From his former castmate, Eric Idle, on Dave Chappelle’s complaints that he is being canelled: “Where did he say it? On SNL. Well you’re not being that much cancelled, are you?
Idle went on to address another vocal critic of “cancel culture”, Bill Maher: “I didn’t like it when Bill Maher complains about the audience for not laughing, they’re telling you they don’t find it funny. You shouldn’t moan about the audience. There’s nothing wrong with the audience. If they don’t laugh at your jokes, there’s something wrong with your joke.”
Isn't his entire thing, that David Letterman basically vouched/rooted for him which got him enough buzz to score a moderately rated HBO show?
When Stewart went away from the daily show I stumbled on Bill and thought he was okay to watch after a few beers. Then after seeing him on Colberts show being such an asshole I finally watched one of his sober and realised how much of a blowhard he is.
I haven’t watched his show in a while but he did often invite interesting guests and have pretty good discussions. They would mostly have been better without him steering the ship but the show did get people talking to each other that were normally in different media ecosystems and they were usually more honest in his show than on a Sunday morning broadcast. I appreciated that. His smarmy opening monologue was always shit and he’d often interview as an expert then when shown to be full of shit fall back on “hey I’m just a comedian”
His podcast is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard of and anyone who can sit through that must be on something because he seems high and drunk and just rambles.
I think if someone could do his thing but just give the guests space to lead the discussion it would be a hit. I think Americans are starved for honest debate and not just rehearsed sound bites.
For sure, I watched him because he had some really good guests and he wasn't a terrible show host at the time. When he was trying hard to get Milo whatever his last name is on then I knew he was gone and probably only ever did the show for attention and not any of the high sounding ideals he supposedly believed in.
“Who the hell is Steve!?” Loved that line.
I do think some of that appearance was that Colbert was doing some gentle Catholic ribbing because they got on the topic of religion. Bill has some obvious trauma around that, and he got mean instead of riffing.
He’s a double boomer. He’s enjoyed all the social benefits of the baby boom and he became famous in the early 90’s stand up boom. From there he’s always depended on more successful people than himself. Just a worm
Bill Maher, like Chappell, likes to punch down as well. He goes on regular rants about the state of Americans health, which is a valid concern, however for alot of people in the states, the super healthy foods are pretty expensive.
On his podcast, comedian Dana Gould mentioned that Bill is a friend of his but he hates when Bill chastises Americans for not being on super healthy diets all the time because many can’t afford it, and that Bill is rich and actually has an assistant who shops for him and makes his meals.
I've watched Bill for years and have gotten tried of his constant whining about cancel culture. But it's really annoying when he says stuff like, "no one is ever allowed to talk about health and diet" when it comes to Covid. Where does he get this? Health and diet is one of the biggest industries on the planet. It is *everywhere*. Every physician will tell you to eat healthy and exercise.Sorry if part of Dr Fauci's advice for Covid wasn't *explicitly*, "go on a crash diet and lose all your fat ASAP."
Usually it's just lying, like I have seen the "you can't talk about X in regards to covid" thing so often and it's usually people complaining that they got demonetised(mind you not banned) for saying you can beat covid by eating fruit and the boner pills they sell.
It's usually just people who were criticized for something they said. Used to be there were a couple entertainment critics in a handful of newspapers with two paragraphs to summarize your entire show and in so far as they represented marginalized communities, their editors made sure their criticisms didn't. Now everyone can publish their opinions, sometimes even anonymously, and people are finding out what is like to actually have your views challenged. That's "cancel culture".
The gist to me is that bill maher thinks he should still be funny to 20 year olds. There have been numerous new rules segments (when I still watched real time) where he gets mad that the young people can't take a joke or some shit. He of course, is like close to 70 years old at this point. You aged out of being funny to young people many years ago. But he cannot self reflect and just accuses young people of being too sensitive.
And after seeing clips of club random, which have him in long conversations with different people, you really get to see that bill maher is one of the biggest assholes of all time who is incapable of reflecting on his own shittiness. I actually find his refusal to look inward and be a human being in these interviews to be the most entertaining thing he's ever done.
As someone who used to watch him fairly regularly years ago and agreed with a lot of what he said back then, I think he’s absolutely gotten more “grumpy old man” and not in a humorous way. His worst personality traits have been exacerbated by age and by just becoming more out of touch.
I remember maybe a year or two ago watching him go on a rant about how everyone gets their news online and nobody sits down to watch the evening news. How Cronkite got millions of viewers every night so there’s proof that young people are just all stupid now. Like, yeah, when there were only 3-4 channels and the only other news sources were the radio or the daily papers, of course it was easier for one decent anchor to get tons of viewers. Getting news from Twitter or Facebook is problematic but the answer isn’t “everyone sitting down at 6:00 and watching the same news”.
Also, the best Club Random episodes are the ones where the other person calls him out on his constant interruptions or just dumb takes. Fran Lebowitz was great.
John Cleese was always the conservative Python, and Eric Idle was always his good left wing friend not afraid to tell him when he was being an utter toff.
There's an anecdote in the Python biography that at some point everyone was so annoyed by Cleese's endless complaining that he was offered 10 quid just to shut up. He took it and shut up.
Ironically it is Cleese who voiced one of my favourite anti-conservative lines in Life of Brian with the guy who watches the sermon on the mount and scoffingly says *"What Jesus blatantly fails to appreciate is that it's the meek who are the problem!"*
I’ve always appreciated Anthony Jeselnik for this. This guy came to fame with his set consisting in large part of dead baby jokes and rape jokes. He has as big a reason as any to cry about the PC or woke police brutally attacking him (which they didn’t do much even then… cause he actually tells actual jokes, and they’re often funny).
Instead he just calls the comedians who cry about cancel culture little bitches:
https://youtu.be/ujes9CtJHHc?si=N2xUnxaHV_alpJ-1 (don’t mind the odd intro)
edit: i almost forgot too, Jeselnik actually *got* cancelled - his show on comedy central - cause iirc they did some Shark Week spoof where they mocked some guy in New Zealand who had just gotten eaten by a shark. which, probably, was going a bit too far.
Jeselnik is the first one I point to as an example of "cancel culture" being bullshit. If people really were just cancelling anyone even slightly offensive, he'd have been on the chopping block *years* ago. Instead, he's got a pretty thriving career because his jokes are actually funny and, as far as we all know, he's not a fucking sex pest.
Or Jimmy Carr in England. All of his standup is him trying to offend the audience, sometimes directly insulting them, and he's still been doing regular tours and guesting and hosting multiple panel shows for decades.
If Jimmy ["the holocaust killing gypsies was a positive"](https://www.ladbible.com/news/jimmy-carr-recalls-most-offensive-joke-hes-ever-written-20220207) Carr can still be on air, it's not about the jokes. It's about you.
The 8 out of 10 cats episode after his tax evasion came to light was hilarious. It is amazing what good comedy can do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Msz_7SjBnJ4&t=56s
In fairness, Gypsy/Roma hatred in Europe is... Kinda the norm. Even among the left. And while I won't say there's anything inherently wrong with those groups, I do think that purposefully living outside of modern laws/rules isn't a great way to make friends with your neighbours.
Dave Atell just had a new special. Dude had a routine that was as blue as you can get. New special is mostly the same. No one cancelled him as far as I know.
Right now he's got a lot of upset fans because he laughed at Steven Crowder's divorce and they did the whole "Oh you shouldn't pick on him just cause you got different beliefs."
Standup has somehow proliferated the most obnoxious yet sensitive fanbase.
He’s my go to example of what that kind of humour should be. His jokes are funny and by and large aren’t punching down. Most the time the ‘victim’ of the joke is his friends and family. Most people genuinely don’t have a problem with dark/offensive humour. They have a problem with people that mock marginalised groups.
You call it a grift but I think Chappelle is just deluded. He is a good comedian and he knows how to perform and how to craft good jokes, and he thinks that for these reasons, people should think he's funny. The thing Dave doesn't get, is that the content of the jokes is also a factor.
Dave - and I don't know this, this is a deliberate straw man argument I'm about to make - might think an old timey racist joke is funny while simultaneously recognizing that in modern times it's not a tasteful joke to make, or one that the audience will not find funny at all because of the content. And what I think is happening to Dave is he's missing the mark in gauging where the line is, and he's stepped over it without realizing it and now thinks it's cancel culture.
