Cleese can’t see modern life as funny
MONTY Python star John Cleese says he worries about writing comedy now because he cannot get to grips with the modern world.
The Fawlty Towers comic, who is 77, says a lot of contemporary life is lost on him.
In the TV series In Conversation With, Cleese tells fellow comedian John Bishop that he would not know how to set his Oscar-winning 1988 film A Fish Called Wanda in the present day. He wrote the script and starred in it. Cleese said: “I don’t understand so much of the modern world. If I had to do a rewrite it would all change because of the mobile phone. If I was trying to write something modern now I don’t understand enough of how it works.
“Making TV comedy nowadays means you have lots of people saying, ‘well let’s try to get the young 20s in here’, and it’s got to be multiracial and all this stuff whereas on Monty Python we just did what made us laugh.” He told Bishop that the Pythons would probably be “lynched” if they made religious satire Life Of Brian now.
John Bishop: In Conversation With John Cleese is on the W channel next Thursday at 9pm.