Fawlty Towers

‘Comedy is much more important than I thought’: John Cleese on the press, his new talk show and the power of Fawlty Towers

John Cleese enjoys tough questions. He’s currently touring America with An Evening with the Late John Cleese, and a substantial part of the show is thrown open to the audience. He tells me that when someone asks a particularly rude question – such as ‘Why can’t you stay married?’ – it simply adds to the fun. Another one of his favourites is ‘What’s the worst film you ever made?’ I ask him the same question. ‘Well, there are a lot of contenders,’ John says. Apparently his ‘sabre-toothed daughter’ Camilla might have the answer, because she often introduces him to the stage as ‘the star of The Pink Panther 2’. When

Should vintage comedy be judged by today’s standards?

The British sense of humour is a source of power, soft and otherwise. The anthropologist Kate Fox observed that our national motto should be ‘Oh, come off it’, and a patriotic raised eyebrow has been cited as our chief defence against demagogues. We see ourselves through a comic lens, a nation of Delboys and Mainwarings, Brents and Leadbetters, Gavins and Staceys. But despite comedy being as central to British culture as music, books on it have few equivalents to Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming (on punk), Rob Young’s Electric Eden (folk rock) or Simon Reynolds’s Energy Flash (rave). A nice fat volume about our national comic self-image by an astute music