I'm reading John Cleese's autobiography, SO ANYWAY. Cleese is a member of Monty Python. I haven't wanted to put it down, it's rather funny. Here's a description:
John Cleese’s huge comedic influence has stretched across
generations; his sharp irreverent eye and the unique brand of physical
comedy he perfected with Monty Python, on Fawlty Towers, and beyond now seem written into comedy’s DNA. In this rollicking memoir, So, Anyway…,
Cleese takes readers on a Grand Tour of his ascent in the entertainment
world, from his humble beginnings in a sleepy English town and his
early comedic days at Cambridge University (with future Python partner
Graham Chapman who was becoming a doctor), to the founding of the landmark comedy troupe that
would propel him to worldwide renown. Cleese was just days away
from graduating Cambridge and setting off on a law career when he was
visited by two BBC executives, who offered him a job writing comedy for
radio. That fateful moment—and a near-simultaneous offer to take his
university humor revue to London’s famed West End—propelled him down a
different path, cutting his teeth writing for stars like David Frost and
Peter Sellers, and eventually joining the five other Pythons to pioneer
a new kind of comedy that prized invention, silliness, and absurdity.
Along the way, he found his first true love with the actress Connie
Booth and transformed himself from a reluctant performer to a world
class actor and back again. Twisting and turning through
surprising stories and hilarious digressions—with some brief pauses
along the way that comprise a fascinating primer on what’s funny and
why—this story of a young man’s journey to the pinnacle of comedy is a
masterly performance by a master performer.
Published in 2014, it has 400 pages. This is a digital loan from the library.
I've included an excerpt at the end of this post.
NOT going anywhere to shop today though I need milk so I'll stop at a convenience store on the way home. Our dinner yesterday turned out well and it was nice to fill our plate and sit on the couch and watch TV. We'll agree to not talk about the Dallas game, eh? I put the turkey carcass and bones back in the turkey roaster after I deboned it and I made broth by simmering it all night. This is the first batch for my food plan that starts on Monday. I may use that roaster more rather than the crock pot I was planning because I can control the temp better.
It is super mild today, almost 50 but the cold front hits tomorrow and the weekend will be yucky with snow and single digit temps. I'm urging Steve to drive to Townsend to pick up his mom today rather than tomorrow. My main selling point is that he would then be able to sleep in tomorrow when my main concern is him driving on icy roads. So, I'll be hunkering down with the boys anyway.
Have a lovely day and weekend...
Much love,
PK the Bookeemonster
An excerpt from SO, ANYWAY…
By John Cleese
I
made my first public appearance on the stairs up to the school nurse’s
room, at St. Peter’s Preparatory School, Weston-super-Mare, Somerset,
England, on September 13, 1948. I was eight and five-sixths. My audience
was a pack of nine-year-olds, who were jeering at me and baying,
“Chee-eese! Chee-eese!” I kept climbing the steps, despite the feelings
of humiliation and fear. But above all, I was bewildered. How had I
managed to attract so much attention? What had I done to provoke this
aggression? And . . . how on earth did they know that my family surname
had once been Cheese?
As Matron “Fishy” Findlater gave me the
customary new-boy physical examination, I tried to gather my thoughts.
My parents had always warned me to keep away from “nasty rough boys.”
What, then, were they doing at a nice school like St. Peter’s? And how
was I supposed to avoid them?
Much of my predicament was that I
was not just a little boy, but a very tall little boy. I was five foot
three, and would pass the six-foot mark before I was twelve. So it was
hard to fade away into the background, as I often wished to—particularly
later when I’d become taller than any of the masters. It didn’t help
that one of them, Mr. Bartlett, always referred to me as “a prominent
citizen.”
In addition, as a result of my excessive height, I had
“outgrown my strength,” and my physical weakness meant that I was
uncoordinated and awkward; so much so that a few years later my PE
teacher, Captain Lancaster, was to describe me as “six foot of chewed
string.” Add to that the fact that I had had no previous experience of
the feral nature of gangs of young boys, and you will understand why my
face bore the expression of an authentic coward as “Fishy” opened the
door and coaxed me out towards my second public appearance.
“Don’t
worry, it’s only teasing,” she said. What consolation was that? You
could have said the same at Nuremberg. But at least the chanting had
stopped, and now there was an expectant silence as I forced myself down
the stairs. Then…
“Are you a Roundhead or a Cavalier?”
“What?”
