Andy Gotts
Writer and comedian John Cleese is known worldwide as a member of the zany sketch comedy troupe Monty Python, as the laughably despicable hotel proprietor Basil Fawlty, and for countless other roles, including more recent appearances in the Harry Potter, James Bond, and Shrek films. His new memoir So Anyway… starts with his early childhood and focuses on the years leading up to the formation of Monty Python. One critic has branded the book “self-absorbed,” a charge Cleese dismisses.
“I sort of had the feeling that that was probably the point of an autobiography,” Cleese says in Episode 124 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “Maybe when I write the next autobiography he wants me to write it about someone else.”
Cleese recounts his youth with brutal honesty, judging himself a wimp as a child, physically and socially awkward as a teen, and conspicuously lacking in talent and enthusiasm as a young performer. His saving grace was his quick wit and ability to make people laugh, which earned him a spot in the Footlights at Cambridge and eventually landed him his early jobs in television. The book covers Cleese’s first marriage and his difficult relationship with his mother, but the focus is firmly on his life as an entertainer.
“There’s a little bit in there about my emotional life, where I think it’s interesting,” he says. “Because I think most of life is relatively boring, and I do try very hard not to be boring.”
Relationships with media figures such as David Frost and Peter Sellers play a larger role, which means the book may appeal most to aspiring writers and comedians, who can learn from Cleese’s example that less talented performers can nevertheless excel if they think hard about what makes comedy work, as Cleese clearly has.
“The primary purpose of the book is to make people laugh,” he says. “And I think there are stories in there that are as funny as any I’ve told.”
Listen to our complete interview with John Cleese in Episode 124 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast (above), and read some highlights from the interview below.
John Cleese on meeting Douglas Adams:
“I met Douglas two or three times. I was introduced to him on one occasion, I remember, and I noticed how tall he was. About four days later I went to a party—Graham [Chapman] was there, I remember—and suddenly Douglas appeared, and we had a long chat. But what surprised me was that he was towering above me. Now, I’m six-four and a half, and I was quite surprised that he seemed to have grown. But I noticed after we’d been chatting for some time that he was wearing four inch high heels, and I was thinking that this was very bizarre. I’ve never met a very tall man who wore high heels before, but I didn’t like to ask him—I didn’t know if it was a joke or what. I subsequently knew him a bit. He asked me to do a voice for his computer game, for which he had great hopes. And apparently his friends in the computer business told him that the time of that type of game had passed, but he’d put an enormous amount of work into it—in fact, I think he’d done so much work that he was unable to pay me for doing the voice of the bomb, but I did it anyway, in exchange for a Chinese meal.”
John Cleese on discussing Life of Brian with Bible scholars:
“I was fascinated to find that the serious academics there—including guys whose books I’ve read, since I’m interested in the subject, like Bart Ehrman—they said that the movie itself had actually influenced academic thought, and I found that hard to credit, but they told me absolutely genuinely that that was the case. But I think that this is because people, whatever discipline they’re in, get slightly stuck in the accepted norms of that discipline, you know? And when I said to one very senior cleric that it seemed to me that the Sermon on the Mount was all about trying to reduce the power of one’s ego, which seems to me exactly what it’s about—it doesn’t say ‘blessed are the powerful’ or ‘blessed are the rich,’ it’s not about power, it’s about the opposite of power—and he found that quite revolutionary. So it’s stuff I’d like to get more interested in. But the fact is that anybody who thinks that the Bible was breathed into existence by God just hasn’t read about the history of the Bible, and how various conferences or synods or whatever you want to call them chose which books would be the definitive version by a vote, and certain books were excluded, like the Gospel of Thomas, which I think are rather more interesting than Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.”
John Cleese on Monty Python and the Holy Grail :
“There was a lovely guy named ‘Jumper’ Gee who died at the age of 101, and who managed to fight in both World Wars—I never came across anyone else who did that. He was a good teacher of English and I liked him enormously, and he would go off on these wonderful excursions where they were nothing to do with the subject he was teaching, and he told this story about a wrestling match that had taken place in ancient Rome. … There was a particularly tough contest in progress, and one of the wrestlers, his arm broke—the difficulty of the embrace was so great that his arm broke under the pressure—and he submitted because of the appalling pain he was in. And the referee sort of disentangled them and said to the other guy, ‘You won,’ and the other guy was rather unresponsive, and the referee realized the other guy was dead. And this was an example to ‘Jumper’ Gee of the fact that if you didn’t give up you couldn’t lose, and I always thought this was a very dodgy conclusion, but it stuck in my mind for years, and so probably 15 years later when I was writing for The Holy Grail with Graham, I told him about that, and that’s where the Black Knight sketch came from.”
John Cleese on creativity:
“I lecture on creativity, and I point out that if you could be creative by applying ordinary logic, then anyone who was logical could do it, and the fact is they can’t. There are some extraordinarily logical people who actually are not terribly good at being creative. Creativity comes from the unconscious, that’s where most of the really unusual and special ideas come from. … If you take someone like Edison, who was a pretty extraordinary scientist, he had a particular methodology to his inventions. He thought that he got his best inventions when he was on the verge of falling asleep, and he used to sit in a chair holding ball bearings in his hands, with a brass bowl under his hands, so that when he fell asleep he’d drop the ball bearings and the noise would wake him up, and in that way he could spend quite a long period of time in that twilight area between being very tired and actually falling asleep, and that’s when he said he got most of his ideas. Now that’s clearly not relying on logic.”
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