But I think it's particularly worrying at the moment because you can only create in an atmosphere of freedom, where you're not checking everything yo… - John Cleese

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But I think it's particularly worrying at the moment because you can only create in an atmosphere of freedom, where you're not checking everything you say critically before you move on. What you have to be able to do is to build without knowing where you're going because you've never been there before. That's what creativity is—you have to be allowed to build. And a lot of comedians now are sitting there and when they think of something, they say something like, 'Can I get away with it? I don't think so. So and so got into trouble, and he said that, oh, she said that.' You see what I mean? And that's the death of creativity. So I would say at the moment, this is a difficult time, particularly for young comedians, but you see, my audience is much older, and they're simply not interested in most of the woke attitudes. I mean, they just think that you should try and be kind to people and that's no need to complicate it, you know?

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About John Cleese

John Marwood Cleese (born 27 October 1939) is an English comedian and actor best known for being one of the members of the comedy group Monty Python and for co-writing the TV series Fawlty Towers in which he played Basil Fawlty.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Alternative Names: John Marwood Cleese
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Additional quotes by John Cleese

But what I liked – indeed, loved – about this man was that he was a passionate supporter of the Somerset county cricket team. Now, to conjure up genuine enthusiasm for the antics of such a comprehensively hopeless bunch of underdogs and ne’er-do-wells was hard enough for someone born and brought up in Somerset; but to choose them voluntarily, when there was absolutely no kind of geographical loyalty involved, was an act of such utter pointlessness that I felt rather in awe of Nick. I had been reading about existentialism; here was someone living it, someone who accepted the concept of an act of Free Will in a Meaningless Universe, and was taking it to a new level.

The sour old cow gave me a sum much more difficult than any I had encountered before: say, a four-digit number divided by a three-digit number. I guessed how to do it, and got it wrong. Without offering help, she told me to do it again. I failed a second time; she warned me to try hard; I did; I failed again; and she told me to hold my hand out and, grasping it firmly, she caned the palm three times, hard. My first reaction was astonishment: none of my kindergartens had been Catholic establishments, so I was unprepared for this kind of assault. Then it hurt, a lot! My precious palm! When I first started having therapy twenty-five years later, this was one of the first traumas I recalled, and I was astonished at the power of the feelings that came flooding back: anger — no, fury; self-pity; humiliation; a deep, deep sense of hurt; and a pure indignation at not so much the unfairness, but the insanity of punishing someone physically for getting an answer wrong. It is terrifying how much of this deeply unkind, utterly pointless, in fact, mind-bogglingly COUNTERPRODUCTIVE kind of behaviour was meted out to children over the centuries by half-witted, power-crazed zombies like this heinous old bat — a large proportion of such psychopaths allegedly acting in the name of an all-loving God.

Too many people confuse being serious with being solemn.

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