Idle is great at playing pricky characters, now we know it wasn't an act!
this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
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John Cleese is great at playing terrible people and joined GB News.
He's a brilliant comedian but not a very good person. He's hardly alone in this.
And there are far worse out there in comedy. He's pretty much a professional grumpy old man these days.
I think ultimately Cleese is held up as a bastion of British values and stiff upper-lip comedy... his enduring popularity and the onset of tech like social media has allowed people to see through the facade though. I don't think he's an awful person by any means, but just a product of his generation where views and takes on things just won't fly today.
I think if you had Instagram or Twitter back in the 60's and 70's, there's a good chance that even British icons like Bob Monkhouse or Bruce Forsyth or.... god forbid, Jimmy Saville may have had some questionable views or tastes exposed.
A shame really. Maybe social media was a watershed moment for PR.
Cleese was never a “bastion of British values” or the stiff-upper-lip. Python was part of the counterculture which subverted everything about British values at the time. Fawlty Towers is about someone who kept the stiff upper lip so hard they completely cracked. Clockwise and Wanda are both about establishment figures who go potty and break bad.
He fits in to the satire boom of the 60s. His contemporaries are the Two Ronnies, the Goodies, David Jason, and he followed in the footsteps of David Frost, Peter Cook and Spike Milligan. Not in the same comedic species as those you mentioned. Barely the same genus. Monkhouse and Forsyth come from the variety tradition, which isn’t establishment, more comfortable affirming fare for the working class of the time.