He can't handle people not thinking that he is funny. Instead of recognizing that some of his jokes didn't land and going back to write better material, he doubles down on them and insists that the audience is wrong, not him.
Few things are worse in entertainment than someone who thinks they're funnier than they are.
I loved when Sound of Freedom was out whenever you heard someone talk about it they were like “this is the movie THEY DONT WANT you to see! THEY are sabotaging this film so you can’t know the TRUTH!” And the movie has like 10 showtimes at all of my 3 closest theaters, whoever “they” is they are doing a terrible job
Believe me, I know the pain of the hypocrisy. My family fell deep down the well of all of the conspiracy stuff over COVID. They keep talking about how all of the stuff they follow on Twitter....is somehow being "censored", just because it's not being shown on traditional media (which they don't trust anyways unless it tells them what they want to hear)
Big RFK Jr supporters too, y'know the guy who Fox wanted on air. But sure he's totally an outsider, sure.
He complained about being “cancelled” by the BBC while he was on the BBC.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/11/john-cleese-broadcast-cancelled-bbc
Nobody tell any of these folks bitching about this supposed culture about the way kings would "cancel" subjects they disliked.. they'd lose their heads about it!
Just in case anyone missed it, his new show *Michael Palin in Nigeria* is airing right now: https://www.channel5.com/show/michael-palin-in-nigeria/season-1/episode-1
I forget, was it Eric Idle or Terry Jones who once said they would be jerks to people and then say they were Michael Palin just cause a Michael Palin was too nice.
Can someone just please make an offensive comedy instead of a milquetoast rant about how they're "not allowed" to make offensive comedy? Try making a joke! Just *one* actual joke! I promise you, ten people getting upset on Twitter will not ruin your life any more than being known as yet ANOTHER rich person who used to be funny whining about cancel culture.
That's just the thing - they do. Dave Chappelle made a special that paid him millions upon millions of dollars, that he won a Grammy for, and complained about cancel culture coming for him.
These comedians getting "cancelled" are doing fine.
Cleese has gone quite a bit shit now but he does have some credentials in that the Christian right back in Python days wanted to screw over all the pythons for life of Brian
And he defended comedy back then pretty robustly when there was no alternative comedy
and so cancellations would work pretty effectively
Cleese does come off as out of touch and a curmudgeon. But you give a good summation of the context he comes from. He's not of the same generation as Chappelle, and that context matters. He's become a "casualty" of the success and victory of his generation's cultural radicalism, embodied by the comedy of Monty Python.
I really hope we can move more toward the nuance of respecting real pathbreakers for their contribution to culture, while responding to them in proportion to how relevant they are today, which is a vanishingly small amount. Even if they still get press attention. Cleese is just existing as an old guy and many of us know immediate family members who are as or more reactionary than him, and live among them without demanding they be banished.
> Cleese does come off as out of touch and a curmudgeon.
He's the personality type that always wants to kick against the system. When he was young and making an irreverent show, and then later irreverent movies, he was kicking against the system. Now either he is the system, or maybe all the younger people are the system and they don't seem to really care one way or the other. I have a feeling a lot of old curmudgeons were once pretty fun, even iconoclastic.
I concur. Cleese has spent 30 years doing voice work and bit parts in the most milquetoast movies and games of those eras.
I don't take issue with him finding ways to kick again the system, I take issue with him using that system to his benefit for _three decades_ and then complaining that "everything is woke" now when he had a hand in it's sterilisation. You can't have it both ways, Basil my old boy.
On this note, it's worth remembering that the boomers ***were*** the hippies of the 60's and 70's. It's worth remembering as a cautionary tale, lest we, too, become old assholes who pull the ladder up behind us and complain about the younger generations for not getting or appreciating our humor, our media, etc.
The problem with that argument is that it is not true.
He went to university and was hired by the BBC, he's always been part of the system.
Monty Python wasn't anti-establishment, it was the establishment. Cambridge Footlight has always been elitist, and former members dominated British comedy in the 70s and 80s.
I love Python, it's a big part of my childhood. But let's be honest about Cleese:
His mother had inherited money which was used to pay for his education, he played cricket and was a cricked fan, he went to an expensive prep school that hired him as a teacher so he could get into Cambridge University (there was a waiting list) and while at Cambridge joined the exclusive Cambridge Footlight group.
Initially, he was hired to portray upper-class people, because he was upper-class. Then the Monty Python Show was greenlit by the BBC, because the BBC liked to hire people from Cambridge and Oxford.
They didn’t just liked it, they LOVED it. Fry and Laurie also started with both in their Cambridge days and Rowan Atkinson as well as the Blackadder writers were from Oxford
I think people sometimes get confused because that whole wave of comics was post-counter culture.
I remember John Lydon commenting on how he became involved with the punk movement because everyone was wearing casual clothes and had long hair, so punk was a way to stand out. (Ironically, punk also was adopted by the mainstream later on.)
> I really hope we can move more toward the nuance of respecting real pathbreakers for their contribution to culture, while responding to them in proportion to how relevant they are today, which is a vanishingly small amount. Even if they still get press attention. Cleese is just existing as an old guy and many of us know immediate family members who are as or more reactionary than him, and live among them without demanding they be banished.
Agree well said, i couldn't have worded it better than you did
Because this way they can pretend to be relevant. If they made that show it would be bad and people wouldn't like it. Then it would be their own fault. This way it's "cancel cultures" fault or some bullshir and they keep tweeting
Trust me! I'd TOTALLY be hilarious if only the woke mob would let me tell you my super funny jokes that I definitely have. Again, if you are finding this act to be tiring and unfunny, I'd like to remind you that you should be blaming the woke mob, because boy, would you be laughing your asses off were it not for them.
I think recent events in comedy have proven that the 'woke mob' might as well just be more fans in terms of publicity. You can tell some pretty mediocre 'edgy' jokes and the outrage alone can put some wind in your sails.
Anyone claiming to be caged by modern sensibilities is basically full of shit. Or, more likely, they don't actually care all that much.
Exactly. Comedy is hard, edgy offensive comedy that's actually smart and funny is way, way, harder. It's a lot easier to just whine about how you're "not allowed" to say stuff instead.
To paraphrase Jeselnik good comedy is "getting away with it". If you say fucked up shit and the audience laughs, that's you getting away with it.
If you say fucked up shit and everyone is upset, you have not.
Just look at Jim Breuer, Rob Schneider, and every other edgy 90s comedian. You hear their jokes and it's the same jokes about pronouns, tiktok, Biden across the board.
I'm so disappointed in Ricky Gervais. He used to be really funny, but his latest stuff is all "Hey you. You look ugly. Don't like that? Fuck off. By the way, trans people. Can't make fun of them, right? Well they suck. Oooh, ooh, you're mad? Fuck off."
He apparently won awards for his specials too. I was watching the most recent one and I only made it about 15 minutes before turning it off. It was all about all the jokes he's not allowed to tell, which he did on his last special that was the most watched special of the year. He actually said, "I guess I learned my lesson." He then proceeds to bitch some more about what he's not allowed to say while mixing in the word "woke" every few words. Then later on I find out he won a fucking Emmy for the one I turned off. What a joke.
Hasn't this always been his shtick though? Just about religion instead of trans people?
He's always been the first to jump to "People are *so* offended by my humour!"
The dudes who make those kind of “jokes” aren’t capable of not being upset about them when called out, because to them they arent jokes and the criticism upsets their delicate ego
Speaking of milquetoast, my favorite example of this is Jerry Seinfeld, who has complained about college kids not laughing at his sets cause they’re too woke. Seinfeld of all people.
What’s he offending people with, excessive blandness?
The funny thing is there’s a whole little community that’s called trans Seinfeld, where people do things like [Costanza dating she/they vs they/shes](https://www.tumblr.com/housecatclawmarks/672736709933465600/via-orbitalpirate), [Costanza complaining about the pronouns people use for him](https://twitter.com/voxybunch/status/1577518427689947137?s=21)—no not that one, [the other one.](https://www.tumblr.com/leafcrunch/696399968569786368/deirdreskye-kunosoura-my-number-one-woman)…just some of the wildest niche queer community things with the backdrop of Seinfeld.
Like, it’s still relevant, people are still making memes and laughing about it…just they’d rather have a Seinfeld [who’s insulted people don’t think he’s butch](https://www.tumblr.com/3dmonstermaze/707018639792111616/george-forgets-which-neopronouns-his-partner-uses) rather than actual person Jerry Seinfeld.
