Sarah Ditum on Cleese and comedy and censorship:

What has John Cleese ever done for free speech? Absolutely nothing, according to the reaction to this week’s announcement that the 81-year-old comedian and actor would be fronting a documentary for Channel 4 about cancel culture. The show, which will “explore why a new ‘woke’ generation is trying to rewrite the rules on what can and can’t be said”, was met with derision before it had even been broadcast.

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The sneering also came from fellow comics, the stand-up Robin Ince among them. Ince, 52, also seemed to think that Cleese’s age disqualified him from having an opinion: “Somewhere in middle age, the ‘young people nowadays’ gene is turned on,” he tweeted.

Which is hilarious because in fact no new idea introduced by young people is ever wrong or destructive. That’s a law of nature.

What does earn Cleese the right to an opinion is the fact that he’s spent his whole career bumping up against the limits of the sayable in comedy. That’s most obviously true in the case of Monty Python’s Life of Brian, which came out in 1979. Even though the Biblical satire was explicitly not about Jesus (it was about a man who gets mistaken for the Messiah), it succeeded in offending Protestants, Catholics and Jews with roughly equal force. The Rabbinical Alliance of America told Variety: “Never have we come across such a foul, disgusting, blasphemous film before.”

The various bans, protests and attacks that targeted the film didn’t stop it from being a success, but they did make things fairly unpleasant for the Pythons. Even before Cleese found himself at the centre of this furore, he had made a concrete commitment to liberal values by instigating The Secret Policeman’s Ball in 1976, a comedy benefit for Amnesty International, which was then focused on supporting prisoners of conscience.

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After all this, it must be baffling to find yourself positioned as the enemy of all that’s right and good. Cleese has been consistent in his principles, right through to last year when he signed a letter in support of JK Rowling’s right to speak about gender. What’s changed is that free speech is no longer as valued as correct speech. A whole strand of cultural criticism today judges comedy first on whether it’s making jokes about the right things, and a distant second on whether those jokes are funny.

I think “correct speech” should be “correct” speech – I think there should be scare quotes on the “correct” bit, because the issue isn’t truth but approval. In a great many contexts incorrect speech is and should be less valued than free speech, because there are a great many contexts where truth does matter. (Such as? Pandemics. Journalism. Science. Medicine. History. Stuff like that.) The joke with the “gender” issue is that it’s riddled with lies and fantasies, along with bullying threat-laden demands for “respect” for those lies and fantasies.