John Cleese Claims That Censorship Killed the British Comedy Industry

It may come as a shock to any British comedians working today, but apparently British comedy isn’t a thing anymore? At least, not according to legendary Monty Python member/notorious grump John Cleese.

Cleese recently spoke at an event organized by the Slapstick Festival in Bristol celebrating 50 years of Fawlty Towers. According to The Daily Mail, Cleese then took the opportunity to slam the BBC. “If you put a script in now it has to go through a fucking committee who have no idea what they are doing,” Cleese argued. 

He also claimed that “there has been nothing funny since The Office. It is sad, and it is because the people in charge have no idea how to make comedy happen,” adding that “the whole process (of making a comedy show) has been replaced by a bureaucratic process which does not begin to work.” 

While it may have seemed as though he was talking about the BBC specifically, he also claimed that the British comedy industry as a whole has collapsed. “We used to be really good at it and now we are not and that is very sad.” 

Come to think of it, the death of comedy in the U.K. could explain why Cleese had to fly to Australia in order to be roasted.

“There weren’t committees when we started,” Cleese continued. “Comedy now has to be clean. You must not play for laughs.”

First of all, it seems pretty obvious that comedy today doesn’t have to be clean, and still gets laughs. One of the better British comedy shows of the past five years, We Are Lady Parts, is about a Muslim punk band with songs such as “I Want to Fuck a Terrorist.” And “clean” isn’t the first word that springs to mind while watching the U.K.-produced Netflix hit Sex Education. Meanwhile, Fleabag, which aired on BBC Three across the pond, literally opened with Phoebe Waller Bridge’s character having anal sex and then fretting about her “massive asshole.”

Monty Python’s Flying Circus, on the other hand, was hardly given free reign by the network. The troupe was forced to add canned boos just to get a now-unshocking sketch about cannibalism on the air. And the BBC wouldn’t even let them do a sketch involving drinking wine glasses full of urine, and in that instance, Cleese actually sided with the censors!

Had the Pythons tried to open a show back in 1969 with a character addressing the camera while being fucked by a stranger, the BBC probably would have had them all arrested. If Cleese is upset that punching down is no longer culturally acceptable, that’s hardly the same as TV censorship, which seems to have become way more relaxed in many ways.

“I am going to write a book about writing comedy to make people aware how difficult it is,” Cleese told the crowd. 

Presumably the last chapter will be all about how to rage about nonexistent problems whenever you start to feel irrelevant.