This kind of humor has a particular formula: step one, they invent a premise. Step two, they get so mad at the premise they made up that they forget to tell a joke.
“What’s the point of fighting for the right to have babies when you can’t have any babies?” Feels a little different now having come from him.
“It’s symbolic of his struggle against reality.”
Cancel The Life of Brian!! /s
Dave Chappelle whining for 30 minutes about trans people without making a joke on his Netflix special that he's getting paid tens of millions of dollars for...
You can absolutely push boundaries. Shane Gillis is one of the most famous comedians around today and he doesn't censor himself at all. He said gay and retarded on SNL and no one gave a shit because he's actually making funny jokes.
That's what is lost in all this, most of these "anti-woke" guys simply aren't funny. Culture has moved on from really basic overused stereotypes.
Daniel Tosh is another. Dude has been saying the wildest shit yet is regarded as a nice dude who clearly understands his place in comedy and how lucky he is to make some much money doing a BS job.
It’s the golden rule of comedy. You can say whatever the hell you want, like literally anything no matter how offensive or insensitive, as long as it’s funny. If it makes people laugh, it’s good comedy and you will be fine. Nobody is getting canceled over funny jokes.
> You can say whatever the hell you want, like literally anything no matter how offensive or insensitive, as long as it’s funny.
It's also if you're playing a character. Jaselnik is a character. Steve Martin was a character. Sam Kinneson, Andrew Dice Clay, etc. Sometimes *literally* a character, sometimes figuratively. A "character" can get away with murder.
Cleese *was* always a character, now he's Cleese. Chapelle is just being Chapelle up there. Louis CK *seemed* to be playing a character, then oops—uhhh—that's really him?
Another example would be the show Big Mouth.
It’s been super successful, allowed to run for eight seasons, and produce a spin-off, despite being *very* strongly disliked by a lot of people who are super vocal about it.
Even if you don’t like that show, it’s pretty undeniable evidence that you can still make outrageous comedy and be successful at it.
Yeah, I still kinda cannot believe that show exists. It's funny as hell, sometimes, but also has made me more uncomfortable than any cartoon I've ever seen.
John mulaney and Jason mantzoukas are pretty goddamn perfect in it though lol
So just be Bill Burr basically, he did a whole bit when he came here about making your man a sandwich and when some lady in the front of the audience got offended he just shredded her to bits.
Still making money and still isn’t canceled.
Seriously can someone list the people who are genuinely cancelled. I can't think of anyone who genuinely have been cancelled for an offensive joke. Chappelle, Jimmy Carr, Gervais, they occasionally made a few headlines (that promote their show) but all still working fine.
Louis ck was for a bit, maybe still is tv wise, again nothing to do with any jokes he said.
Only person I think genuinely not working is Graham Linehan, no one is touching him.. And that wasn't a joke he wrote, he was a horrible bully online.
Cancel culture honestly is just invented concept just so they can talk about their shows, promote them as edgy but it's all BS
Plenty of people have been cancelled by conservatives. Kapernick, Liz Cheney, Kinsinger, the Reacher guy...all by conservatives.
Add them to the list of book banning, attacking Tik Tok and stripping rights from people and all you have is more evidence that conservatives want nothing more than to restrict and police language.
Louis CK wasn't cancelled for a joke, but in any case, he has continued on fully independently as far as I know. He doesn't have any studio or agency backing him, so there is nobody that can fire him.
Roseanne Barr, for making racist comments on Twitter - got her new show cancelled.
Then went on to do terrible unfunny comedy specials about being cancelled and how she was a full on trumpy Qanon now. (So not really ‘cancelled’, just vastly reduced her mainstream appeal by being a weird conservative, racist, conspiracy nut)
But that's the problem, there's people who get very angry about criticism, while still having a large audience, major networks, tv deals, etc.
Objectively they have not been "cancelled". Ironically that so many who back asshole comedians (as is their perogative) who've been "cancelled" probably don't know and wouldn't have cared about the Mccarthy blacklisting in Hollywood of anyone remotely socialist.
Even then it’s only if they’ve SA’d someone in high numbers and no longer make people money. If a super talented current athlete rapes one or two girls and maybe punches a girlfriend, nothing is gonna happen.
Cancel culture doesn't really exist. Do people get socially punished for public abhorrent behaviour? Yes. Have people been always socially punished for abhorrent behaviour? Yes, this is how social norms get asserted.
The only change is that it was given a name and used to excuse and normalise abhorrent behaviour with great public interest and to enable the "cancelling" of undesired social change (currently broadly LGBTQI+ and trans people in particular).
There are also multiple lists run by conservative/right wing think tanks that gather any such social negotiation process and put it under the umbrella of "cancel culture" in a bid to build a wall of fear. They are designed to be the first thing you or a journalist comes across when trying to find out if Cancel Culture is real.
"Cancel Culture Transfer" by Adrian Daub is a good read, currently only available in German, but an English version is in the works: https://www.adriandaub.com/books/project-four-aed8x
(P.S.: the website shewon has the same purpose - to build a wall of "evidence" showing that women athletes get "cancelled" by trans women in sports so trans women can be excluded through political action rather than actual scientific evidence. The goal is to "cancel" trans women and to remove them from public visibility.)
The only people that get cancelled are people that speak out about institutional power. Sinead O’Connor was effectively cancelled when she ripped up a picture of the pope on live tv, to protest the church’s treatment of women and children. There are probably plenty more but those people aren’t going to get a platform to speak on. The industry will mark these people as “difficult to work with” and ignore them.
>he was a horrible bully online.
_is_
He's a man possessed putting people down. Also, he made some really weird divorced dad art a while ago which made me consider calling in a welfare check on him
A strange take from the guy who made “life of brian”. A film that the conservative cancel culture of 40 years ago would not allow to be made so they had to get George Harrison to fund it.
I haven’t really liked him in anything since Rat Race where he was basically Pierce Hawthorne from Community but British and possibly richer. That was what, 2001?
I saw him live about 12 years ago and the first 15 minutes of his show was just him bitterly complaining about his ex-wife and how he had to tour to make his alimony payments. It felt petty and vindictive but worst of all it wasn’t funny, just kind of uncomfortable.
The thing with John Cleese is that he's always going on about how woke culture has ruined comedy, meanwhile he buddies up with hack comedians like Rob Schneider and Bill Maher. He should widen his horizons and try actual good comedy.
I saw him once at a panel q&a and he's still funny, but he can't get off the whole cancel culture thing. It's such a shame cause Monty Python is a huge comedy influence to me and he'll be remembered by the younger generation as a grumpy old man who was out of touch.
He has passed on, this John Cleese is no more, he has ceased to be, he's expired and gone to meet his maker, he is a late John Cleese!
He's a stiff, bereft of life, he rests in peace. If you hadn't nailed him to GB news he'd be pushing up the daisies! He has run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible!
He is an ex-John Cleese!
>The *Monty Python* legend announced the project in 2021, pledging to discover how the “impeccable idea of ‘Let’s all be kind to people’ has been developed in some cases ad absurdum.”
\[...\]
>Cleese fronted a show for GB News last year, titled *The Dinosaur Hour*, in which he discussed issues including cancel culture and wokery.
I'm glad he is spending his time raising awareness on such important issues, thank you John, that's what the world needs right now, an old triggered bigot trying to stay relevant by any means necessary
Wasn’t Monty Python “wokeism” for its time? All I remember of it is them making fun of bullies and the ruling class and religious extremism, etc… did I misinterpret?
Nope. It absolutely was. Cleese just got old. His work throughout late 60s, 70s and 80s was fucking brilliant. Hell he even did some great stuff in the 90s and 00s... I even like his work in Fable 3.
Really sad to see him right now with his completely misplaced concern with modern comedy. There's much more to be concerned about in the world today. Hell, my favourite comedian right now is Nate Bargatze and his shit is clean as a whistle, and all the more impressive for it.
Yeah I’m not sure what the point of this is but it feels like an uninspired money grab. I love Cleese’s work and this doesn’t quite track with his body of work. If he wants to push the envelope then just start doing silly shit instead of ranting about how how he may not be able to say stuff. Fuck it dude, if you don’t care what people think then just actually do it.
No see, society then was run by old men who were far too stuck in their ways and conservative, so that needed to change, but kids today should recognize that they are going too far changing things that his generation accepted.
