John Cleese: Why There Is No Hope, Cadogan Hall, review: the wretched sight of a national treasure boring for Britain
We look – or at least used to look – to John Cleese to send up pomposity, self-importance and snooty superiority. His famous “Ministry of Silly Walks” Python skit alone gave us a defining image of earnest-faced, inherently ridiculous officialdom. Basil Fawlty remains a never bettered incarnation of a hotelier under the influence of uptightness, officiousness and irascibility. And in Clockwise (1986), one of his funniest films, he was the pedagogical stickler for order who got his chaotic comeuppance.
None of these comic achievements – and the understanding of behaviour they embody – was discussed in his pay-to-view live-stream from Cadogan Hall on Sunday night, which instead seemed calculated to demonstrate, over a tedious hour, that Cleese has become the very thing, humourless and earnest, that he once made a universal laughing stock.
Hopes were high ahead of this near-lone address (thanks to current guidelines) that he might entertainingly set the world to rights. He has been outspoken of late, lambasting the (temporary) removal – from UKTV – of the “Germans” episode of Fawlty Towers on the grounds of its offensiveness. And he has warned that comedians are having “to set the bar according to what we are told by the most touchy, most emotionally unstable and fragile and least stoic people in the country”.
Amen to all that, but this e-Cleesiastical sermon delivered no similar hallelujah moments of revelation, let alone excoriation on such close-to-home subjects. Instead – aside from a few welcome quips at his own expense (he likened Cadogan Hall’s surreally vacant auditorium to “the Annual General Meeting of the Apathy Society”) – the national treasure decided to bore for Britain on the bleak topic indicated in the title: Why There Is No Hope.
He wasn’t joking, he explained. “There is no hope that we’ll ever live in a rational, sensible, well-organised, kind, intelligent society.” Talk about failing to read the room. Please Mr Cleese, we’re in a pandemic – could you help us look on the bright side of life? But no, barely alluding to Covid-19, an attack on allegedly know-nothing comedy gate-keepers at the BBC established a note of unwavering disdain, as if he had morphed into monotonous wind instrument.
His thesis, a dead-parroting of the Dunning-Kruger Effect – whereby people incompetent at something (even those supposedly expert in it) are incapable of acknowledging that deficiency – took in medics, critics, even scientists. From Murdoch to millennials, few were spared the rod of weary, headmasterly disapproval (himself excepted: “At least I know that I don’t know what I’m talking about”).
After the lecture fizzled out, as if in fulfilment of a contractual obligation, there was a brief, undemanding Q&A. Given that each query dutifully adhered to the subject at hand, the suspicion lingered that they were generated in-house from the handful of attending acolytes.
“I think that’s enough, don’t you?” he abruptly declared, at once articulating the boredom of those watching and displaying such a lack of self-knowledge (vis value for your £21.99) as to drive a final nail of irony into the coffin of the occasion. Cleese’s comedy legacy is assured, but I’d rather submit to the Spanish Inquisition than watch his wretched disquisition again.
Streaming at: johncleese-uniquelives.com
