Jesus and John Cleese

I’ve got a pretty cool wife. She took me to see John Cleese Live. Not sure how many greater gifts there are in life than getting to see one of your heroes live. 

Cleese is a hero of mine in a very qualified sense. I’m not sure he’s ever done anything truly heroic. I mean he’s a hero to me in the same way Frank Miller, Shigeru Miyamoto, or Tony Romo/Dak Prescott are heroes. Though playing football does take a measure of courage. But there’s tiers for heroes. You’ve got martyrs of the church level heroes and then people you really like and respect because of their positive contributions to the world. 

Cleese has filled the world with laughter for decades which makes him a hero to me. Laughter is such a wonderful thing. And all the Pythons have contributed to that laughter, but Cleese did a lot of comedy outside of Monty Python. He still is doing comedy. Seeing him live was a pretty glorious experience. He came out and talked for a bit, basically just introducing the night’s format and telling some jokes. Then we watched Holy Grail, then he came back out for Q&A. We were instructed to give rude questions. I had been working on a thoughtful question for days but now I felt like I had to pivot and think of something insulting. 

But sadly, in the end, I didn’t even bother getting into the Q&A lines, because they were both quite long. I wished I had because there were no good questions. Some of the questioners were deeply obnoxious, either because they were drunk or were trying to be funny themselves. And there were no rude questions. 

But Cleese is a real class act, he turned all the crappy questions into opportunities for comedy or managed to connect them to interesting stories. Someone did ask what’s the worst question Cleese has been asked. He said the naughtiest one was whether he had slept with Jamie Lee Curtis, and the answer is Mr. Cleese doesn’t remember. He’s old and that was a long time ago. Quite a cheeky way to answer! 

I did come up with a rude question I really wish I had asked. 

Do you regret any of your marriages as much as making Fierce Creatures?  

I think he would’ve found this amusing, in part because he made some jokes about getting divorced so many times, but also because I doubt he gets questions about Fierce Creatures very often. It’s the much less funny follow up to a Fish Called Wanda, which is almost an honorary Python movie because Michael Palin is in it as well. I really regret not asking this question. But such is life.

The more serious question I came up with is quite long and a bit philosophical as well as a bit political. I thought about the phrasing for days, this was what I came up with:

I’m pretty sure you said something like this on the life of Brian documentary. One reason you chose not to make fun of Jesus in that movie was that you genuinely didn’t think Jesus was funny because your philosophy of comedy stems from the inflexibility of the ego and Jesus wouldn’t have had an ego to bruise. My question is do you still think that’s true, and if so do you think that insight about comedy is relevant to some of our distinctly western cultural problems? I’m thinking in part about what’s happening to Graham Lineham.

This is one of the reasons I defend Life of Brian as not only a great comedy but an important film in general. I really don’t believe that the Python’s were taking “the piss” out of Christianity. Yes they had some bad vicars growing up that didn’t represent Christianity as a rational or reasonable religion, and they do poke fun at Christianity on occasion but most of the time their jokes about Christianity are quite funny, in part because they can hit a bit close to home. Usually those jokes are based in a morsel of truth. For instance the Old Testament in particular can be deeply confusing and feel irrelevant to contemporary life, so when Brother Maynard starts reading the directions for how to use the Holy Hand Grenade and he lists off all the things the people ate, including sloths and orangutans, it’s funny because it speaks to a real reality of reading such an old text today. I can find that humorous and also think the Old Testament is God’s word and incredibly valuable. They are both true.

Especially in light of the recent rapture fiasco it’s hard not to appreciate a film like Life of Brian. It exposes the stupidity that religion can be, especially when it’s divorced from scripture and traditional forms of Christianity. And to me what’s so powerful about Cleese’s insight regarding inflexible egos being the basis of comedy is how helpful that is for life in general. CS Lewis observed that the body was made for buffoonery. It takes a very proud person indeed to be embodied for any length of time and not find our frailties humorous. There’s a reason people laugh at poop and fart jokes. Our bodies are awkward and often gross. To follow Jesus is to acknowledge our limitations and embrace them. If we do this then we can laugh at ourselves and get the joke rather than be the joke.

I think that was ultimately the insight of Cleese regarding Jesus. It Michael Scott slips on a banana peel he gets upset and becomes a joke. If Jesus slips on a banana peel he laughs and gets the joke. That’s the difference between pride and humility. 

In some sense his atoning sacrifice is so painful and humiliating because his response to the situation stops being relevant to the outcome. He will be mocked and derided and tortured. He will give up dignity and cry to God as one who was truly abandoned. It won’t be a funny joke, but he will be the joke for us. 

It’s interesting how relevant this insight has become to our current cultural moment. One of the funniest scenes from Life of Brian is when Eric Idle’s character Stan admits he wants to be a woman. Here’s the full text of the hilarious scene:

Francis: Why are you always on about women, Stan?

Stan: I want to be one.

Reg: What?

Stan: I want to be a woman. From now on, I want you all to call me 'Loretta'.

Reg: What?

Stan: It's my right as a man.

Judith: Well, why do you want to be Loretta, Stan?

Stan: I want to have babies.

Reg: You want to have babies?

Stan: It's every man's right to have babies if he wants them.

Reg: But... you can't have babies!

Stan: Don't you oppress me!

Reg: I'm not oppressing you, Stan! You haven't got a womb! Where's the foetus going to gestate? You going to keep it in a box?

Judith: Here! I've got an idea: Suppose you agree that he can't actually have babies, not having a womb - which is nobody's fault, not even the Romans' - but that he can have the *right* to have babies.

Francis: Good idea, Judith. We shall fight the oppressors for your right to have babies, brother... sister, sorry.

Reg: What's the *point*?

Francis: What?

Reg: What's the point of fighting for his right to have babies, when he can't have babies?

Francis: It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression.

Reg: It's symbolic of his struggle against reality.

This is the essence of our current cultural problem. And it’s why Graham Lineham was arrested. He got in trouble with the transgender crowd, multiple times. Bizarrely it all started with an episode of his show IT crowd that’s clearly mocking transphobes. Transgenderism is certainly a complicated phenomenon that I will not pretend to fully comprehend but at base it seems to be connected to this inflexible ego idea. There’s an inability to accept reality on reality’s terms, which is one of those AA aphorisms that anyone who has struggled with addiction has to wrestle with at some point. 

This probably seems surprising to some but this ego problem wasn’t something Charlie Kirk struggled with. When he heard that South Park had lampooned him he fully embraced it. They had Cartman, one of their most despicable characters, basically be a stand in for him doing his whole college campus discussion stuff. Charlie saw it as a compliment of sorts and thought it was quite funny. He said:

We need to have a good spirit about being made fun of. This is all a success. This is all a win. We as Conservatives, we have thick skin, not thin skin, and you can make fun of us, it doesn’t matter.

Thats a genuine spirit of humility. Understanding humor is an important part of happiness. I think we are really doing a deep disservice, especially to young people, when we present Christianity or Conservativism as something dour and humorless. Our God clearly has a sense of humor. All you have to do to know this is true, is simply take a long look in the mirror. If you don’t get the joke, you are the joke.