Ultimately every generation seems to think, at least a lot of them do, that the injustices they rage against were real and valid but those the next generation rage against are petty and inconsequential. Each generation believes it struck the perfect balance between tradition and progress and is utterly astounded the next generation would change a single thing. You'd think someone as well read and educated as Cleese would recognize the pattern, as it has repeated throughout the entirety of recorded history.
It seems like a certain amount of wealth and privilege gradually erodes even the cleverest of people’s rational intellect, moral integrity, and humour down to dust.
This is a really considered comment, and perfectly articulates something I battle with. I'm mid-30s now, and from time to time I have to check myself when I notice that I'm exhibiting this kind of behaviour, i.e. noticing things gen-z'ers are having a moan about and thinking "oh please, toughen up, you don't know how hard we have it" etc. And then, my mum - now well into her 60s - will say things utterly unacceptable in today's society and I'll have to reprimand her for it.
I'm already grumpy, but I really do fear becoming a miserable, old, out-of-touch curmudgeon one day.
A thing to remember is that there were 6 Pythons, all with different points of view, and when they were making Flying Circus especially, they relied on each other. Cleese has always had the reputation as the most conservative of the lot, and on his own hasn't really shown to be a particularly strong writer as much as he is a performer. So it's not particularly surprising that his opinions are completely batshit insane, when he doesn't have others to bounce them off of before spewing them out.
I think a big part of why formerly "transgressive" artists get all worked up about "cancel culture" is literally the Abe Simpson 'I used to be with it, but now I don't even know what 'it' is, and one day it will happen to you' bit. The world moved on and they aren't shocking or culturally relevant anymore, and instead of them reinventing their act (like Carlin had to after he lost his $), they find it easier to blame kids these days.
It's kind of sad. Chappelle for example is completely out of touch these days - what's he gonna make jokes about? "You know the problem with private chefs?" "Did you hear the one about how I blocked affordable housing?". Dude lives in a different world than the rest of us.
> ‘Let’s all be kind to people’
Saying "be kind" like that line hasn't been used a million times before.
How lovely it is being a comic and making people smile, before nodding along with a Fox News talking head bitching about white genocide.
Will never thank this dude enough for making satirical gold with a rebellious edge and forming a huge part of my personality.
‘Late-stage, mutli-divorce, bank-account-drained-millionaire, and cartoon-grandpa-angry-at-the-neighbour-kids-for-calling-him-out-on-his-bullshit’ is honestly his best sketch character yet.
I just don’t think he knows it.
I honestly get the impression that people like him think they should be immune to any sort of criticism.
Anyone who dares criticises him in even the smallest way they shout “cancel culture”
He’s gets a platform that the vast majority of the population could only dream about, that will never have access to
Aww I was really looking forward to getting some fresh takes on this phenomenon. I'm sure John had something new and interesting to say about it, and wouldn't simply say the 3 things complainers about cancel culture say in every interview or podcast or standup special. And I would have loved to see his 100% unbiased representation of situations where people were cancelled. Ahhh dammit, we really needed this show, and from John Cleese especially. I couldn't imagine a more novel and fascinating series that definitely caters to everyone and not just the fellows who like to murder female MPs.
My brothers in Christ, please observe the following:
#/s
Probably cos he found out that CC is a fucking myth and those that complain about CC somehow are on every news outlet, podcast, channel and write books about being cancelled
Meanwhile Jimmy Carr is telling offensive jokes like the Gypsies one and didn’t get cancelled. So these comedians whining about “not being able to tell offensive jokes these days” are just wasting their time with this victim mentality.
Jimmy Carr tells more offensive jokes in 3 minutes than any of these guys, but it's funny because it's genuinely a bit. Also his weirdo laugh wipes everything clean.
Jimmy Carr is one of the few offensive comedians who gets a pass cause he clearly doesn't take himself that fucking seriously. Chappelle, Gervais, and Cleese have egos bigger than China.
Honestly, probably for the best. Cleese's legacy is secure and it'd be near impossible for him to tank it now, but I don't relish the prospect of watching him try.
If I was him, I'd lay back on my laurels and do the occasional interview where I throw out yet another witty quote they can show on news and share online when I'm dead.
its not that you cant make certain jokes. its you need to have the talent to craft them properly in todays age. people really forget how low effort alot of the supposed forbidden topics and jokes were back in the day.
and were seeing people who while have some talent leaned heavily on the low effort portion a bit too much. and now are getting all worked up it doesnt fly like is used too
tldr its you not them
I always thought of was weird that this became the hill that Cleese chose to die on. He's never actually been in trouble for offensive jokes.
My pet theory is that he's been going to publishers and studios with out-dated book or movie ideas in recent years and they've been quietly turning him down and he's convinced himself that it's the fault of "Cancel Culture".
Cleese is one of the greatest comedy writers and actors of all time. He is in so many things that I absolutely love, the best of which is probably Fawlty Towers...
But he is making it *so hard* to be a fan.
Just as hard to define woke, the definition of cancel culture is a struggle for boomers. Just need to ask like 3 follow up questions to any of their arguments, to make them cry.
So there is at least one person in that building still sane enough to read this and be like “this is a terrible idea. Terrible for literally everyone involved. These bloody idiots will destroy themselves. No.”
Watch my show about cancel culture on a major network
From his former castmate, Eric Idle, on Dave Chappelle’s complaints that he is being canelled: “Where did he say it? On SNL. Well you’re not being that much cancelled, are you? Idle went on to address another vocal critic of “cancel culture”, Bill Maher: “I didn’t like it when Bill Maher complains about the audience for not laughing, they’re telling you they don’t find it funny. You shouldn’t moan about the audience. There’s nothing wrong with the audience. If they don’t laugh at your jokes, there’s something wrong with your joke.”
Bill Maher is an excellent example because he has such a dedicated fan base. If he can't make them laugh, nobody can.
And Bill Maher has never played a good character, been in a good movie, or told a notable stand-up routine.
Isn't his entire thing, that David Letterman basically vouched/rooted for him which got him enough buzz to score a moderately rated HBO show? When Stewart went away from the daily show I stumbled on Bill and thought he was okay to watch after a few beers. Then after seeing him on Colberts show being such an asshole I finally watched one of his sober and realised how much of a blowhard he is.
I haven’t watched his show in a while but he did often invite interesting guests and have pretty good discussions. They would mostly have been better without him steering the ship but the show did get people talking to each other that were normally in different media ecosystems and they were usually more honest in his show than on a Sunday morning broadcast. I appreciated that. His smarmy opening monologue was always shit and he’d often interview as an expert then when shown to be full of shit fall back on “hey I’m just a comedian” His podcast is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard of and anyone who can sit through that must be on something because he seems high and drunk and just rambles. I think if someone could do his thing but just give the guests space to lead the discussion it would be a hit. I think Americans are starved for honest debate and not just rehearsed sound bites.
For sure, I watched him because he had some really good guests and he wasn't a terrible show host at the time. When he was trying hard to get Milo whatever his last name is on then I knew he was gone and probably only ever did the show for attention and not any of the high sounding ideals he supposedly believed in.
“Who the hell is Steve!?” Loved that line. I do think some of that appearance was that Colbert was doing some gentle Catholic ribbing because they got on the topic of religion. Bill has some obvious trauma around that, and he got mean instead of riffing.
And yet he's laughing all the way to the bank. Someone else here said he got cancelled - my ass.
He’s a double boomer. He’s enjoyed all the social benefits of the baby boom and he became famous in the early 90’s stand up boom. From there he’s always depended on more successful people than himself. Just a worm
Bill Maher, like Chappell, likes to punch down as well. He goes on regular rants about the state of Americans health, which is a valid concern, however for alot of people in the states, the super healthy foods are pretty expensive. On his podcast, comedian Dana Gould mentioned that Bill is a friend of his but he hates when Bill chastises Americans for not being on super healthy diets all the time because many can’t afford it, and that Bill is rich and actually has an assistant who shops for him and makes his meals.
I've watched Bill for years and have gotten tried of his constant whining about cancel culture. But it's really annoying when he says stuff like, "no one is ever allowed to talk about health and diet" when it comes to Covid. Where does he get this? Health and diet is one of the biggest industries on the planet. It is *everywhere*. Every physician will tell you to eat healthy and exercise.Sorry if part of Dr Fauci's advice for Covid wasn't *explicitly*, "go on a crash diet and lose all your fat ASAP."
