John Cleese Reveals Family Name Is Really ‘Cheese,’ Not ‘Cleese’
John Cleese really wants you to pay for his Substack, only $80 a year for subscriber-only messages and, presumably, provocative photographs. However, if you opt to sign up for his free posts, he’ll occasionally drop a doozy on you. Like this weekend, when the Monty Python veteran revealed that his family’s last name isn’t actually “Cleese.”
Cleese is a recently made-up monicker? Yes, actually.
“My father’s name was Reginald Francis Cheese,” John said in a backstage video. “And my father’s father’s name was John Edwin Cheese.”
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That’s Cheese, not Cleese, as in “Please throw out that molding package of cheddar cheese.”
The 85-year-old Cleese, who’s currently on his ‘Not Dead Yet’ tour (funny name for as long as it’s true), recently shared the backstory with an audience in Monterey, California. It turns out that his father, Reginald, fought in the trenches of the First World War, back in 1915. Reggie was a soldier for four and a half years before deciding to change the H in Cheese to an L. The reason is simple and relatable: “He was fed up with being teased about being a cheese.”
The elder Cheese made Cleese official in 1923, “hereby giving public notice” that he “formally and absolutely renounced, relinquished and abandoned the use of my said surname of Cheese.” The language is so comically demonstrative that it’s a wonder John never turned it into a Python sketch.
But his comedian son wishes that Reginald Francis had stuck with his original surname. “I think Cheese is a rather splendid name, you know?” he said. For comedy’s sake, it’s hard to argue — Cheese is a funnier name than Cleese, even if it might be trying too hard. It worked for ironic pop/lounge musician Richard Cheese (real name Mark Davis), and animatronic pizza huckster Chuck E. hasn’t done too badly with it either.
John Cleese likes the old family name so much that he says, likely in jest, that he’s changing his own name to “Jack Cheese” for his show in London next week. And because Cleese never met a dad joke he didn’t embrace, he noted that “it was particularly suitable that I was in Monterey tonight.”
In case you didn’t get the pun, he held up a visual aid.
