Splitsider

Posts tagged as john cleese

Tragedy Plus Time

Divorce Is Hilarious… Sometimes

by | April 16th, 2013

Welcome to the latest installment of Tragedy Plus Time. Each segment will focus on a particular ‘life crisis’ — sometimes globally tragic, sometimes more of a personal affair — and we’ll explore how many of the comedians we know and love have dealt with it.

Comedians having been talking about the chaotic state of their marriages since the dawn of time, or at least since Henny Youngman got into the game. Marriage is an unavoidable topic for performers that want to use their personal lives in their material. And they know the audience doesn’t want to hear about how happy or in love they are — they want to [...]

Beefs

Eric Idle and John Cleese Are in a Fight and It's Ruining Everything

by | December 15th, 2011

You know things are bad in the world when even Monty Python members are fighting. After Eric Idle kicked John Cleese out of Spamalot and noted that "It wasn’t mean — he’s had millions of dollars from it," Cleese tweeted references to "Yoko Idle." He argued (see below) that Idle's made $13 million from the show, but Cleese still hasn't seen a full million. Then Idle said that he "wouldn’t take £13 million to be married to [Cleese]" and Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones started crying and asking if they could go live with their aunt because Eric and John won't stop yelling mean things and [...]

British STuff

The Time When John Cleese Wrote and Bet and Got Angry at a Newspaper

by | May 4th, 2012

Letters of Note has a exchange from 1982 between John Cleese and the editor of The Sun, which stemmed from a report in that paper claiming that on the set of The Monty Python's Meaning of Life, Cleese got frustrated at the weather and chastised a bunch of extras dressed as Zulu warriors by asking "Which one of you bastards did a rain dance?" Cleese, however, did not agree that he said that so he wrote a strongly worded letter. That ended with:

"I know what happened. I am a zany madcap comic, and your writer thought of the joke and decided to attribute it to [...]

muppets

The Nine Greatest Celebrity Muppet Show Hosts

by | December 1st, 2011

One of my favorite Not the Nine O'Clock News skits of all-time begins with the Not Team relaxing at home, reading their newspapers. One after another, they read something amazing in the paper — "El Salvador Is Going to Be a Second Vietnam," something about goats and artificial limbs and flamingos — but show little to no emotion. Finally one of them sees something in the paper that excites everyone: "Good Lord…there's someone I've heard of guesting on The Muppet Show."

The Muppet Show premiered in 1976, and 35 years later, many of its celebrity guest hosts have, like so many other millions from pop culture, been [...]

Lectures

John Cleese on Creativity

by | April 9th, 2012

"Creativity is not a talent, it is a way of operating." — This lecture by John Cleese from 1991 is long, but truly excellent and worth watching in full if you've never seen it before. It's got some jokes in it, sure, but mostly it's an earnest rumination on what it means to be creative, and how difficult creativity is to nail down.

-->