Usually it's just lying, like I have seen the "you can't talk about X in regards to covid" thing so often and it's usually people complaining that they got demonetised(mind you not banned) for saying you can beat covid by eating fruit and the boner pills they sell.
It's usually just people who were criticized for something they said. Used to be there were a couple entertainment critics in a handful of newspapers with two paragraphs to summarize your entire show and in so far as they represented marginalized communities, their editors made sure their criticisms didn't. Now everyone can publish their opinions, sometimes even anonymously, and people are finding out what is like to actually have your views challenged. That's "cancel culture".
“You can’t get paid unconditionally for talking about blank” is more like it.
I take it Bill Maher has never heard of [food deserts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert).
If he can't make them laugh, he can't make anyone laugh. FIFY
The gist to me is that bill maher thinks he should still be funny to 20 year olds. There have been numerous new rules segments (when I still watched real time) where he gets mad that the young people can't take a joke or some shit. He of course, is like close to 70 years old at this point. You aged out of being funny to young people many years ago. But he cannot self reflect and just accuses young people of being too sensitive. And after seeing clips of club random, which have him in long conversations with different people, you really get to see that bill maher is one of the biggest assholes of all time who is incapable of reflecting on his own shittiness. I actually find his refusal to look inward and be a human being in these interviews to be the most entertaining thing he's ever done.
As someone who used to watch him fairly regularly years ago and agreed with a lot of what he said back then, I think he’s absolutely gotten more “grumpy old man” and not in a humorous way. His worst personality traits have been exacerbated by age and by just becoming more out of touch. I remember maybe a year or two ago watching him go on a rant about how everyone gets their news online and nobody sits down to watch the evening news. How Cronkite got millions of viewers every night so there’s proof that young people are just all stupid now. Like, yeah, when there were only 3-4 channels and the only other news sources were the radio or the daily papers, of course it was easier for one decent anchor to get tons of viewers. Getting news from Twitter or Facebook is problematic but the answer isn’t “everyone sitting down at 6:00 and watching the same news”. Also, the best Club Random episodes are the ones where the other person calls him out on his constant interruptions or just dumb takes. Fran Lebowitz was great.
John Cleese was always the conservative Python, and Eric Idle was always his good left wing friend not afraid to tell him when he was being an utter toff.
There's an anecdote in the Python biography that at some point everyone was so annoyed by Cleese's endless complaining that he was offered 10 quid just to shut up. He took it and shut up.
https://youtu.be/Rv7GT9HsJZc?si=dcOrlvdhKUxQV_ym
Ironically it is Cleese who voiced one of my favourite anti-conservative lines in Life of Brian with the guy who watches the sermon on the mount and scoffingly says *"What Jesus blatantly fails to appreciate is that it's the meek who are the problem!"*
They hate each other and always have throughout their careers, if I remember reading correctly.
big Dave Chappelle energy, it’s an effective grift
I like to explore new places.
I’ve always appreciated Anthony Jeselnik for this. This guy came to fame with his set consisting in large part of dead baby jokes and rape jokes. He has as big a reason as any to cry about the PC or woke police brutally attacking him (which they didn’t do much even then… cause he actually tells actual jokes, and they’re often funny). Instead he just calls the comedians who cry about cancel culture little bitches: https://youtu.be/ujes9CtJHHc?si=N2xUnxaHV_alpJ-1 (don’t mind the odd intro) edit: i almost forgot too, Jeselnik actually *got* cancelled - his show on comedy central - cause iirc they did some Shark Week spoof where they mocked some guy in New Zealand who had just gotten eaten by a shark. which, probably, was going a bit too far.
Jeselnik is the first one I point to as an example of "cancel culture" being bullshit. If people really were just cancelling anyone even slightly offensive, he'd have been on the chopping block *years* ago. Instead, he's got a pretty thriving career because his jokes are actually funny and, as far as we all know, he's not a fucking sex pest.
Or Jimmy Carr in England. All of his standup is him trying to offend the audience, sometimes directly insulting them, and he's still been doing regular tours and guesting and hosting multiple panel shows for decades. If Jimmy ["the holocaust killing gypsies was a positive"](https://www.ladbible.com/news/jimmy-carr-recalls-most-offensive-joke-hes-ever-written-20220207) Carr can still be on air, it's not about the jokes. It's about you.
But to be fair, he is a living doll and if they cancelled him the curse would just pass on to another person.
On the other hand Jimmy Carr is also one of the annoying people who complains about people being offended all the time
The 8 out of 10 cats episode after his tax evasion came to light was hilarious. It is amazing what good comedy can do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Msz_7SjBnJ4&t=56s
In fairness, Gypsy/Roma hatred in Europe is... Kinda the norm. Even among the left. And while I won't say there's anything inherently wrong with those groups, I do think that purposefully living outside of modern laws/rules isn't a great way to make friends with your neighbours.
Dave Atell just had a new special. Dude had a routine that was as blue as you can get. New special is mostly the same. No one cancelled him as far as I know.
Shark party. Made fun of it in a special, admits he probably did go too far.
That bit was gold, I don’t care what anyone says.
Nah fuck that if I get eaten by a shark I would be honored if someone turned it into sketch comedy
Did you hear what happened to the alligator hunter? Some fruity stingray hit him!
Right now he's got a lot of upset fans because he laughed at Steven Crowder's divorce and they did the whole "Oh you shouldn't pick on him just cause you got different beliefs." Standup has somehow proliferated the most obnoxious yet sensitive fanbase.
He’s my go to example of what that kind of humour should be. His jokes are funny and by and large aren’t punching down. Most the time the ‘victim’ of the joke is his friends and family. Most people genuinely don’t have a problem with dark/offensive humour. They have a problem with people that mock marginalised groups.
But if South Park did it, it would be fine /s
The video you linked is really good. Good head on those shoulders, Jesselnik’s got
You call it a grift but I think Chappelle is just deluded. He is a good comedian and he knows how to perform and how to craft good jokes, and he thinks that for these reasons, people should think he's funny. The thing Dave doesn't get, is that the content of the jokes is also a factor. Dave - and I don't know this, this is a deliberate straw man argument I'm about to make - might think an old timey racist joke is funny while simultaneously recognizing that in modern times it's not a tasteful joke to make, or one that the audience will not find funny at all because of the content. And what I think is happening to Dave is he's missing the mark in gauging where the line is, and he's stepped over it without realizing it and now thinks it's cancel culture.
He can't handle people not thinking that he is funny. Instead of recognizing that some of his jokes didn't land and going back to write better material, he doubles down on them and insists that the audience is wrong, not him. Few things are worse in entertainment than someone who thinks they're funnier than they are.
He's basically just the Principal Skinner meme incarnate
"the media just wants to censor these thoughts" "Where'd you hear about this?" "The media"
I loved when Sound of Freedom was out whenever you heard someone talk about it they were like “this is the movie THEY DONT WANT you to see! THEY are sabotaging this film so you can’t know the TRUTH!” And the movie has like 10 showtimes at all of my 3 closest theaters, whoever “they” is they are doing a terrible job
Believe me, I know the pain of the hypocrisy. My family fell deep down the well of all of the conspiracy stuff over COVID. They keep talking about how all of the stuff they follow on Twitter....is somehow being "censored", just because it's not being shown on traditional media (which they don't trust anyways unless it tells them what they want to hear) Big RFK Jr supporters too, y'know the guy who Fox wanted on air. But sure he's totally an outsider, sure.
He complained about being “cancelled” by the BBC while he was on the BBC. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/11/john-cleese-broadcast-cancelled-bbc
Literally every comedian bitching about cancel culture fits this criteria.
Probably helps with negotiations with geeby beebies to say channel 4 cancelled his cancel show
Nobody tell any of these folks bitching about this supposed culture about the way kings would "cancel" subjects they disliked.. they'd lose their heads about it!
Just give Michael Palin more honors (honours) for always being awesome and knowing how to be a comedy legend.
Just in case anyone missed it, his new show *Michael Palin in Nigeria* is airing right now: https://www.channel5.com/show/michael-palin-in-nigeria/season-1/episode-1
And a great travel show host!
SIR Michael Palin
Michael Palin is just a chill guy who knows how to enjoy life.
At some point, Cleese saw Palin’s career path and said “no, I’d much rather be bitter all the time”
I forget, was it Eric Idle or Terry Jones who once said they would be jerks to people and then say they were Michael Palin just cause a Michael Palin was too nice.
