John Cleese Explains Why He Thinks It’s Okay to Tell Ethnic Jokes
John Cleese hasn’t exactly made good on his promise to quit Twitter/X after he announced he was moving to Substack last month. Cleese continues to spout off about politics on Elon Musk’s dime, but at least he’s saving the good stuff for his Substack subscribers. Today, for example, he shared a two-minute video on the difference between affectionate teasing and nasty teasing, especially when it comes to ethnic jokes.
Oh, Dad.
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To illustrate his point, Cleese explained a segment of his stage show in which he delivers a series of jokes based on the hilarious differences between the nationalities. Want to hear a few?
- “How do you get 200 Canadians to jump into an ice-cold swimming pool? The answer is you ask them nicely.”
- “How can you tell a Turkish airplane has landed at the airport? Because it has hair under both wings.”
- “Why do the French have so many civil wars? It’s so they can win one now and again.”
Classics! But then Cleese gets to the part where he loses his audience every night. “And then I start a Mexican joke, and the whole audience goes GASP! You can hear a pin drop. Anxiety suddenly fills the theater!”
Cleese stops his act and asks the audience what happened. “And people realize that’s the joke and they laugh, and then we could start talking about it.”
Why is it, Cleese wonders, that he can joke about Swedes, Germans, French, Italians, Americans or the British but he can’t make a joke about Mexicans?
The answer seems obvious, but Cleese draws a weird conclusion. “Is it because they are such feeble, helpless, hopeless people that they cannot take a joke?” he wonders. “Because if that’s our reason for not making jokes about Mexicans, I think it’s rather condescending.”
Cleese is right, up to a point — if white people didn’t joke about Mexicans because of perceived helplessness, that would be condescending.
But nobody thinks that! It doesn’t occur to Cleese that his jokes about Americans, Brits and Canadians — people who look like him, people for whom he could be mistaken — are safe territory because he’s basically the target. It’s self-deprecating. How has he not realized that “white people” are the common denominator in his book of approved joke subjects?
A rich, old white man making jokes about Black people, Asians or Mexicans is another thing entirely, and not because those people are weak or feeble. Instead, it might have something to do with a long legacy of punchlines rooted in bigotry and oppression, comedy used to reinforce stereotypes that keep people in the proper pecking order.
Here’s what matters, according to Cleese: “Is the joke intended to make people laugh and feel good, or is the joke intended to hurt people’s feelings and make them feel bad about each other?”
But again, the Monty Python veteran has things backward. It’s great if Cleese intends no malice with his funny Mexican bit, but what if Mexicans are offended anyway? Don Rickles made a career out of “I’m roasting you with love!” as a defense for some pretty heinous material.
Comedians don’t get to decide if jokes are offensive any more than they get to decide whether or not jokes are funny. It’s not up to you, Mr. Cleese — the audience always makes the final call.
