John Cleese is best known for his roles in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Besides his appearance as Lancelot, The Black Knight, Tim, and the French Taunter, Cleese was perhaps the key writer to the beloved film. So Anyway is his autobiography and it falls right along the lines of his most famous work; it’s irreverent, zany, and hilarious.
When I decided to read this book, I was most interested in an analysis of monte python humor. Was the peasant’s monologue about the origin of political power in The Holly Grail that is used in university law classes poetic coincidence or intentional genius? Was the opening cheese shop sketch monologue a deliberate lesson on vernacular or merely humor with a fortuitous vein of applicability? In many ways, I wasn’t disappointed.
To me, the most important power of humor is the power it has to make us take ourselves less seriously. Cleese delves into his academic background as well as the background of the other pythons and engages in some deliberate analysis of his work but he laughingly admits ignorance on most of it. Cleese is indeed somewhere between a poet and an analyst, living some kind of whole-brained life if you can imagine such a thing!
Still, the best part of the book wasn’t the analysis, it was the humor itself. It gave me more than one good laugh. Near the end of the book, I was out for a run as Cleese layered on hilarity after hilarity. Pretty soon my face was hurting from smiling and my side ached not so much from running as from laughing. It made running difficult and probably made the passing motorists think I was on an unparalleled runner’s high.
The third dimension of the book can perhaps best be described as a form of politics. Cleese has some extraordinarily irreverent political and religious viewpoints. I found myself alternating between agreement, bemusement, and disgust. I’ve rarely met a person who can hold and rationalize so many viewpoints I would have considered conflicting. Unsurprisingly, his strongest viewpoints align with his professional expertise.
“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). Pompous people mistrust humour because at some level they know their self-importance cannot survive very long in such an atmosphere, so they criticise it as “negative” or “subversive.” Neurotics, sensing that humour is always ultimately critical, view it as therefore unkind and destructive, a reductio ad absurdum which leads to political correctness.”