Did John Cleese Just Cancel His Own Cancel Culture Show?

After years of railing against wokeness on television and social media, Monty Python legend John Cleese’s long-awaited series devoted entirely to combatting political correctness may have been canceled by his calendar.

Three years ago, Cleese and the production company Expectation Entertainment announced that cancel culture’s days on British television were numbered. On the U.K. station Channel 4, their planned series, obviously titled John Cleese: Cancel Me, was supposed to examine “how the impeccable idea of ‘Let’s all be kind to people’ has been developed in some cases ad absurdum,” specifically in how it has affected the world of comedy. That description seems like an imperfect thesis on the state of Cleese’s late career, as the 84-year-old icon’s creative output in recent years has largely been composed of presenting gigs on shows about censorship at GB News, a channel often described to Americans as “U.K. Fox News,” and an occasional acting job in a Roman Polanski film.

Those engagements, coupled with Cleese’s comedy tour in which he sits down and tells all the race jokes he’s “not allowed” to perform before playing clips from A Fish Called Wanda, seem to be complicating Cleese’s plan to land a death blow on cancel culture with the Channel 4 series. As Deadline reported late last week, John Cleese: Cancel Me is dead in the water due to scheduling difficulties with the title comic — and here I thought the series would fizzle out because Cleese wasted all his poorly informed cancel culture rants on Twitter.

When Channel 4 first announced that they would provide Cleese with his biggest platform yet from which to claim that he had been silenced, Cleese said of John Cleese: Cancel Me, “I’m delighted to have a chance to find out, on camera, about all the aspects of so-called political correctness,” adding the obvious comment, “There’s so much I really don’t understand.” 

“I want to bring the various reasonings right out in the open so that people can be clearer in their minds what they agree with, what they don’t agree with, and what they still can’t make their mind up about,” Cleese said of the goal of the scrapped series. How, exactly, Cleese planned on stretching out this vague premise into numerous episodes of a TV show was unclear at the time, and, now that Cleese has supposedly abandoned the project, I wonder if there was ever a good answer in the first place.

The ideological problem with devoting an entire series to the notion that rich, powerful and beloved figures like Cleese are somehow restricted in their conduct and their speech is that the existence of a show like John Cleese: Cancel Me would contradict the very premise: that Cleese is canceled. Additionally, there is hilarious irony in the fact that John Cleese: Cancel Me failed because, at 84 years of age and with little left to say besides “I’m not allowed to say anything,” Cleese is simply getting too much work to devote the time necessary to proving that comics like him have been blacklisted for being too provocative. 

However, those die-hard Cleese fans who couldn't wait to hear weekly rants about cancel culture on TV instead of on his Twitter feed should not feel too dismayed at the reported cancelation of John Cleese: Cancel Me — the Fawly Towers reboot is still in the works, and Basil Fawlty is all-but-guaranteed to start beef over some bullshit like a gender neutral bathroom debate.