John Cleese Rants: It's Harder To Laugh Now

-by NOAH

This morning, my wife sent me an interview, by Logan Hill, with a true comic genius, John Cleese. It’s in the new issue of New York Magazine.

Cleese is in New York to, among other things, promote the October 16th reunion of Monty Python and his newly re-mastered Fawlty Towers DVD setand is currently working on a new project entitled “Why There Is No Hope.” That’s a subject I often think about, especially when I hear the vomitous spew that routinely gushes forth from the mouths of politicians, corporate sleazebags and other suit wearers. I’ve never met Cleese, but I have always been a huge fan, a fan of his contempt for nonsense, upper class twits and their pathetic, gullible defenders, and general idiocy and human foibles. The interview gives a nice sampling from the mind of John Cleese. He speaks of his ex-wife, who now gets a yearly seven figure sum from him as “the special love child of Bernie Madoff and Heather Mills.” Along the way, he jabs at hotels and the profits above quality model that American business now seems to be based on, and, of course, those dreaded Republicans. Regarding Sean Hannity, Cleese offers:

What you begin to see is how funny life is. You turn Sean Hannity on and there is wall-to-wall insanity. They have absolutely no idea what clowns they are.

That nails it for me, because that’s exactly what I see when I put on Hannity or any of the other usual suspects, or hear the latest lunacy from the likes of Michele Bachmann or this week’s prize winner Rep. Louie Gohmert, who likened being gay with necrophilia and bestiality publicly, with no sense of shame or irony, right on the floor of Congress, in front of cameras no less.

I think we all go through life thinking, at times, wouldn’t it be great if…

Life often seems like satire itself to me. For several years now, one of my wouldn’t-it-be-great-ifs has been, if I could add a laugh track from some old 1950s sitcoms -- really, didn’t they all use the same one? -- to all of FOX. I don’t mean just on my TV, but on everyone's! It would put FOX’s programming in proper context. I’d even add periodic circus music and add in clips of tricycling chimps in party hats and juggling clowns too. Only then would people see what a bizarrely comic genius that Roger Ailes guy truly is. Cleese kinda already sees it, but Cleese, unlike Ailes, means to be funny for real, and his humor has deeper meaning than most. It is often said that great comedy comes from psychic pain, and Cleese is proof positive. I was heartened by his comment on Sean Hannity and his vicious but fair take on other things Repug. As he says, “It would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous.” Clearly, the man has no tolerance for clowns and buffoons.

When asked, “As politics gets more childish, does satire get harder for you?,” Cleese responds with deductive reasoning at its best.

Yes. Take Sarah Palin-- so many Republicans love her. I suddenly realized that in order to actually understand that someone is not very bright -- or to be brutal, that they’re rather stupid -- you really have to be more intelligent than them. Most Republicans aren’t smarter than Sarah Palin. It’s true.

My laugh track idea would definitely benefit Hannity’s loathsome show. There are times when I marvel at his inability to construct a context for his sentences. He has great trouble putting his thoughts together. He’s just in such a hurry to utter whatever talking point that Drudge or Frank Luntz have programmed him and his ilk with on a given day that he just spits it out and it just lies there to be eagerly lapped up by the really lost causes that walk among us. So, I muse, does he know exactly what he is doing, just playing on the fools and tools in his audience for megabucks? Is the reason that he can’t string two sentences together without getting flustered or flubbing it because, either consciously or unconsciously, he knows he’s flat out wrong? Or is he just the thuggishly stupid man that he appears to be?

Almost buried in the interview is a real pearl. When discussing one of his most famous characters, Basil Fawlty, Cleese talks about how Basil always behaves badly out of fear. In Basil’s case, it’s his drill sergeant of a wife, the perfectly named Sybil.

Basil’s awful. He’s a terrible, shallow creature, completely obsessed with class. Ah, but he is funny. We laugh at Basil because, although he behaves appallingly to other people, a lot of the time it’s because of his fear that Sybil will get very angry. We also feel sorry for him. When people behave badly out of fear, it’s much funnier than if they were just behaving badly because that’s their default mode.

We live in scary and farcical times. It seems that everyone is under pressure of one sort or another, some self-made, some not. Cleese’s comments have an eerie familiarity. Interviewer Logan Hill then asks,

“And we recognize our own worst impulses in him?”

Oh, yes. I think that there’s an enormous number of people in England who, given enough stress, behave very much as Basil does. That marvelous book Emotional Intelligenceby Daniel Goleman has this tremendous phrase: “Stress makes you stupid.” So the more stress you put on the protagonist in the farce, the stupider he gets. That’s one of the delights of it. They make worse and worse mistakes.

The mistakes keep coming in our world, tsunamis of them, and they are coming more and more often. There are plenty of such people here in the good ol’ USA too, Mr. Cleese. They may be named Chuck Grasshole and spew about offing grandma, or they may be named Max Baucus, stuffing his pockets with cash. Neither political party is immune to the fear, and they turn their fear upon us. Some people fear the unknown, and some people fear not being re-elected and thus losing their place at the corporate trough.

Some people can’t make sense of an America that elected Barack Obama. They fear his culture. They fear that his religion is different. They just fear. Period. “Stress makes you stupid.” Some make millions, nightly diagramming incoherent conspiracies on a blackboard for millions of fearful and gullible TV viewers. When I was a little kid, there was a guy on TV named Jack Barry. One of the features of his show was that kids could buy a special sheet of see-thru plastic that would adhere to the screen so that you could faithfully copy or embellish whatever he drew up that day for us impressionable minds. It was called Winky Dink. Man, that was power, but, Jack Barry never abused it (although, he did later get caught up in a quiz show scandal). Then again, Barry never made millions or had an evil piece of crap named Roger Ailes backing him.

When asked about a recent incident, the F-Bomb on Saturday Night Live, Cleese goes on to say,

I think the older you get the more you begin to realize what a madhouse we live in. People get upset about things that don’t matter at all and people don’t really get upset at all about things that matter a lot. You’ve got a rotten, rickety old legal system that anyone with money can manipulate -- and nobody goes around saying this; they go around worrying that somebody said "fuck." I mean, frankly, it’s pathetic and so completely half-witted that you give up any expectation of any kind of rational behavior of any kind, in any way, as you get older. It’s a madhouse. There are small pockets of sanity, but the rest of it is irretrievably second-rate at best. So when these things come along now, I just shrug.

It can be depressing. But you have to let go of the idea that this can ever be a decent and rational place. I already have quite a lot of material for a new show I will call Why There Is No Hope. I’ve tried it out. A friend said it was fascinating afterwards because the more I destroyed people’s hope that this could ever be, in any way, a rational planet, the more they laughed.

Lest you think that Cleese has given up all hope, he offers hope for President Obama, while also offering a succinct and logical explanation for the unseemly behavior of contemporary Republican politicians.

If there is no hope, you must not trust Obama.

No, I have real hope for Obama, because I think without the slightest doubt he is operating from a considerably higher level of mental health than we’re used to in our politicians. I think that’s what frightens the shit out of Republicans. Because if you put very mad people in a room with very sane people the mad people start feeling madder, do you see what I mean? Whereas, if you put mad people in together -- if you put the Gestapo in together -- they’re all sort of reinforcing each other’s madness and everyone’s happy.

To me, the interview is one nail hit squarely on the head after another. The mind slaves of the true elitists will grumble that Cleese is an elitist. Tough. But, let’s hope he’s right about Obama. I do agree about the President’s mental health. My little mental jury is still out on the rest, but somewhat hopeful.