By Andreas Kessaris for Curtains Up! (@AKessaris)
“A good sense of humour is the sign of a healthy perspective, which is why people who are uncomfortable around humour are either pompous (inflated) or neurotic (oversensitive).”
-John Cleese
No matter what John Cleese achieves in his life, he will always be remembered for Monty Python (even though in my eyes he attained comedic perfection with his portrayal of the frantic hotel owner in Fawlty Towers…best sit-com ever!). With his trademark quick delivery and dry British wit, the lanky actor and writer has become an entertainment legend; an international elder statesman of humour, if you will. Now in his seventies, he has finally penned a memoir with the cheeky title of So, Anyway…
So, Anyway… covers the author’s modest, lower-middle-class childhood in a town with the peculiar (at least for us North Americans) name of Weston-super-Mare, and follows him from his schoolboy days, through Cambridge University (where he received a law degree), to his almost accidental beginnings in show business, and concludes at the filming of the first episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, with a jarringly out of place and annoyingly brief chapter at the end relating the story of the recent Python reunion shows. (At least Cleese honestly admits it was tacked on at the last minute.)
Throughout the skillfully written and enjoyable text Cleese relates his experiences, both personal and professional, and what he has learned from them, as well as the origins of some of the iconic sketches and comedy routines he created (including my personal favourite, the inspiration behind the famous “Black Knight” scene in Holy Grail), or co-created; one of the many things I liked about So, Anyway… is how respectful Cleese is with his fellow writers and performers and how willing he is to give most of the credit to others.
So Anyway… refreshingly has no pretentious and unnecessary forward or introduction (I can never understand why an autobiography would even have that…shouldn’t the book be self-explanatory? But I digress…), or disingenuous acknowledgements at the end where every person and dog the author has ever come across gets their due, whether they deserve it or not. It doesn’t even contain an index. And I love how there is no condescending subtitle like “How an Englishman Became a Python” or something equally trite. It begins, tells the story, and ends. Cleese leaves the rest to us; he trusts us to understand what he has to say and if not too bad.
With its engaging inside details, the book is a real treat for followers of Monty Python. My favorite passages contain Cleese’s theories on humour and why certain things are funny, and certain other things are not. His intelligent and insightful observations make So, Anyway… the best biography of its kind since Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up (both volumes would make useful reading for anyone who wants to get into comedy).
Other books I recommend for Python fans are Eric Idle’s The Greedy Bastard Diary: A Comic Tour of America and Everything I Ever Needed to Know About ______* I Learned From Monty Python by Brian Cogan, Ph.D. & Jeff Massey, Ph.D.
