John Cleese Tells Fox News That ‘Disastrous’ Wokeness Marks the ‘Death of Creativity’
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John Cleese, one of the masterminds behind the Monty Python franchise, lamented the “disastrous” effect of wokeism on modern comedy in an interview with Fox News Digital this week.
Wokeism, Cleese said, equals the “death of creativity” as artists do not have the freedom to create without worrying about the potential of being canceled by stepping out of line.
I think it’s particularly worrying at the moment because you can only create in an atmosphere of freedom, where you’re not checking everything you say critically before you move on. What you have to be able to do is to build without knowing where you’re going because you’ve never been there before. That’s what creativity is—you have to be allowed to build. And a lot of comedians now are sitting there and when they think of something, they say something like, ‘Can I get away with it? I don’t think so. So and so got into trouble, and he said that, oh, she said that.’ You see what I mean? And that’s the death of creativity.
Asked whether comedians have the freedom to actually be funny today, Cleese simply answered, “No,” according to Fox News’ Joseph A. Wulfsohn and Kristen Altus.
Cleese’s comments came after he spoke at the FreedomFest this month in Las Vegas.
Late-night comedy, the 82-year-old said, has especially been affected by political thought and constantly changing cultural standards, naming Stephen Colbert as an example. While Cleese — who has poked fun at Fox News in the past — is a fan of the comedian, he said Colbert’s audience is “more obviously politically aligned than it used to be.”
When the British Cleese arrived in America, he said he was impressed with the freedom of thought and the friendships that could be had across political aisles, something he saw eroding way back when Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House.
When I first got to America in the 60s… two things happened. First of all, I very much admired the cross-the-aisle friendships and thought we don’t have that in England. We have real battles between the Tories and the Labour, but in America there seems to be these- and this was destroyed by Newt Gingrich, quite deliberately, for purposes of power. I think that’s a tragedy.
Other members of the Monty Python comedy troupe have also targeted wokeism in recent years, including Monty Python and the Holy Grail director Terry Gilliam who told the Wall Street Journal in 2019 that you “can’t laugh at anybody” anymore.
“We can’t laugh at anybody because it causes offense. There’s a kind of egotism out there: ‘Oh, they were making fun of me.’ Never heard of you. I’m making fun of an idea,” the filmmaker said.