Faces were thrust at me, each one of them demanding, “Roundhead or Cavalier?” What were they talking about?
Had
I understood the question, I would almost certainly have fainted, such a
delicate little flower was I. (And perhaps I should explain to the more
delicately nurtured that I was not being asked to offer my considered
views on the relative merits of the opposing forces in the English Civil
War, but to reveal whether or not I had been circumcised.) However, my
first day at prep school was not a total failure. By the time I got home
I had learned the meaning of two new words—“pathetic” and “wet”—though I
had to find Dad’s dictionary to look up “sissy.”
Why was I so .
. . ineffectual? Well, let’s begin at my beginning. I was born on
October 27, 1939, in Uphill, a little village south of
Weston-super-Mare, and separated from it by the mere width of a road
which led inland from the Weston seafront. My first memory, though, is
not of Uphill but of a tree in the village of Brent Knoll, a few miles
away, under whose shade I recall lying, while I looked through its
branches to the bright blue sky above. The sunlight is catching the
leaves at different angles, so that my eye flickers from one patch of
colour to the next, the verdant foliage displaying a host of verdant
hues. (I thought I would try to get “verdant,” “hues” and “foliage” into
this paragraph, as my English teachers always believed that they were
signs of creative talent. Though I probably shouldn’t have used
“verdant” twice.)
Of course, I’m not
sure it is my first memory; I’m sure I used to
think it was; and I
like to
think it was, too, because it would make sense, baby me lying in a
pram, contentedly watching the interplay of the glinting verdant foliage
and its beautiful hues.
One thing I do know for certain, though, is
that shortly before this incident with the tree, the Germans bombed
Weston-super-Mare. I’ll just repeat that…
On August 14, 1940, German planes bombed Weston-super-Mare. This is verifiable: it was in all the papers. Especially the
Weston Mercury.
Most Westonians were confident the raid had been a mistake. The Germans
were a people famous for their efficiency, so why would they drop
perfectly good bombs on Weston-super-Mare, when there was nothing in
Weston that a bomb could destroy that could possibly be as valuable as
the bomb that destroyed it? That would mean that every explosion would
make a tiny dent in the German economy.
The Germans did return,
however, and several times, which mystified everyone. Nevertheless I
can’t help thinking that Westonians actually quite liked being bombed:
it gave them a sense of significance that was otherwise lacking from
their lives. But that still leaves the question
why would the Hun have bothered? Was it just Teutonic
joie de vivre?
Did the Luftwaffe pilots mistake the Weston seafront for the Western
Front? I have heard it quite seriously put forward by older Westonians
that it was done at the behest of William Joyce, the infamous “Lord
Haw-Haw,” who was hanged as a traitor in 1944 by the British for making
Nazi propaganda radio broadcasts to Britain during the war. When I asked
these amateur historians why a man of Irish descent who was born in
Brooklyn would have such an animus against Weston that he would
buttonhole Hitler on the matter, they fell silent. I prefer to believe
that it was because of a grudge held by Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering
on account of an unsavoury incident on Weston pier in the 1920s,
probably involving Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan.
My father’s
explanation, however, makes the most sense: he said the Germans bombed
Weston to show that they really do have a sense of humour.
Whatever
the truth of the matter, two days after that first raid we had moved to
a quaint little Somerset village called Brent Knoll. Dad had had quite
enough of big bangs during his four years in the trenches in France, and
since he was up to nothing in Weston that was vital to the war effort,
he spent the day after the bombing driving around the countryside near
Weston until he found a small farmhouse, owned by a Mr. and Mrs.
Raffle, who agreed to take the Cleese family on as paying guests. I love
the fact that he didn’t
mess around. We were out of there! And
it was typically smart of him to find a farm, where, at a time of strict
rationing, an egg or a chicken or even a small pig could go missing
without attracting too much attention.
Mother told me once that
some Westonians privately criticised Dad for retreating so soon. They
apparently felt it would have been more dignified to have waited a week
or so before running away. I think this view misses the essential point
of running away, which is to do it the moment the idea has occurred to
you. Only an obsessional procrastinator would cry, “Let’s run for our
lives, but not till Wednesday afternoon.”
Back to the tree. I
revisited the farm many years later, and, just as I thought I
remembered, there was a huge chestnut tree in the middle of the front
lawn, under which I might easily have lain in a pram. In 1940 the
farmhouse had been one of a row of houses of medium size strung along a
road, with fields opposite; it didn’t look very farm-like from the
front, but when you walked up the drive and got to the back of the house
you saw there was a proper farmyard, with mud and chickens and rusty
farm equipment and ferrets in cages and rabbits in wooden hutches.