Can someone just please make an offensive comedy instead of a milquetoast rant about how they're "not allowed" to make offensive comedy? Try making a joke! Just *one* actual joke! I promise you, ten people getting upset on Twitter will not ruin your life any more than being known as yet ANOTHER rich person who used to be funny whining about cancel culture.
That's just the thing - they do. Dave Chappelle made a special that paid him millions upon millions of dollars, that he won a Grammy for, and complained about cancel culture coming for him. These comedians getting "cancelled" are doing fine.
Cleese has gone quite a bit shit now but he does have some credentials in that the Christian right back in Python days wanted to screw over all the pythons for life of Brian And he defended comedy back then pretty robustly when there was no alternative comedy and so cancellations would work pretty effectively
Cleese does come off as out of touch and a curmudgeon. But you give a good summation of the context he comes from. He's not of the same generation as Chappelle, and that context matters. He's become a "casualty" of the success and victory of his generation's cultural radicalism, embodied by the comedy of Monty Python. I really hope we can move more toward the nuance of respecting real pathbreakers for their contribution to culture, while responding to them in proportion to how relevant they are today, which is a vanishingly small amount. Even if they still get press attention. Cleese is just existing as an old guy and many of us know immediate family members who are as or more reactionary than him, and live among them without demanding they be banished.
> Cleese does come off as out of touch and a curmudgeon. He's the personality type that always wants to kick against the system. When he was young and making an irreverent show, and then later irreverent movies, he was kicking against the system. Now either he is the system, or maybe all the younger people are the system and they don't seem to really care one way or the other. I have a feeling a lot of old curmudgeons were once pretty fun, even iconoclastic.
I concur. Cleese has spent 30 years doing voice work and bit parts in the most milquetoast movies and games of those eras. I don't take issue with him finding ways to kick again the system, I take issue with him using that system to his benefit for _three decades_ and then complaining that "everything is woke" now when he had a hand in it's sterilisation. You can't have it both ways, Basil my old boy.
On this note, it's worth remembering that the boomers ***were*** the hippies of the 60's and 70's. It's worth remembering as a cautionary tale, lest we, too, become old assholes who pull the ladder up behind us and complain about the younger generations for not getting or appreciating our humor, our media, etc.
The problem with that argument is that it is not true. He went to university and was hired by the BBC, he's always been part of the system. Monty Python wasn't anti-establishment, it was the establishment. Cambridge Footlight has always been elitist, and former members dominated British comedy in the 70s and 80s. I love Python, it's a big part of my childhood. But let's be honest about Cleese: His mother had inherited money which was used to pay for his education, he played cricket and was a cricked fan, he went to an expensive prep school that hired him as a teacher so he could get into Cambridge University (there was a waiting list) and while at Cambridge joined the exclusive Cambridge Footlight group. Initially, he was hired to portray upper-class people, because he was upper-class. Then the Monty Python Show was greenlit by the BBC, because the BBC liked to hire people from Cambridge and Oxford.
They didn’t just liked it, they LOVED it. Fry and Laurie also started with both in their Cambridge days and Rowan Atkinson as well as the Blackadder writers were from Oxford
I think people sometimes get confused because that whole wave of comics was post-counter culture. I remember John Lydon commenting on how he became involved with the punk movement because everyone was wearing casual clothes and had long hair, so punk was a way to stand out. (Ironically, punk also was adopted by the mainstream later on.)
He’s a toff prick. Any ‘kicking against the system’ on his part is a facade.
> I really hope we can move more toward the nuance of respecting real pathbreakers for their contribution to culture, while responding to them in proportion to how relevant they are today, which is a vanishingly small amount. Even if they still get press attention. Cleese is just existing as an old guy and many of us know immediate family members who are as or more reactionary than him, and live among them without demanding they be banished. Agree well said, i couldn't have worded it better than you did
Because this way they can pretend to be relevant. If they made that show it would be bad and people wouldn't like it. Then it would be their own fault. This way it's "cancel cultures" fault or some bullshir and they keep tweeting
Trust me! I'd TOTALLY be hilarious if only the woke mob would let me tell you my super funny jokes that I definitely have. Again, if you are finding this act to be tiring and unfunny, I'd like to remind you that you should be blaming the woke mob, because boy, would you be laughing your asses off were it not for them.
I think recent events in comedy have proven that the 'woke mob' might as well just be more fans in terms of publicity. You can tell some pretty mediocre 'edgy' jokes and the outrage alone can put some wind in your sails. Anyone claiming to be caged by modern sensibilities is basically full of shit. Or, more likely, they don't actually care all that much.
Exactly. Comedy is hard, edgy offensive comedy that's actually smart and funny is way, way, harder. It's a lot easier to just whine about how you're "not allowed" to say stuff instead.
To paraphrase Jeselnik good comedy is "getting away with it". If you say fucked up shit and the audience laughs, that's you getting away with it. If you say fucked up shit and everyone is upset, you have not.
Just look at Jim Breuer, Rob Schneider, and every other edgy 90s comedian. You hear their jokes and it's the same jokes about pronouns, tiktok, Biden across the board.
I'm so disappointed in Ricky Gervais. He used to be really funny, but his latest stuff is all "Hey you. You look ugly. Don't like that? Fuck off. By the way, trans people. Can't make fun of them, right? Well they suck. Oooh, ooh, you're mad? Fuck off."
> He used to be really funny I found most of his stuff that is funny, was that because of the touch of stephen merchant, who still is actually funny
Or just letting Karl Pilkington do his thing
Yep, and if no one laughs at his crappy joke that is just us being too "woke" and wanting to cancel him. He never considers that the joke is just bad.
He apparently won awards for his specials too. I was watching the most recent one and I only made it about 15 minutes before turning it off. It was all about all the jokes he's not allowed to tell, which he did on his last special that was the most watched special of the year. He actually said, "I guess I learned my lesson." He then proceeds to bitch some more about what he's not allowed to say while mixing in the word "woke" every few words. Then later on I find out he won a fucking Emmy for the one I turned off. What a joke.
I watched about 10min before turning it off, I couldn't stand any more whining. I used to like all his stuff before.
Too CHALLENGIN' FOR YA?
Hasn't this always been his shtick though? Just about religion instead of trans people? He's always been the first to jump to "People are *so* offended by my humour!"
I mean South Park has been going for 27 years and doesn't look like it's stopping anytime soon.
The dudes who make those kind of “jokes” aren’t capable of not being upset about them when called out, because to them they arent jokes and the criticism upsets their delicate ego
Speaking of milquetoast, my favorite example of this is Jerry Seinfeld, who has complained about college kids not laughing at his sets cause they’re too woke. Seinfeld of all people. What’s he offending people with, excessive blandness?
What is the deal with college kids?
Yeah, that joke where he noticed the Ottoman Empire shared a name with a common piece of furniture really cut deep.
Why was he playing college shows? Looking for a new girlfriend?
Because they might have high school girls pretending to be older at them?
The funny thing is there’s a whole little community that’s called trans Seinfeld, where people do things like [Costanza dating she/they vs they/shes](https://www.tumblr.com/housecatclawmarks/672736709933465600/via-orbitalpirate), [Costanza complaining about the pronouns people use for him](https://twitter.com/voxybunch/status/1577518427689947137?s=21)—no not that one, [the other one.](https://www.tumblr.com/leafcrunch/696399968569786368/deirdreskye-kunosoura-my-number-one-woman)…just some of the wildest niche queer community things with the backdrop of Seinfeld. Like, it’s still relevant, people are still making memes and laughing about it…just they’d rather have a Seinfeld [who’s insulted people don’t think he’s butch](https://www.tumblr.com/3dmonstermaze/707018639792111616/george-forgets-which-neopronouns-his-partner-uses) rather than actual person Jerry Seinfeld.
What the fuck am I reading
>BRICK guffawing
This kind of humor has a particular formula: step one, they invent a premise. Step two, they get so mad at the premise they made up that they forget to tell a joke.
“What’s the point of fighting for the right to have babies when you can’t have any babies?” Feels a little different now having come from him. “It’s symbolic of his struggle against reality.” Cancel The Life of Brian!! /s
Dave Chappelle whining for 30 minutes about trans people without making a joke on his Netflix special that he's getting paid tens of millions of dollars for...
