John Cleese Blames Wokeness for Derailing His Reboot of ‘A Fish Called Wanda’
Even at the age of 85, John Cleese is hard at work announcing new versions of classic comedies he was involved with, then never actually making them. Remember the Fawlty Towers reboot starring Cleese and his daughter? How about the Life of Brian stage show that Cleese refused to censor even though no one had actually asked him to?
One of Cleese’s oldest ill-conceived, yet-to-be-produced reboot pitches is a proposed musical version of A Fish Called Wanda, the acclaimed 1988 comedy that he both starred in and scripted.
Cleese has been working on the Wanda musical since at least 2008, which, perhaps not coincidentally, wasn’t long after Cleese’s frenemy Eric Idle achieved Broadway success with his own musical adaptation of an old movie: Spamalot.
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Regardless of whether or not it was motivated by spite, Cleese’s musical has yet to come to fruition because, according to the 85-year-old comedian, it’s been stonewalled by that amorphous boogeyman known as wokeness.
In a new interview with The Times, per Chortle, Cleese revealed that the project was at an “impasse” due to concerns from his collaborators. Namely, some of them felt that the Wanda character was “objectified,” didn’t like the animal cruelty plotline and took issue with the jokes about Michael Palin’s character’s stuttering. “I think that their main fault is they don’t understand that all comedy is critical,” Cleese argued. “You cannot write something funny about someone who is kind, honest, friendly, co-operative — they’re not funny. It’s the faults, our faults, human faults, that are funny, and they think that pointing faults out is unkind, whereas it’s actually how we improve.”
This isn’t exactly a shocking development for Cleese, who’s spent more time talking about how wokeness is ruining comedy than he has feuding with Idle. And his defense in this case doesn’t even really make any sense. For one thing, no one seems to be concerned with the script’s “human faults.” The issue isn’t that the characters in A Fish Called Wanda are bad people, it’s that the storytellers may not be framing those characters in the most appropriate way.
This isn’t to say that Cleese’s detractors are necessarily right, but Cleese doesn’t seem to even be addressing their concerns, which is no doubt why no one has been able to move forward with this show. And for all of Cleese’s past claims that people are more “uptight” now than ever before, at least one of these “new” complaints was the subject of a significant controversy when the film was released nearly four decades ago.
A Fish Called Wanda was criticized by the National Stuttering Project (NSP) for its depiction of Palin’s Ken, which perpetuated false myths about stuttering. Some members of the NSP even picketed outside MGM’s offices because of the film, which they called “cruel and demeaning,” carrying signs with messages such as “Wanda Insults People Who Stutter” and “Educate, Not Humiliate.”
And clearly the animal cruelty rubbed some audience members the wrong way as well. “Everyone’s upset about the dogs and the fish mostly,” producer Michael Shamberg told The Washington Post. “As John Cleese is fond of pointing out, nobody’s upset that an old lady dies, or a man is run over by a steamroller. The only thing people get upset about is cruelty to dogs and fish.”
To be clear, no dogs or fish were actually harmed in the movie. And presumably no one was murdered with a steamroller either.