And
it was this location that provides my second memory. (It must come
after the first because in it I am now standing up.) I was bitten by a
rabbit.
Or rather, I was nibbled by a rabbit, but, because I was
such a weedy, namby-pamby little pansy, I reacted as though I’d lost a
limb. It was the sheer unfairness of it all that so upset me. One
minute, I was saying, “Hello, Mr. Bunny!” and smiling at its sweet
little face and funny floppy ears. The next, the fucker savaged me. It
seemed so gratuitous. What, I asked myself, had I done to the rabbit to
deserve this psychotic response?
The more pertinent question, though, is: why was I such a
wuss?
And the obvious answer is that it’s because I was the only child of
older, over-protective parents. I have a memory (No. 3) to support this.
I’m now about three and am in the Red Cow Inn, the hub and beating
heart of Brent Knoll. Somehow I bang my hand, and just before I burst
into tears, I hold it up to my father and howl, “Daddy, look! I’ve hurt
my precious thumb!” This, to my astonishment, gets a big laugh. Is my
thumb
not precious, I wonder? Dad certainly thinks it is. When
the occasion demands, he always says, “Oh, you’ve hurt your precious ———
[fill in applicable body part].”
I hesitate to criticise Dad,
because what sanity I have I owe to his loving kindness. But there’s no
doubt that he did pamper me, and such early coddling was one of the
reasons I embarked on a wussy lifestyle. Throughout my schoolboy days I
never felt very manly, or strong, or virile, or vigorous, or healthily
aggressive. At school I avoided playground “gangs,” because I didn’t
understand why anyone would want to behave like that. I loved ball
games, but was always appalled at how rough, for example, rugby looked,
even at the safe distance I kept while pretending to play it. When I was
seventeen, my assistant Clifton College housemaster, Alec MacDonald,
finally took me to task for funking tackles. Describing my efforts as
“dancing around like a disabled fairy,” he ordered me to watch while he
gave a demonstration of how to tackle properly. He asked a member of
the first XV, Tony Rogers, to run at him. He closed in on Rogers, and
then went in hard, just as Rogers tried to sidestep him. The result was
that the top of Mr. MacDonald’s head came into sharp contact with
Rogers’ right hip. Mr. MacDonald was unavailable for teaching later that
afternoon; indeed he did not reappear for forty-eight hours. When he
did, I was too cowardly to remind him that he had specifically told me
that “if you go in hard, you never get hurt.” So when I see
international rugby teams lumbering out at Twickenham, I look at them
with awe, but also with a sense of being genetically disconnected from
them. I was not born to be butch, and I have accepted my innate
unmanliness without complaint. Besides, it seems to me that cowards very
seldom cause trouble, which is probably why there is a history of them
being shot by people who do.[1]
None of this, incidentally, is
to say that my infant wussiness was in any way admirable. But while I
was undeniably a gutless little weed there was an upside: at least I
didn’t display the habitual mindless aggression of some young males.
Better a wuss than a psycho, I say, and I am proud that I have never
been able to force myself to watch cage fighting.
If part of my
weedy outlook on life came from my father’s pampering, a fair
proportion was down to my complicated relationship with my mother. And
in this context another early memory comes to mind. I am lying in bed,
falling asleep, when a noise causes me to turn and see shadows moving on
the half-open door of my bedroom. They are shadows of my parents
fighting. Dad has been coming into my room and Mum has started attacking
him, pummelling him with a flurry of blows which he is trying to fend
off. There is no sound—I sense they are both trying not to wake me—and
the memory has no emotion attached, although it is very clear. Just the
shadows which last a few seconds and then . . . silence. As I write
this, my throat tightens a little. The level of violence I’m describing
is low: there are no shillelaghs or chainsaws here, just
lower-middle-class fisticuffs, with no prospect of Grievous Bodily Harm,
as English law calls it. Nevertheless, my beloved dad, a kind and
decent person, is being attacked by this unknowable creature who is
widely rumoured to be my mother.
