John Cleese Doesn’t Actually Understand Why ‘Fawlty Towers’ Offends People
With multiple alimony-inspired money-making projects in need of promotion, Monty Python legend John Cleese recently appeared on ITV’s Lorraine in the U.K. Unfortunately, things got off to a rocky start when Cleese inadvertently insulted the interviewer.
As reported by Yahoo!, guest host Kate Garraway asked Cleese if he would consider appearing in a reality TV show, like The Traitors. “Only if I went completely mad, “Cleese responded. “I can’t imagine anything more awful. And you get offered so much money. (But) I couldn’t stand the humiliation.”
Garraway mentioned that she has appeared on several of these shows, adding “so we’ve got off to a great start, haven’t we?” Although she somehow restrained herself from pointing out that she perhaps doesn’t need lessons in avoiding career humiliation from the fifth-billed star of Daddy Daughter Trip.
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Cleese also discussed Fawlty Towers, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. “The key was that we took so much time over it,” Cleese said of Fawlty Towers’ success, pointing out that he and Connie Booth spent six weeks writing each episode.
When asked about the controversial episode “The Germans,” which made headlines when it was “temporarily removed from a BBC-owned streaming platform” in 2020, Cleese suggested that “the only people who never worried about that were the Germans.”
Cleese went on to defend the show by pointing to several instances of German people not finding the episode offensive. “When I went to Cologne where we actually made a version of Fawlty Towers in Germany, the first thing they showed me was the Fawlty Towers ‘German’ episode,” Cleese noted. “They always thought it was funny.” He also recalled a time when he was “in a hotel in Hamburg” and a German businessman shouted “Hey John, don’t mention the war!” And “the whole hotel laughed.”
When pressed about the issue of certain jokes offending audiences today, Cleese had this to say: “I think they should just go away and be offended on their own. I’m offended all the time by most of the things that are happening in the world at the moment, I’m not out there trying to stop it. If you find that kind of humor funny that’s fine, if someone else disapproves of it that’s their problem.
But Cleese’s assertion that Fawlty Towers isn’t really offensive because it didn’t annoy German people is a pretty glaring mischaracterization of the actual situation.
The episode was flagged by the BBC, not because of the scenes in which a concussed Basil Fawlty tries and fails to avoid bringing up World War II, but due to a brief moment in which the hotel’s elderly resident, Major Gowen, goes on a disturbingly casual racist rant in which he drops the N-word multiple times.
Cleese should know that the Major’s dialogue, and not the jokes about Germany, is at the root of the controversy. After all, certain broadcasters edited the scene out completely more than a decade ago, and Cleese himself removed it from his recent West End stage adaptation of Fawlty Towers. “Those scenes where the Major used a couple of words you can’t use now, racial slurs they would come under, we took them out,” Cleese stated at the time, before going on to complain that he was only doing so because “literal-minded people don’t understand metaphor, irony or comic exaggeration.”
It’s unclear if Cleese has found any irony in his defense of a scene that was seemingly intended to satirize old, out-of-touch conservatives who refuse to adhere to the evolving values of contemporary society.