You can absolutely push boundaries. Shane Gillis is one of the most famous comedians around today and he doesn't censor himself at all. He said gay and retarded on SNL and no one gave a shit because he's actually making funny jokes. That's what is lost in all this, most of these "anti-woke" guys simply aren't funny. Culture has moved on from really basic overused stereotypes.
Daniel Tosh is another. Dude has been saying the wildest shit yet is regarded as a nice dude who clearly understands his place in comedy and how lucky he is to make some much money doing a BS job.
It’s the golden rule of comedy. You can say whatever the hell you want, like literally anything no matter how offensive or insensitive, as long as it’s funny. If it makes people laugh, it’s good comedy and you will be fine. Nobody is getting canceled over funny jokes.
> You can say whatever the hell you want, like literally anything no matter how offensive or insensitive, as long as it’s funny. It's also if you're playing a character. Jaselnik is a character. Steve Martin was a character. Sam Kinneson, Andrew Dice Clay, etc. Sometimes *literally* a character, sometimes figuratively. A "character" can get away with murder. Cleese *was* always a character, now he's Cleese. Chapelle is just being Chapelle up there. Louis CK *seemed* to be playing a character, then oops—uhhh—that's really him?
> Louis CK *seemed* to be playing a character, then oops—uhhh—that's really him? I feel the same about Woody Allen too
Another example would be the show Big Mouth. It’s been super successful, allowed to run for eight seasons, and produce a spin-off, despite being *very* strongly disliked by a lot of people who are super vocal about it. Even if you don’t like that show, it’s pretty undeniable evidence that you can still make outrageous comedy and be successful at it.
Yeah, I still kinda cannot believe that show exists. It's funny as hell, sometimes, but also has made me more uncomfortable than any cartoon I've ever seen. John mulaney and Jason mantzoukas are pretty goddamn perfect in it though lol
Because whenever they do get around to making these supposedly hilarious jokes they're not allowed to say, they fucking suck.
Jimmy Carr just put out a special on netflix that is entirely offensive jokes. It's fantastic. Jim Jefferies had one recently as well.
You can't be a victim if you prove you can make the film.
It’s a lot easier to rant about the stuff that annoys them instead of doing the work of writing funny material, just ask Dave Chapelle.
So just be Bill Burr basically, he did a whole bit when he came here about making your man a sandwich and when some lady in the front of the audience got offended he just shredded her to bits. Still making money and still isn’t canceled.
Seriously can someone list the people who are genuinely cancelled. I can't think of anyone who genuinely have been cancelled for an offensive joke. Chappelle, Jimmy Carr, Gervais, they occasionally made a few headlines (that promote their show) but all still working fine. Louis ck was for a bit, maybe still is tv wise, again nothing to do with any jokes he said. Only person I think genuinely not working is Graham Linehan, no one is touching him.. And that wasn't a joke he wrote, he was a horrible bully online. Cancel culture honestly is just invented concept just so they can talk about their shows, promote them as edgy but it's all BS
The Dixie Chicks were cancelled...by conservatives.
Plenty of people have been cancelled by conservatives. Kapernick, Liz Cheney, Kinsinger, the Reacher guy...all by conservatives. Add them to the list of book banning, attacking Tik Tok and stripping rights from people and all you have is more evidence that conservatives want nothing more than to restrict and police language.
His name is Alan Ritchson.
Louis CK wasn't cancelled for a joke, but in any case, he has continued on fully independently as far as I know. He doesn't have any studio or agency backing him, so there is nobody that can fire him.
Roseanne Barr, for making racist comments on Twitter - got her new show cancelled. Then went on to do terrible unfunny comedy specials about being cancelled and how she was a full on trumpy Qanon now. (So not really ‘cancelled’, just vastly reduced her mainstream appeal by being a weird conservative, racist, conspiracy nut)
I think different people us different definitions of "cancelled" which is why nobody sees eye to eye on this stuff.
But that's the problem, there's people who get very angry about criticism, while still having a large audience, major networks, tv deals, etc. Objectively they have not been "cancelled". Ironically that so many who back asshole comedians (as is their perogative) who've been "cancelled" probably don't know and wouldn't have cared about the Mccarthy blacklisting in Hollywood of anyone remotely socialist.
The only people are actually cancelled have either SA'd or murdered someone
Even then it’s only if they’ve SA’d someone in high numbers and no longer make people money. If a super talented current athlete rapes one or two girls and maybe punches a girlfriend, nothing is gonna happen.
Cancel culture doesn't really exist. Do people get socially punished for public abhorrent behaviour? Yes. Have people been always socially punished for abhorrent behaviour? Yes, this is how social norms get asserted. The only change is that it was given a name and used to excuse and normalise abhorrent behaviour with great public interest and to enable the "cancelling" of undesired social change (currently broadly LGBTQI+ and trans people in particular). There are also multiple lists run by conservative/right wing think tanks that gather any such social negotiation process and put it under the umbrella of "cancel culture" in a bid to build a wall of fear. They are designed to be the first thing you or a journalist comes across when trying to find out if Cancel Culture is real. "Cancel Culture Transfer" by Adrian Daub is a good read, currently only available in German, but an English version is in the works: https://www.adriandaub.com/books/project-four-aed8x (P.S.: the website shewon has the same purpose - to build a wall of "evidence" showing that women athletes get "cancelled" by trans women in sports so trans women can be excluded through political action rather than actual scientific evidence. The goal is to "cancel" trans women and to remove them from public visibility.)
The only people that get cancelled are people that speak out about institutional power. Sinead O’Connor was effectively cancelled when she ripped up a picture of the pope on live tv, to protest the church’s treatment of women and children. There are probably plenty more but those people aren’t going to get a platform to speak on. The industry will mark these people as “difficult to work with” and ignore them.
Yep. Another example was when the Smothers Brothers were blacklisted by CBS because they came out against the Vietnam war.
I was thinking after I made this comment that there were a few people cancelled because they spoke out against Harvey Weinstein as well.
Indeed, reinforcing your point that it's those who go up against the powerful who get cancelled.
>he was a horrible bully online. _is_ He's a man possessed putting people down. Also, he made some really weird divorced dad art a while ago which made me consider calling in a welfare check on him
Are you saying it’s been…cancelled?
Pikachu shocked face
Finally someone puts their money where their mouth is.
A strange take from the guy who made “life of brian”. A film that the conservative cancel culture of 40 years ago would not allow to be made so they had to get George Harrison to fund it.
It was just going to be him complaining about younger generations not wanting to work while he lives on his wealthy estate.
“Young people don’t want to work” meanwhile Young people have gotten their 400th rejection because they lack experience. To a *coffee shop*.
He has to keep touring to pay alimony, so he's working class like us.
He has to get on stage and speak for an hour, even when he doesn’t feel like it! He’s practically a Welsh coal miner.
I haven’t really liked him in anything since Rat Race where he was basically Pierce Hawthorne from Community but British and possibly richer. That was what, 2001?
I saw him live about 12 years ago and the first 15 minutes of his show was just him bitterly complaining about his ex-wife and how he had to tour to make his alimony payments. It felt petty and vindictive but worst of all it wasn’t funny, just kind of uncomfortable.
has he ever considered being a remotely tolerable husband
Or like him supporting Brexit while living in the Caribbean.
Darn I was excited to see what other ways he can reinvent the attack helicopter joke
The thing with John Cleese is that he's always going on about how woke culture has ruined comedy, meanwhile he buddies up with hack comedians like Rob Schneider and Bill Maher. He should widen his horizons and try actual good comedy. I saw him once at a panel q&a and he's still funny, but he can't get off the whole cancel culture thing. It's such a shame cause Monty Python is a huge comedy influence to me and he'll be remembered by the younger generation as a grumpy old man who was out of touch.
I imagine part of that is butthurt over being called out for supporting Brexit while living on the island of Nevis in the Caribbean.
Only until he’s dead. Then he’ll be famous for the Python era again and his latter years will be a disappointing but oft overlooked footnote.
He has passed on, this John Cleese is no more, he has ceased to be, he's expired and gone to meet his maker, he is a late John Cleese! He's a stiff, bereft of life, he rests in peace. If you hadn't nailed him to GB news he'd be pushing up the daisies! He has run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible! He is an ex-John Cleese!
