John Cleese had his microphone taken away at an SXSW comedy event in Austin, TX for having the audacity to joke about reparations, according to the Daily Mail.
“[People] get competitive about this business of being oppressed,” he deadpanned. “We were oppressed, the English, by the Romans from about 0 to 400.”
Cleese asked, “You do know the British have been slaves twice, right?”
The British comic insisted England was owed “reparations” from both Italy and France, referring to the historic invasions of the Romans, and 1000 years later by the Normans under William the Conqueror.
“I want reparations from Italy,” he told the stunned crowd. “And then the Normans came over in 1066… they were horrible people from France and they colonised us for 30 years and we need reparations there too, I’m afraid.”
The Monty Python legend, creator of Fawlty Towers and writer/director/star of A Fish Called Wanda, was making a broader historical point in his usual dry way.
All of this was part of a 90-minute show called “John Cleese in Conversation,” in which he dismissed the idea that the British Empire was somehow the first ever to colonize other nations.
He described human history as “a history of crime,” and on that point, he wasn’t being funny. “It’s a history of people who were stronger beating up people who were weaker and it’s always been that. It’s deeply, deeply distasteful.”
Indeed. That’s why it feels so good to joke about it.
That is, if you’re a funny person or can at least appreciate when another person is funny.
The SXSW “comedy” panel was neither funny nor appreciative of Cleese, who is supremely funny.
Watch him in Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks sketch, skewering the British government’s habit of subsidizing, well, anything.
Who else could sublimely combine goofy physicality with overdone stiff-upper-lip Britishness — all to make a political point about the absurdity of big government?
That’s genius.
Nevertheless, panelist Dulcé Sloan, allegedly a comic herself, at one point forcibly relieved Cleese of his microphone.
Sloan claims she did it to “save a comic whose career I respect.”
Host Dan Pasternack — a producer of somewhat comedic Hollywood television material — accused Sloan of having “saved the colonizer.”
Is that comedy gold or what, amirite?
Let me say something directly to Sloan.
Ms. Sloan, John Cleese had produced more than two decades of gut-busting laughs before you were born, and he was just getting started. If you actually respected him or his comedy — or even merely understood it — you would not have tried to cancel an 82-year-old man. I would add that he’s forgotten more about humor than you’ve ever learned, except he hasn’t forgotten anything and you haven’t learned anything.
Let me say something directly to Pasternack, too.
You don’t know what a colonizer is and I don’t know who you are, so now we’re even.
The worst part of the story? The Austin crowd booed Cleese and cheered Sloan.
And this is why we can’t laugh at bad things anymore.
Here’s what we are supposed to laugh at — Sloan skewering white women talking about feminism and how she manages her intersectional oppression.
She’ll be here all week. Watch your veal.
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