Young children have so little
life experience that they inevitably assume that what happens around and
to them is the norm. I remember that when my daughter Cynthia was very
young she was surprised to discover that some of her friends’ fathers
did not work in television. So it would have been hard for me to
describe my relationship with my mother as problematic because I had no
idea what the word “motherly” conveyed to most people. Dad once
described to me how, during the First World War, he had witnessed a
wounded soldier lying in a trench and crying out for his mother. “Why on
earth would he cry for her?” I wondered. When, over the years, I began
to hear friends tell me that their mother was their best friend, someone
with whom they routinely discussed their daily life, and to whom they
looked for emotional support, I simply thought, “How wonderful that must
be…”
Please do not think that I am loftily labeling her a “bad
mother.” In many ways she was a good mother; sometimes a very good
mother. In all day-to-day matters she was extremely diligent: preparing
good meals, making sure I was properly clothed and shod and warm and
dry, keeping the house neat and clean, and fiercely protective of me.
Under light hypnosis, I once recalled a German air raid, with the sound
of the bombers not far away, and Mother throwing herself on top of me,
under a big kitchen table. If it was a false memory, it’s still what she
would have done.
From a practical point of view, then, she was
impeccable. But she was also self-obsessed and anxious, and that could
make life with her very uncomfortable indeed.
A clue to her
self-obsession, I always felt, was her extraordinary lack of general
knowledge. On one of her visits to London in the late ’80s, a salad was
prepared for lunch which contained quails’ eggs. She asked what kind of
eggs they were and I explained that they were moles’ eggs, and that when
we wanted them, we would go up to Hampstead Heath very early in the
morning, as moles laid them at the entrance to their burrows during the
night, collect the eggs and make sure we ate them the same day before
they had time to hatch. She listened with great attention, as my
family’s jaws sagged, and said she thought them “delicious.” Later that
day she caught a mention of Mary, Queen of Scots. She recognised the
name and asked me who this was. With my family listening, I pushed the
envelope a little, telling her that Mary was a champion Glaswegian darts
player who had been killed in the Blitz. “What a shame,” she said.
I
was being a bit naughty, of course, but I also wanted to prove to my
family the truth of a comment I had made earlier about Mother, which
they had not accepted on first hearing. I had told them that
she had no information about anything that was not going to affect her life directly in the immediate future; and
that consequently she possessed no general knowledge—and when I said no
general knowledge, I didn’t mean very, very little. Naturally they had
thought I was exaggerating.
And the reason for this was not that
she was unintelligent, but that she lived her life in such a constant
state of high anxiety, bordering on incipient panic, that she could
focus only on the things that might
directly affect her. So it
goes without saying that she suffered from all the usual phobias, along
with a few special ones (like albinos and people wearing eye patches).
But she also cast her net wider. In fact, I used to joke that she
suffered from omniphobia—you name it, she had a morbid dread of it. It’s
true that I never saw her alarmed by a loaf of bread or a cardigan or
even a chair, but anything above medium size that could move around a
bit was a hazard, and any reasonably loud sound startled her beyond
reason. I once compiled a list of events that frightened her, and it was
quite comprehensive: very loud snoring; low-flying aircraft; church
bells; fire engines; trains; buses and lorries; thunder; shouting; large
cars; most medium-sized cars; noisy small cars; burglar alarms;
fireworks, especially crackers; loud radios; barking dogs; whinnying
horses; nearby silent horses; cows in general; megaphones; sheep; corks
coming out of sparkling wine bottles; motorcycles, even very small ones;
balloons being popped; vacuum cleaners (not being used by her); things
being dropped; dinner gongs; parrot houses; whoopee cushions; chiming
doorbells; hammering; bombs; hooters; old-fashioned alarm clocks;
pneumatic drills; and hairdryers (even those used by her).
In a nutshell, Mother experienced the cosmos as a vast, limitless booby trap.
Consequently,
it was never possible for her really to relax, except perhaps for the
times when she sat on the sofa knitting while Dad and I watched
television. But even then she was active, knitting away against time. I
noticed years ago that when people (myself definitely included) are
anxious they tend to busy themselves with irrelevant activities, because
these distract from and therefore reduce their actual experience of
anxiety. To stay perfectly still is to feel the fear at its maximum
intensity, so instead you scuttle around doing things as though you are,
in some mysterious way, short of time. But although Mother kept herself
busy in countless and pointless ways, it did not alleviate her
worrying: her pervading sense that she was keeping nameless disasters at
bay only by incessantly anticipating them, and that one moment’s lapse
in this vigilance would bring them hurtling towards her. I once proposed
to Dad that we should purchase a large hamster wheel for her, so that
she would find it easy to remain active all day, instead of having
continually to invent non-essential activities like polishing cans of
peas, or stacking cups, or sewing borders on handkerchiefs, or boiling
knitting needles, or weeding the carpet.
