When were you last funny?
Guardian columnist Zoe Williams also dislikes John Cleese, it seems.
[I]t’s hard to find out when John Cleese was last funny. Some people think he had some moderately amusing lines in A Fish Called Wanda (1988). There was a period in the 2010s when he had an idiosyncratic vendetta and went around town saying “Michael Palin’s travel show” and then yawning, which a small niche found rather tickling.
Does that actually matter? He did some brilliant Being Funny before the 2010s, which thanks to technology we can still benefit from. Isn’t that good enough?
It would be fair to say it’s not a recent body of comic work that has recommended Cleese for a Channel 4 show about “cancel culture”…
But it probably is a not-recent body of comic work. I don’t know, maybe the Channel 4 show won’t be any good at all, maybe Cleese will just do some variation on the enraged fogey shtick (which may be all a lot of us do), but after all he did get some practice as Basil Fawlty. I don’t know if it will be interesting or not, funny or not, but neither does Zoe Williams.
Those vibes in full: they are outspoken gentlemen who refuse to be cowed by convention into staying silent on their sub-saloon-bar bullshit. They are fearless crusaders for freedom, so long as by “freedom” we mean the liberty to tell gags about male superiority that would have been too tired for Les Dawson.
Ok but at least he doesn’t tell us what his pronouns are.
Maybe Zoe Williams ought to consider something: there’s a *huge* bloody market for this sort of thing. The anti-cancel culture beat is a popular one. Doesn’t matter if he’s all that funny; he’s clever and people like that. His two minute video on Extremism resonates to this day (and I think it was posted here within the last year or so).
I bet Zoe Williams is delighted that she doesn’t much care for John Cleese’s work and can use his lack of recent funnyness to dismiss his opinions. Imagine the horror if she had only last week declared him The Funniest Man of August 2021 and now had to disavow all he stood for!
It clearly hasn’t occurred to her that it may have been his recent bout of politely but firmly (not to mention fearlessly) challenging total bollocks on twitter that has recommended him for a channel 4 show on “cancel culture” rather than his comedic work. Why assume it’s meant to be funny?
Cleese’s funniness or otherwise, past or present is irrelevant. Why can’t anyone stick to the point, these days? The show isn’t about comedy, it’s about cancel culture, a thing of which Cleese has first hand experience. Lots of it.
His earlier work was also both radical and subversive; the right to push boundaries of what kinds of speech are acceptable is surely at the heart of both comedy and cancel culture and all of this would seem to qualify him well for the job.
I wonder who Williams would prefer to host the show? Twitter people have been telling me today that somewhere else on British TV there’s a show about sewing which is hosted by a man (Joe Lycett) who knows nothing about sewing. He does know quite a lot about misogyny though, having often demonstrated command of its core principles. He has also tweeted that “all rape is hilarious”. I’m not sure that any of this qualifies him to host a show about sewing which I’m told is aimed primarily at women. The rape comment was about ten years ago, though, so perhaps Williams thinks that’s not recent enough to count. Either way, I don’t think she’s argued that he’s a poor fit as host. Whether that’s oversight or double standards, I can’t say.