Comedy / Reviews
Review: John Cleese, Colston Hall
If glorified book launches are the fate of many of our ageing comic talents, let’s hope that more of them can be as fascinating, good-natured and funny as this.
An unadvertised Steve Coogan takes to the stage in the first minute, telling us that Cleese has taken ill. It’s a somewhat limp comic ruse, but the next two hours of rambling discussion between the two men – based very loosely on Cleese’s new autobiography, and some enthusiastic audience questions – is something of a comedy geek’s private heaven.
The comics steer mostly clear of Cleese’s private life, so there is little opportunity for him to display the allegedly misogynistic venom for one of his ex-wives that peppered his recent solo shows. He’s now happily married, he tells us. “Are you sure?” Coogan deadpans back.
Instead, the focus is on the craft of comedy, and Coogan proves as spirited an interviewer on the subject as you might expect. On Fawlty Towers, Cleese ponders that almost all humour is based on one of two things: people behaving inappropriately, and things going wrong. Coogan relates how, in those pre-VCR days, he used to rehearse entire scenes with his family in the kitchen immediately after watching a new episode, for fear of forgetting any beautifully scripted detail.
Cleese is engagingly sharp on the way that comedy has changed over the course of his career. In the 1950s, he recalls, it was taboo for most people even to make jokes about the Prime Minister – a situation almost unimaginable to Coogan, 25 years his junior. He tells a funny and touching anecdote of an older judge that he met at a group therapy session in the 1970s, who was so embarrassed by Fawlty Towers’ relatively new type of social ‘cringe’ comedy that he had to leave his own living room and listen to the episode from outside the door.
The world’s moved on again of course, and most of the laughs tonight are heavy on warm recognition and low on surprise, a situation of which Cleese seems fully and archly aware. But for anyone interested in the roots of some of our most defining comedies, this reluctant national institution proves he’s still got plenty to say.
John Cleese was at Colston Hall on Sunday, 21 December.
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