It was a complete waste of time. Cleese, you left your shoes in the spa. Can we send them up to your room? Cleese because you just called me Mr. Cleese, and you know the room that Mr. Cleese was in because you came to my room number. So what are we doing asking for identification? Does comedy have any surprises for you anymore? Not many.
Have you been following any of the controversies over free speech on college campuses? Jon Stewart said something like that to me about two years ago. But the thing about political correctness is that it starts as a good idea and then gets taken ad absurdum. And one of the reasons it gets taken ad absurdum is that a lot of the politically correct people have no sense of humor.
Because they have no sense of proportion, and a sense of humor is actually a sense of proportion. In my stage show I tell jokes that make the audience roar with laughter, jokes about the Australians or the French or the Canadians or the Germans or the Italians.
This actually reminds me of an idea I had: Every year at the U. So to eliminate jokes that are at the expense of other people is to eliminate most jokes. Francis of Assisi, because everything they do is pretty appropriate.
Not Jesus, his followers. At what point are we allowed to make a joke? After the Charge of the Light Brigade, say, how many years had to pass for it to be acceptable to make jokes about the dead British?
Seven years. Of course, seven years. How foolish of me. So clearly, enough time had passed to allow for us to make jokes about the Vietnam War. Eighty percent of people out there on the sidewalk will tell you they are oppressed by the system.
You know this one? The story I then tell involves an American patrol boat in the Gulf of Mexico. The guy on the boat is cruising along, and suddenly sees two Mexicans going for the border.
The others are already there. Oy, John. But is that a nasty joke? Think about the content of it. The Mexicans are actually the heroes!
There are millions of Mexicans in America. So is that a nasty story to tell? What I found surprising was that the least successful people supported Trump. You understand the wealthy wanting tax cuts, but why on Earth did the less successful people think Trump was going to do anything he said he was going to do to help them? The thing that astounded me as I looked around Colston Hall in Bristol is that quite a lot of the audience thought what they were seeing was for real.
The inability of people unable to intuit what was going on with Trump — I was impressed by it, not repelled. Tell me more about your impression of Trump. What also appalls me is the language of him and his cronies — people talking about sucking on their own cocks and such. They talk like out-of-control 6-year-olds. I was thinking yesterday about a Chinese blessing.
Can you guess which one? May you live in interesting times? The blessing is to live in un interesting times. Half the floor was missing; we were all huddled together in one corner for fear of falling. We used to have to live in a corridor. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woken up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us. Log In. Contact us Sign up for newsletters.
Log In Register now My account. By Mark Butler. January 22, am Updated September 28, am. The primary memory I have of adolescence—besides the horniness—is a desperate fear of being the Only One of something. Being understood by everyone felt boring and slightly anxiety-inducing, like they were about to pull the rug out from under you.
But feeling understood by no one felt like death. So I clung to the pieces of culture that took me to that oasis where someone-but-not-everyone got me, where I could feel the satisfaction of it being me against the world , but with some backup. So I had more freedom in many ways and they were kind of dumbstruck by the things I did. He was just deadpan. He never broke up and he never let you know he was being funny.
He did a mime where there was a huge magnet in the wings that was drawing him towards it by his fingertips. There was a fellow who did that in a Cambridge Footlights Revue and Graham officially bought the piece from him. I think his name was Andrew Lumsden. I never saw Andrew again but it was a funny piece and Graham was smart enough to spot it.
He took his part very seriously and he was just wonderful. Terry had a lovely, rather sad comic persona, which he used in sketches. I just loved it; I was very touched by it. He played characters very well. But we did a sketch about two police officers at the Edinburgh Festival. Silly stuff. The British members of Python worked on a variety of TV shows in different combinations throughout the s, including The Frost Report on which they all collaborated.
The show ran for four series, albeit without Cleese for the final series. You had to audition everything, so you had to make them laugh.
If they laughed it was in. Gilliam: I just liked shocking people because, to me, television was this sedentary, dulling experience, so anything you could do to shock the audience and wake them up was a good thing as far as I was concerned. Idle: We decided to link things in a different way. Palin: I think we were having a go at the establishment, the people who saw themselves as the ruling class, but not in the sort of full-frontal mode. We were tweaking their epaulettes. I think sometimes comedy can express a feeling of disillusionment.
Jones: I always liked the Rachmaninoff piano concerto where the music starts up and I come rolling on to the stage in a sack with chains and I just leap around and get my hands free in time to play the concerto.
Cleese: There was a thing that Graham and I wrote together with this guy, Raymond Luxury-Yacht, who had an enormous nose. I loved that the doctor whom he went to see had so many initials after his name that it went off the desk and down and along the floor. I always thought that was very funny.
It broke so many rules.
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