state of British comedy, picked it up, pulled it apart, put it back together in the most bizarre, absurd form imaginable, and off they went, having changed it forever. Comedy, however, has now changed its spots in kind, moving away from the kind of theatrical sketch comedy that the Pythons pioneered towards realism, even nihilism. But that doesn’t mean Cleese’s national treasure status within Britain at large has diminished, far from it.

On Being Recognized Everywhere He Goes

Such is the fate of uber-success and uber-stardom, even though most of Cleese’s groundbreaking work was now created a lifetime ago (nearly double mine), he tells me he still can’t walk around in public without being accosted by fans. “If I go to Northern Europe, Scandinavia, Holland, Belgium or any of the German speaking countries, I get recognized just as often as I do in London … I’ll be recognized every 20 yards. I had to go back to the hotel in Singapore recently because I was being stopped every 10 yards—every 10 yards somebody wanted to talk to me and I couldn’t get on with my life, and that was in Singapore!” (Par for the course for any A-lister, but when you suffer as few fools as Cleese does, you imagine looking quite so memorable still comes as an annoyance.)

In Southern Europe, however, Cleese is less sure of his household-name status. “For some reason, BBC comedy has never played as well in Italy, Spain and Southern France as it plays in Northern Europe.” Does he know why? “I’ve never understood, but that is the facts … If I walk down the street in Madrid I don’t think anyone knows who I am. But I have been told that they know me better in Catalonia, in Barcelona, than they do in other parts of Spain.”

When I mentioned that I was interviewing the John Cleese to Catalan friends, their looks of awe told me they knew exactly who I was on about. One of the first reference points they arrived at was Fawlty Towers, the late 1970s sitcom Cleese wrote and starred in as the wonderfully parochial hotel proprietor, Basil Fawlty. You might think that this Catalan love of Fawlty Towers was down to Andrew Sachs’ hapless waiter, Manuel, who in most versions of the show is from Barcelona. However, and to my surprise and intrigue when I was told recently, in the Catalan version of the show, Manuel is in fact from Mexico.

Everybody Likes Stupid Jokes

I mention this to Cleese, and ask whether he thinks this change of nationality says something about a specifically Spanish insecurity? “Well, no. Everybody likes laughter, and one of the base sources of laughter is what I call ‘stupid jokes.’ In England, we tell them about the Irish, but if you go to America, in Chicago, all the ‘stupid jokes’ are about the Poles [Polish-American immigrants] … If you go to Denmark, they seem to tell jokes about the people from Aarhus, which is a big town there. So everybody likes stupid jokes, they just don’t like being the butt of a stupid joke.”

“I like doing stage because it is very real. We’re doing exactly what we [humans] have been doing for two millennia: I am going out on a stage and talking to a live audience and making them laugh.” —John Cleese

Indeed, now that all cultural discourse takes place exclusively on the online frontier of perennial pearl clutching and polarization, it’s clear that many people don’t just dislike being made fun of, they’ll try and take down your entire career for daring to do so. However, the tribal nature of human beings means that making fun of the “other,” whoever that might be, has always existed. And while this kind of punching down has undoubtedly led to the fostering of deep-set prejudices, which have at various dark times in history been manipulated into dangerous, violent bigotry, Cleese claims his conception of these jokes is perfectly harmless, and I believe him.

“We’re not trying to humiliate anyone,” he continues, when I bring up the notion of offense and comedy in the 21st century. “It’s a complete misunderstanding of what humor is about. Humor is in a sense critical, because if you have a character who is kind and generous and doesn’t take himself or herself too seriously, and who generally gets through life without messing anything up, then there is nothing very funny about them. If Basil Fawlty was a really nice, kind, efficient human being, then he wouldn’t be the slightest bit funny. Funniness is about people not being perfect.” 

The Changing Face of Comedy in a Hyper-Sensitive Era

The online culture of offense is something that Cleese and many of the other elder-statesmen of comedy have railed against in recent years. It would be easy, as many people do, to dismiss their accusations of millennial touchyness with a swift “Ok, Boomer” or some sort of gammon related insult, but this is equally facile. We live in an age bereft of nuance, where to be a progressive is to self-censor your own laughter, and I can hear how much the dull predictability of online outrage drains Cleese in his voice.

