Monty Python's John Cleese: Cancel the censors!

When in doubt, listen to John Cleese.
FIRE’s President and CEO Greg Lukianoff sits down with Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning comedy legend John Cleese (Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, A Fish Called Wanda) to discuss comedy, cancel culture, and the religious controversy around the 1979 comedy classic Life of Brian.
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Chapters:
00:00 - What’s the worst movie you ever made?
00:45 - Who are your favorite comedians?
2:22 - The ‘Life of Brian’ controversies
08:22 - Can comedy puncture our beliefs?
10:53 - How can comedy liberate us?
12:41 - Has cancel culture changed?
15:24 - CBT, stoicism, and Buddhism
18:44 - How does censorship affect creativity?
19:35 - Are comedians afraid of cancel culture?
23:37 - Do you have hope for the future?
Credits:
Featuring John Cleese and Greg Lukianoff
Senior Producer and Editor Aaron Reese
Executive Producer Matthew Harwood
Producer and Operations Manager Tyler MacQueen
Director of Photography Chris Maltby
Grip and 1st AC Bobby Marione
Set Photographer Khalia Abner
Makeup Artist Sarah Elizabeth
About FIRE:
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression's mission is to defend and sustain the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought - the most essential qualities of liberty. FIRE educates Americans about the importance of these inalienable rights, promotes a culture of respect for these rights, and provides the means to preserve them.
Transcript of Interview:
www.thefire.org/research-lear...
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[@NB-tq1xp]

Best take-away: When people laugh, they relax--and become more open to new ideas.

[@ericindallas2847]

The GREAT John Cleese. Thanks!

[@debracarnow9475]

Masterful! And stay tuned until the very end! Still laughing.

[@nicoperrino5971]

Best sign-off to an interview ever.

[@jerrydenney5184]

Incredible interview!! Monty Python will live forever!!

[@Johnconno]

Monty Python has aged like an old man's nappie.

[@c.maltby7091]

Great interview!

[@neonatalpenguin]

Statistically, the least popular feature-length John Cleese film is the 2006 French film L’Entente Cordiale, in which he played 'Lord Conrad'.

[@seanjustg5425]

You may have changed that...i thank u....🤔⛎....🙏

[@joeshanley2026]

Amazing insights. What a great conversation!!

[@williamrobinson7435]

Good this. Thanks for posting! 🌟👍

[@PeterRoos]

A legend.

[@jshnaymor]

Excellent conversation. I love the part about comedy making people relaxed and more open to learn/accept criticism!

[@JonathanRossRogers]

10:07 Kudos to the subtitler.

[@dangarcia5755]

Saw Cleese perform a couple of weeks ago and nearly pissed myself! He showed the wafer thin and black knight clips and the crowd went WILD! Absolute bucket list.

[@harrisfogel1697]

Thanks for this. Aye!

[@lesliemacmillan9932]

Be sure to watch to the very very end! 😀

[@bobbispencer7777]

I REALLY LOVED THIS INTERVIEW💥💯👀

[@seanjustg5425]

What a fantastic conversation...thank yas❤🙏😁

[@jaewok5G]

brilliant. i think a wonderful conversation could be held w john cleese and jordan peterson

[@JonathanRossRogers]

17:43 Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.

[@alsomarkezuma]

I live in the Midwest and I keep things interesting with books. I don't have the time, energy, or money to travel so I expand my mind with words. I am currently behind on my reading but I should put Coddling of the American Mind on the list of books I need to buy. It beats trying to chase down Greg or John.

[@ROOKTABULA]

He signed my Monty Python book a few months after Mike Palin did. I really need to get my _fave_ director, Terry J, to sign it before one of us shuffles off.

[@shortkatnap]

Great interview.

[@Rhonda22]

First, thank-you, Mr Cleese and thank you, Fire, for this interview. I always laughed and enjoyed Monty Python's hysterics - I didn't agree with some of his politics in the past, probably now also, for sure, but the beauty was, IT DIDN'T MATTER. I certainly DO agree with him on wokism and cancel culture, regardless of which cuktural/political direction it is coming from. With Monty Python everyone was a target and all that mattered, matters, was the comedy, the ironic, the sarcastic, the sardonic, and the Knights who say Ni 🤣🤣🤣

[@JonathanRossRogers]

3:14 I guess it should be called the Python Effect instead of the Streisand Effect.

[@deadman746]

Thank you for this. It’s extremely thought-provoking, so I’m going to write about some thoughts. I realize KZbin comments are not the optimal venue, but FIRE gets so few comments I figure someone might read them. If not, at least I got to bork them out and clarify them so I can write about them in my book. I saw a Robert M. Sapolsky video claiming that political affiliation, red or blue, is 70% heritable. This is not genetic; it’s epigenetic. It seems to be a reaction to stress hormones _in utero_ passed through the placenta. Of course these are generated by actual environmental stress. This makes sense, as red tends to be rural and blue tends to be civil, and rural life is generally more difficult unless you can afford a lot of servants, which are commodified and cheaper in cities due to economies of scale. His conclusion was that it had to do with tolerance of ambiguity, which is necessary for comedy. I think it’s more basic than that, having to do with intensional pragmatics, the ability to maintain mental spaces, and so on, but the ability to deal with ambiguity is a symptom. His video was from 12 years ago, so add a few years to get the research to the point that it is suitable for an introductory class, maybe 20 to 25 years total. I think it’s changed. I think that blue people have experienced a significant degradation to their way of life and have been subject to the same epigenetic pressures. However, they lack the long historical context of liberal ( I don’t mean blue; I mean the original meaning, basically, the Enlightenment) ideology that at least contextualizes hardship in terms of individual liberties and responsibilities. Thus, wokety wokery woke/the wokesters toked hoke smoke/their brains fell out/they only shout/wokety wokery woke. And thus, a cancel culture common to the Right™ during the McCarthy era is now on the Left™, though of course the Right™ is still keeping it up and even stepping on the gas. The wokety misogyny is perhaps older, and it undergoes a cycle lasting around four decades, at least back to the introduction of the printing press. The most prominent feminist during the late 1970s and through the 1980s were deeply misogynistic. They would recognize that the old idea of women as Earth Mothers who were incapable of logic was sexist and bad, but they thought the idea of women as Goddesses with superior ways of thinking through the body against logic, which was a patriarchal trap, was anti-sexist and good. The semantics were exactly the same, only the sides and identity politics were different. But that would be a different book. I’m sticking to the topic of political imprisonment in the US in this book, and feminism _per se_ would be a distraction as well as too many pages. Since I’ve mentioned political tribes, I certainly appreciate that FIRE doesn’t discriminate based on them. I know Harvey, and he’s a Mensch. My fellow prisoner, “Coop,” knew Alan back in the day and can vouch for him. My biggest fear is that FIRE will go the way the ACLU did after Ira Glasser left. There is a non-partisan tendency for bad people to take over good organizations because their good reputation can provide a cover for doing bad things in the name of good. See, well, all of human history.

[@andydixon2980]

What a great mind. We need a world full of more John Cleese's, not full of stupid people with no sense of humour. Too many of them out there.

[@BaalDavaR999]

Irreplaceable.