His Royal Silliness
John Cleese fish-slaps Pasadena and Glendale with ‘A Final Wave at the World’
By Carl Kozlowski
“Of all the questions I’ve ever been asked, that’s got to be the stupidest!”
I never imagined hearing those words being spat at me in a raging fit of comic apoplexy by John Cleese, the British comedy mastermind who has made a career out of playing flustered upper-crust twits who are constantly enraged by the stupid behavior of everyone in the world around them. I must admit though, I’ve spent much of my life laughing at Cleese venting his frustrations at others onscreen.
Yet there I was last Thursday morning, surreally injected into a moment that could be found in any one of his hundreds of film and TV appearances. At the behest of my esteemed editor, I had just asked Cleese if he still engaged in the occasional bit of Silly Walking — an utterly ridiculous form of strolling that formed the centerpiece of one of his most famous skits with the legendary comic troupe Monty Python. His response made me want to duck for cover as I stammered an apology.
“Wait, I’m having a go at your editor!” Cleese explained, in a half-conciliatory tone. “I lead a very entertaining but not a high-key life seeking attention. When I was younger I used to do eccentric things to amuse myself. But now, no Silly Walks! Why would I do that? Good heavens!”
Cleese was on the phone from a luxury hotel in New York City, where he was staying while promoting “Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer’s Cut),” the new six-hour Independent Film Channel miniseries about the troupe.
He was speaking with PW in connection with his upcoming Nov. 14 live performance at Glendale’s Alex Theatre of “John Cleese in A Final Wave at the World (or the Alimony Tour, Year One),” in which Cleese will ruminate on his life and work for a 100-minute, two-act stretch before engaging in a question and answer session with the audience. He archly noted that the “utterly shambolic” Q&A seems to be attendees’ favorite portion of the show, despite the fact that he poured months of effort into creating the show’s scripted portion.
Cleese is strikingly candid about his motivations for the tour. “I still need money, especially with having to pay alimony of $1 million a year until I’m 76,” the 69-year-old Cleese explained with much the same sense of joy he had just employed in scolding my editor. “She got $13 million up front and a million a year more until I’m 76. That’s a lot for having no children, but that’s California law, which I consider a bit mad.
“I was actually told to fix the back steps of my home because a burglar could fall and get hurt trying to get in!” Cleese continued, switching the conversation to his bucolic Santa Barbara estate. “The American legal system is a complete failure, except for making money for lawyers. There’s a little bit about that at the start of the show, and believe me, the Norwegians loved it.”
It’s not just the Norwegians who are loving Cleese’s show. While he played 10 cities there, he launched the show in another unlikely corner of the world: New Zealand. Cleese got the idea four years ago, after “a couple of irritating experiences” with Hollywood studios and executives “who didn’t know they didn’t know what to do, telling me how to make changes to scripts.
“If there’s a good idea given by someone, I pounce on it with a snarl,” Cleese says. “I got an Oscar nomination for writing ‘A Fish Called Wanda,’ but 13 people contributed ideas to it. I pinch any ideas that are good. But when the people at Disney told me my script was all wrong after I’d invested three months in it, and I got a call from someone who wanted me to take a stage tour of New Zealand, I thought that’ll be fun since no one will be able to tell me what to do.”
This will be a rare stateside performance for the current show, played only a few times in California back in 2006. He digs deep in his history for material, tracing how he got into comedy; about people he worked with like Marty Feldman, Peter Sellers and the Python guys; his years in the hilarious “Fawlty Towers,” and his richly diverse escapades as writer and actor since then.
“And then of course, there is the divorce to talk about,” he notes with a perfectly icy tone that could put a deep freeze on a desert.
Cleese was torn between the funny and the serious from birth, as the son of an acrobat and an insurance salesman. Similarly, he spent his student years mixing good grades with pranks, such as painting footsteps on a school’s grounds to make it look like a statue had come off its pedestal and gone to the toilet. But he was almost lost to the legal world — he was attending law school at Cambridge when he joined a comic troupe called the Cambridge Footlights Revue.
