John Cleese Has a John Cleese Problem

Part of the genius of Monty Python’s comedy was its ability to blend irony with absurdity. In the process, the troupe could knock you to the floor in laughter, while sometimes making some really profound points. You would think that one of the legendary players of the group, John Cleese, who is now 86 years old, would be able to connect the dots on what’s happening all around him right now. There is plenty of irony and plenty of absurdity.

I’d like to think that his age is not catching up with him on this. He’s got 4.6 million followers on the X platform, and he’s pretty active on it, and he likes to share pretty good content. He’s still articulate, and he seems to have his finger on the pulse… well, sort of. And that’s why he has a John Cleese problem. He’s having trouble these days making connections, and yet he is so close. 

One of his rants in recent days has been about the BBC’s lack of coverage of the Iran revolution. 

This is the best explanation I've read so far

Incredible as it seems

I am so ashamed of the BBC https://t.co/JJgv98PNLE

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) January 8, 2026

It appears that it’s only occurring to Cleese now that the BBC hasn’t been a real news organization for some time. He seems appalled that the BBC would censor news coming out of Iran, yet the BBC has been ground zero for the global censorship movement for years. 

The BBC founded the Orwellian-named “Trusted News Initiative” (TNI), which is anything but trustworthy. TNI was launched in 2019, just before the pandemic. It seeks to actively and aggressively identify “harmful misinformation,” share intelligence across TNI members, and coordinate the suppression, labeling, or de-amplification of flagged content. Also known as censorship. 

Who decides what is truth and what is misinformation? TNI does, of course. 

The BBC is also associated with NewsGuard, an organization that assigns numerical trust scores to news sites, and then it works to embed its ratings into browsers, tech platforms and schools. 

Who decides what sites can be trusted and which ones cannot? NewsGuard does, of course. 

As comedian George Carlin once said, “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.” 

So Cleese is just figuring out that the BBC selectively covers some stories and selectively buries others, and that most recently it’s decided to bury the Iran uprising story. At first his posts on X seemed to be a sincere attempt to find out why. Later it seems, he started to get it. 

The BBC doesn’t want to offend the Muslim population throughout the UK, lest the country find itself with an uprising of its own. As of 2021, the UK had roughly 4 million Muslims, or roughly 6% of the total population. London alone counts 1.3 million Muslims. 

So to keep them happy, obviously, the BBC would rather hide the fact that Iran is blowing up right now, and it looks as if the citizens of that country are rejecting Islam and Islamic government in a big way. 

Why, in God's name, has the BBC been told to ignore this ? https://t.co/fp8eURhN5U

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) January 6, 2026

Clearly, Cleese understands that the people of Iran are unhappy with decades of suppression under the thumb of Islamic rule. I’ll assume he knows just how inhumane this has been, since he seems to be in support of the people. 

At the same time, Cleese is posting and reposting, critically, about America and the Trump administration on the issue of immigration enforcement, including this repost:

"The great irony is of course that Donald Trump is the son of an immigrant. The grandson of an immigrant and married to an immigrant.

In fact two of his three wives were immigrants, proving yet again that immigrants will do the jobs that even Americans are not willing to do." pic.twitter.com/fCcDJPQqaw

— Irlandarra (@aldamu_jo) January 9, 2026

Cleese can see that the BBC is nervous about the consequences of offending a huge number of Islamic immigrants it welcomed into its country, only to begin the destruction of English culture. He can see that Islamic rule is oppressive. But he cannot see that President Donald Trump is working right now to avoid the very mistakes the UK made to put itself in its current predicament. 

The English comedian can’t seem to grasp that if you don’t want to fear backlash from millions of Islamists who hate western culture, you don’t open the floodgates to let them in at scale to your country. 

Cleese is an old school lib, which is to say, we may not agree with him on the means, but I think we all agree what we all want a more civil and civilized world. His intentions aren’t bad. But I do think he needs to catch up. 

The BBC was never your friend, John. Why were you so naïve for so long, expecting it to behave like a real news organization? As for America’s immigration enforcement, to reiterate, we really don’t want to repeat the mistakes of the UK. Don’t blame us for that. 

All of that said, I will forever be indebted to Cleese for all of the laughs he gave us, and how prescient he and his fellow Monty Python players were when they gave us this:

Thank you, John.

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