Her own approach was to
write her worries down on a piece of paper, so that there was no chance
she would forget one, thus unleashing it. After Dad died, I would
drive down to Weston to visit her and she would greet me with a cup of
coffee and a very long list of worries which she had been compiling
during the previous weeks, and we would sit down and discuss each worry
in turn at some length: what it was about, and why it mattered, and how
likely it was to happen, and what she could do to forestall it, and what
we could do if it did actually happen, and whether we would know what
to do if it didn’t . . . and after we’d processed six or so, she’d make
me another cup of coffee and we would continue working till bedtime. And
if we hadn’t got through them all by then, we’d leave the rest for
breakfast. It took me decades to realise that it was not the analysing
of her worries that eased them; it was the continuous contact with
another person that gradually calmed her.
Why Mother should have
been quite so anxious I simply don’t know, but the net effect was to
make her difficult. Actually, “difficult” is not quite fair. There was
only one thing that she wanted. Just one. But that one thing was her own
way. And if she didn’t get it, that upset her. And she was prettily
easily upset; in fact I think it’s fair to say she had a real facility
for it; and when something did upset her—and there was a
very limited
supply of things that, in the final analysis, didn’t—she would throw a
tantrum, or several tantra, of such inconceivable volume and activity
that there must have been times when Dad yearned for the relative
tranquillity of the trenches in France.
But Mother would never have seen herself as a tyrant: her trick was to rule through weakness. Whereas Dad might
prefer to sleep with a window open, Mother
had to have it shut, because she
just couldn’t cope with
the alternative. Sadly, there was no choice, so negotiation was never
an option, although Dad once confided to me that she had been much more
flexible before they’d got married.
It was only in later years
that I began to see just how alarmed Dad really was by the tantrums.
While he talked occasionally about the need “to keep the little woman on
an even keel,” his faux-amused casualness was intended to conceal his
fear, for when Mother lost her temper, she really lost it: her rage
filled her skin until there was no room left for the rest of her
personality, which had to move over till things calmed down a bit. The
phrase “beside oneself with anger” could have been coined in
Weston-super-Mare.
Mother could be quite charming and bright and
amusing, but that was when we had visitors. Once they had gone, her
sociability began to fade. This meant that there was nearly always
tension in the Cleese household because when mother was not actually
angry it was only because she was not angry
yet. Dad and I knew
that the slightest thing—almost anything—would set her off, so constant
placatory behaviour was the name of the game.
It cannot be
coincidence that I spent such a large part of my life in some form of
therapy, and that the vast majority of the problems I was dealing with
involved relationships with women. And my ingrained habit of walking on
eggshells when coping with my mother dominated my romantic liaisons for
many years. Until it began to fade, women found me very dull. My own
unique cocktail of over-politeness, unending solicitude and the fear of
stirring controversy rendered me utterly unsexy. Very, very nice men are
no fun. I once wrote a sketch based on my younger self (for the 1968
show
How to Irritate People), in which I tried to show just how infuriating this desire to be inoffensive can be:
JOHN CLEESE: I’m afraid I’m not very good company tonight.
CONNIE BOOTH: No, it’s me. I’m on edge.
JC: No, no, no, you are marvellous, really super! It’s me.
CB: Look, let’s forget it.
JC: I’m not good company.
CB: You are.
JC: I’m not. I’ve been fussing you.
CB: It’s all right.
JC: I have been fussing you. It’s my own fault, you told me last time about fussing you too much.
CB: Please!
JC: Look, am I fussing you too much?
CB: A bit.
Although
there was little real emotional communication between us, my mother
and I had our moments of closeness, almost all of them when we laughed
together. She had quite a sharp sense of humour—and as I got older I
discovered to my surprise that she also laughed at jokes that were
rather dark, if not quite black. I remember on one occasion listening to
her as she methodically itemised all the reasons why she didn’t want to
go on living, while I experienced my usual sense of glum failure at my
powerlessness to help. Then I heard myself say, “Mother, I have an
idea.”
“Oh? What’s that?”
“I know a little man who lives
in Fulham, and if you’re still feeling this way next week, I could have
a word with him if you like— but only if you like— and he can come down
to Weston and kill you.”
Silence.
“Oh God, I’ve gone too
far,” I thought. And then she cackled with laughter. I don’t think I
ever loved her as much as I did at that moment.