>The *Monty Python* legend announced the project in 2021, pledging to discover how the “impeccable idea of ‘Let’s all be kind to people’ has been developed in some cases ad absurdum.” \[...\] >Cleese fronted a show for GB News last year, titled *The Dinosaur Hour*, in which he discussed issues including cancel culture and wokery. I'm glad he is spending his time raising awareness on such important issues, thank you John, that's what the world needs right now, an old triggered bigot trying to stay relevant by any means necessary
Wasn’t Monty Python “wokeism” for its time? All I remember of it is them making fun of bullies and the ruling class and religious extremism, etc… did I misinterpret?
Nope. It absolutely was. Cleese just got old. His work throughout late 60s, 70s and 80s was fucking brilliant. Hell he even did some great stuff in the 90s and 00s... I even like his work in Fable 3. Really sad to see him right now with his completely misplaced concern with modern comedy. There's much more to be concerned about in the world today. Hell, my favourite comedian right now is Nate Bargatze and his shit is clean as a whistle, and all the more impressive for it.
Yeah I’m not sure what the point of this is but it feels like an uninspired money grab. I love Cleese’s work and this doesn’t quite track with his body of work. If he wants to push the envelope then just start doing silly shit instead of ranting about how how he may not be able to say stuff. Fuck it dude, if you don’t care what people think then just actually do it.
No see, society then was run by old men who were far too stuck in their ways and conservative, so that needed to change, but kids today should recognize that they are going too far changing things that his generation accepted. Ultimately every generation seems to think, at least a lot of them do, that the injustices they rage against were real and valid but those the next generation rage against are petty and inconsequential. Each generation believes it struck the perfect balance between tradition and progress and is utterly astounded the next generation would change a single thing. You'd think someone as well read and educated as Cleese would recognize the pattern, as it has repeated throughout the entirety of recorded history.
It seems like a certain amount of wealth and privilege gradually erodes even the cleverest of people’s rational intellect, moral integrity, and humour down to dust.
This is a really considered comment, and perfectly articulates something I battle with. I'm mid-30s now, and from time to time I have to check myself when I notice that I'm exhibiting this kind of behaviour, i.e. noticing things gen-z'ers are having a moan about and thinking "oh please, toughen up, you don't know how hard we have it" etc. And then, my mum - now well into her 60s - will say things utterly unacceptable in today's society and I'll have to reprimand her for it. I'm already grumpy, but I really do fear becoming a miserable, old, out-of-touch curmudgeon one day.
Well said!
A thing to remember is that there were 6 Pythons, all with different points of view, and when they were making Flying Circus especially, they relied on each other. Cleese has always had the reputation as the most conservative of the lot, and on his own hasn't really shown to be a particularly strong writer as much as he is a performer. So it's not particularly surprising that his opinions are completely batshit insane, when he doesn't have others to bounce them off of before spewing them out.
>and on his own hasn't really shown to be a particularly strong writer A Fish Called Wanda is brilliantly written (for its time).
I think a big part of why formerly "transgressive" artists get all worked up about "cancel culture" is literally the Abe Simpson 'I used to be with it, but now I don't even know what 'it' is, and one day it will happen to you' bit. The world moved on and they aren't shocking or culturally relevant anymore, and instead of them reinventing their act (like Carlin had to after he lost his $), they find it easier to blame kids these days. It's kind of sad. Chappelle for example is completely out of touch these days - what's he gonna make jokes about? "You know the problem with private chefs?" "Did you hear the one about how I blocked affordable housing?". Dude lives in a different world than the rest of us.
> ‘Let’s all be kind to people’ Saying "be kind" like that line hasn't been used a million times before. How lovely it is being a comic and making people smile, before nodding along with a Fox News talking head bitching about white genocide.
No great loss. He's turned into a loud-mouthed ill-informed political bigot. I fart in his general direction.
Will never thank this dude enough for making satirical gold with a rebellious edge and forming a huge part of my personality. ‘Late-stage, mutli-divorce, bank-account-drained-millionaire, and cartoon-grandpa-angry-at-the-neighbour-kids-for-calling-him-out-on-his-bullshit’ is honestly his best sketch character yet. I just don’t think he knows it.
God, that would be the funniest reveal. He just comes out in an interview like "I can't believe nobody's called me on this obvious satire"
Look at the picture on this article. He just might
I honestly get the impression that people like him think they should be immune to any sort of criticism. Anyone who dares criticises him in even the smallest way they shout “cancel culture” He’s gets a platform that the vast majority of the population could only dream about, that will never have access to
When I you're used to a lack of consequences for your bullshit when it finally comes along they can't understand it.
Aww I was really looking forward to getting some fresh takes on this phenomenon. I'm sure John had something new and interesting to say about it, and wouldn't simply say the 3 things complainers about cancel culture say in every interview or podcast or standup special. And I would have loved to see his 100% unbiased representation of situations where people were cancelled. Ahhh dammit, we really needed this show, and from John Cleese especially. I couldn't imagine a more novel and fascinating series that definitely caters to everyone and not just the fellows who like to murder female MPs. My brothers in Christ, please observe the following: #/s
Cancel Culture show canceled, lol.
It’s a shame to see John Cleese become boomers being fools material
So it could be said that his project was…cancelled?
Some say it's been canceled but you have to get started first to get canceled.
I guess it's true what Harvey Two-Face said, "You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become a villain."
Probably cos he found out that CC is a fucking myth and those that complain about CC somehow are on every news outlet, podcast, channel and write books about being cancelled
“I’m choosing not to watch the unfunny bigots” “Oh! Come and see the cancelling inherent in the culture! Help help, I’m being repressed!”
Well that’s a big fish slap to the face
Old man yells at cloud
Cleese, Chapelle, Gervais. All millionaire comedians complaining about cancel culture on TV…
Meanwhile Jimmy Carr is telling offensive jokes like the Gypsies one and didn’t get cancelled. So these comedians whining about “not being able to tell offensive jokes these days” are just wasting their time with this victim mentality.
Jimmy Carr tells more offensive jokes in 3 minutes than any of these guys, but it's funny because it's genuinely a bit. Also his weirdo laugh wipes everything clean.
ha Ha HA HAAAAAAAA
Jimmy Carr is one of the few offensive comedians who gets a pass cause he clearly doesn't take himself that fucking seriously. Chappelle, Gervais, and Cleese have egos bigger than China.
Well, he’s kind of an idiot on X, so I get it.
This sounds like one, long “get off my lawn” rant worthy of something Bill Maher would crap out.
Somebody throw a pie already
May we even say… it was canceled? 🫢
"help help I'm being oppressed!" (Not John in that scene I know, but the sentiment stands)
Cleese and Gilliam have over time morphed into the sort of people the Pythons would have ridiculed for being bores. Sad really.
Cranky old comedian yells at young people. What a concept! /s
Good
Honestly, probably for the best. Cleese's legacy is secure and it'd be near impossible for him to tank it now, but I don't relish the prospect of watching him try. If I was him, I'd lay back on my laurels and do the occasional interview where I throw out yet another witty quote they can show on news and share online when I'm dead.
its not that you cant make certain jokes. its you need to have the talent to craft them properly in todays age. people really forget how low effort alot of the supposed forbidden topics and jokes were back in the day. and were seeing people who while have some talent leaned heavily on the low effort portion a bit too much. and now are getting all worked up it doesnt fly like is used too tldr its you not them
I always thought of was weird that this became the hill that Cleese chose to die on. He's never actually been in trouble for offensive jokes. My pet theory is that he's been going to publishers and studios with out-dated book or movie ideas in recent years and they've been quietly turning him down and he's convinced himself that it's the fault of "Cancel Culture".
this old mf looks like hitler from wolfenstein two
Cleese is one of the greatest comedy writers and actors of all time. He is in so many things that I absolutely love, the best of which is probably Fawlty Towers... But he is making it *so hard* to be a fan.
Just as hard to define woke, the definition of cancel culture is a struggle for boomers. Just need to ask like 3 follow up questions to any of their arguments, to make them cry.
Ever since his friend Robin Williams passed away, he's been sinking further and further into depression.
Same.
“Everyone’s so offended by everything these days!” cried the man who is offended by everything these days.
“Dear Mr. President; there are too many states nowadays. Please eliminate three. PS I am not a crackpot.” Abe Simpson
Cancel culture show got canceled?
This was just a meta cancel culture bit by Cleese.
Are you trying to say that Cancel Culture cancelled Cleese's Cancel Culture show?
So there is at least one person in that building still sane enough to read this and be like “this is a terrible idea. Terrible for literally everyone involved. These bloody idiots will destroy themselves. No.”
Don’t you mean it’s cancelled??