That decision to join the revue, then meeting fellow future Python Graham Chapman, saved him from a dreary life of briefs and court appearances. The breakthrough came when the 1963 Footlights highlight show became so popular that it toured the world, including stops on Broadway and in Cleese’s now-beloved New Zealand.
Cleese then dove into a career as a humor writer for British TV and radio, gradually forming the friendships that became the unstoppable force known as Monty Python. Earning worldwide stardom through their five-year TV series and a string of classic films that include “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” and the controversial Messiah-centric “Life of Brian,” the group earned lasting respect and untold riches before unofficially dissolving after “Monty Python’s Meaning of Life” in 1983.
While group members have worked on each other’s solo projects since then, Chapman’s death in 1989 meant the group could never be fully revived. Yet Cleese and the other surviving members re-teamed in a rare collective appearance Oct. 15 on NBC’s “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” to help promote the miniseries — belying Cleese’s jocular claims earlier in the day we talked that “we all hate each other too much” to work together.
“My favorite silly bit from Python was the fish-slapping dance, and my favorite sketch was the cheese shop,” Cleese recalls. “It was a little bit like the parrot in format, with me and [Michael] Palin. My favorite film within an episode was a spoof of a natural history program, a parody that was really really funny about a pantomime horse. My favorite Python movie was ‘Life of Brian’ but Americans prefer ‘Holy Grail.’”
It’s here that I tell Cleese that he might very well be in part responsible for my eternal damnation, since my hometown’s Catholic bishop warned his followers they would be banned from the Church for watching “Brian,” a wicked satire on the life of Christ. While I was only 8 years old when the controversial film was released, a decade later I almost literally ran for the video store during my first weekend away from home at college to rent “Brian” and see what the fuss was about.
“Very well,” he chuckles. “It’s always amazed me how big church authority finds the most incredible things to meddle with. A movie?! I think spirituality is alive and well, but I just think organized religion has always mashed it up.”
While he has kept a strong presence in the public consciousness through his colorful supporting roles in countless films and TV series (including Emmy-winning guest spots on “Cheers” and “Will and Grace”), Cleese has maintained a lucrative sideline by starring in, producing and co-writing a series of videos designed to teach business principles in a humorous way. Though the videos were only viewable by those lucky enough to work for a corporation that purchased the special video sets, and weren’t mass-marketed for consumption by individual fans, Cleese earned a mint on them.
“Businesses bought them as a business expense, and I did it for 19 years, from 1972 to 1991,” says Cleese. “We started out making films about selling, but we found what everyone wanted was how to interview, make decisions, how to run a meeting, all those kinds of things that happen everywhere — from charities, in the army, and even town halls. We made over 100 of them. I wrote the first 15 and then hired the best British TV writers. I liked the sense of continuity to it, because in show biz you often never see people again, even after you’ve made friends or a sort of family on the set. Here I saw the people all the time for 19 years. Then the directors wanted to sell up and retire.”
For now, Cleese is content to traverse the planet as a comic colossus, touring with the show and prepping two new major co-writing projects — a Broadway musical version of “A Fish Called Wanda” with his daughter, Camilla, and a film he won’t spill the details on with his friend Lisa Hogan that he feels has “an extremely good [outline].”
He also has long settled into Santa Barbara, both because he felt a desire to dissociate from his English upbringing and because he finds the town to be a cultural Mecca attracting the best musicians and authors imaginable amid their journeys between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
In coming to the Alex, he’ll no doubt also make a point of visiting Pasadena.
“My two favorite places in LA are Pasadena and Santa Monica, but I haven’t been to all the areas of the city,” says Cleese. “In Pasadena, there are so many beautiful buildings, great shops and great bookshops, plus some wonderful restaurants.”
Yet in typical curmudgeonly fashion, Cleese found a cloud in even that silver lining.
“Apart from the air, Pasadena’s great,” he harrumphs. “The air doesn’t seem to be the cleanest.”
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