Was John Cleese Always This Bad?

These days, John Cleese is as well known for his comedy career as he is for his “being an embarrassingly out-of-touch curmudgeon” career. Whether it’s complaining about imaginary persecution, feuding with his former collaborators or continually raging against the specter of cancel culture, for a lot of fans, late-stage Cleese straight-up sucks. 

This begs the question: Was John Cleese always this shitty?

Certainly the Cleese of the 21st century, even before his most recent transgressions, went out of his way to share a number of garbage opinions — from his claims that London is no longer an “English city” thanks to immigration, to his suggestion that his James Bond role was minimized because of “Asians” (and not because nobody needed John Cleese to be in a James Bond movie).

And in terms of burning any goodwill he’d accrued since his Monty Python days, not many comedians have alienated an entire city purely through acts of rudeness, as Cleese did with Palmerston North, New Zealand — they even named a garbage dump after him as a result.  

But did people think he was an asshole back in the 20th century, when he was doing his best work? Certainly some collaborators had difficulties with Cleese. Other Pythons have labeled Cleese as “difficult,” and Terry Jones reportedly once threw a typewriter at his head during an argument.

Worse still, during the making of Fawlty Towers, Cleese physically abused Andrew Sachs, the actor who played the Spanish waiter Manuel. Instead of, you know, acting during scenes in which Basil Fawlty hit Manuel, Cleese actually struck Sachs. “He never stopped,” Sachs told The Guardian in 2014. “There was one time when he hit me so hard I fell over, and I couldn’t get up.”

When the actor tried to stand up for himself following the shoot, Cleese dismissed his concerns. “I went up to the bar and said: ‘John, I’m really rather hurt by what you did to me, knocking me out and then not even apologizing,’” Sachs recalled. “He hardly noticed and said, ‘What are you talking about? You are not doing a long run in the West End. It’s once in your performance. Pull yourself together and I’ll buy you another Babycham.’ So that’s what I got out of it.”

As we’ve mentioned before, it’s been suggested that Fawlty Towers’ co-writer, and Cleese’s ex-wife, Connie Booth, filled the Basil character with Cleese’s real-life faults, including a genuine hostility toward immigrant servers. “It was kind of like therapy,” Booth claimed. 

While all of this happened behind the scenes, Cleese did get the opportunity to show off his dickish side to the public during a controversy involving the classic 1988 comedy A Fish Called Wanda. The movie is obviously beloved, but at the time, it was criticized by the National Stuttering Project, owing to the fact that Michael Palin’s character Ken has a speech impediment that’s played for laughs, and ultimately cured via murder.

The NSP’s issue with the film wasn’t so much with its humor as the fact that the storyline perpetuated a “major myth” about stutterers, illustrating that stuttering is caused by either shyness, nervousness or an “emotional disorder,” which isn’t true.

It’s an entirely fair point. Following the protest, the film’s producer, Michael Shamberg, even co-signed a letter with the head of the NSP noting that “while we feel that the film accurately portrays, in the interest of comedy, how one person who stutters might react in certain absurd situations, it was never our intention that this be taken as a portrayal of all people who stutter.”

“He didn’t attack the idea (that) you could be funny about it; he just wanted to attack certain stereotypes,” Shamberg told the press at the time.

Cleese, on the other hand, was less sympathetic. “We also had a lot of complaints about the Kevin Kline character from the American Association of Stupid People,” Cleese joked. “We don’t laugh at perfection.” 

So, yeah, it seems like Cleese has always been a difficult, self-serving person who doesn’t love listening to the needs of others. But perhaps everyone just ignored it because he was making things people actually enjoyed, not cameoing in movies like Daddy Daughter Trip.

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