“What the PC [politically correct] people really don’t understand,” he sighs, opting for the now antiquated “PC” when most would use “woke,” that newly ubiquitous fault line in the modern culture wars, “is that you can tease people with great affection. We do this with our friends the whole time: if we see friends who we haven’t seen in a long time there is a lot of joshing … a lot of friendly teasing, and that’s a bonding mechanism. It doesn’t humiliate people, it actually helps them bond.”

Is the seeping of hyper-offense culture into “IRL” situations primarily the fault of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, et al.? “Yes,” Cleese says, “because there’s a lot of people online whose opinions would never have been known if the internet had never been invented. And they are not necessarily very intelligent or very emotionally mature—if they’ve spent a lot of time online, then it is almost certain that they are not … Do we really want to be conducting our lives at the level of the people who are most easily offended, most easily upset, and most touchy? No, because these are not people we admire, and we shouldn’t be taking our standards from them.”

Whether these issues have had any effect on modern comedy is harder to ascertain—the glorious vulgarity of Fleabag, The Thick of It, Toast and Succession from recent years proves the best written British comedy has hardly become tame or neutered—but there is certainly a tendency to avoid stereotyping now which wasn’t there before. I put it to Cleese that comedy is still daring: perhaps it is the punching down element that has become too crass for TV? “Yes, yes. But the thing is, the rules keep changing. And by staying off television, I don’t have to deal with this stuff.”

The Theatre Experience

Instead, Cleese is now relishing performing shows in the “the-eh-ter” (the sergeant major is back), a place which gives him the freedom to make jokes without fear of a Twitter-mob pile-on. “I like doing stage because it is very real. We’re doing exactly what we [humans] have been doing for two millennia: I am going out on a stage and talking to a live audience and making them laugh. And if they’ve bought tickets, it’s because they like what I do, and that means that they are probably older—40s, 50s, 60s—and they don’t take PC stuff any more seriously than I do. So I’m totally safe when I’m in a theatre. But when I go on television, I’d be making jokes and people would be spending all their time asking me to apologize, and I’m not interested in dealing with people who are not very bright.”

The realness of the stage, the shared experience that it necessarily engenders and the—dare I say it?—“safe space” that it provides Cleese is something that speaks to the core of what makes comedy so very popular. However, it’s also something that is being aggressively eroded in the age of on-demand streaming, watching on-the-go and bingeing on an entire series alone and horizontal. Sure, things can still be funny when you watch them by yourself, but for those truly side-splitting moments, for that explosive, irresistible, choking laugh that writhes in the belly, arriving from somewhere deep in the gut, you need to be in an audience, among others who are also relishing the moment.

Last Time To See Me Before I Die is a look back on a career whose hilarious tirades and silly walks came to define British comedy in the 20th century.

As his PA (I speak with the three of them during the whole interview process) joins the call and tells us it’s time to wrap up, I just have time to ask Cleese whether he thinks this notion of a shared experience is something vital to his own comedic style: “Yes, and I don’t think this is something which is terribly new. I mean, when I made Fish Called Wanda, which is a ridiculously long time ago, 30 years or something ridiculous, Jamie Lee [Curtis] said to me that she thought part of the success of the film was that it was giving people the feeling of being in a theatre laughing … That is an experience which I think we don’t have so much now. I think it’s much nicer, because people laugh more when they are surrounded by laughing people than they do when they are sat at home on their own watching the box.”

When we hang up, I’m left wondering whether Last Time To See Me Before I Die refers to Cleese the man, or his brand of comedy? Given the breadth and success of the tour, it actually feels like a misnomer: there is clearly still an appetite for both. Let’s hope, then, that things don’t go the way that Cleese is predicting, on both fronts.

Harry Stott is a regular contributor to the Barcelona Metropolitan covering Brexit, local political and social issues as well as the music scene. He recently received a B.A. in music from the University of Leeds, and now writes and produces radio content for a number of organizations in Barcelona and beyond. You can read more of Harry's articles here.