So, Anyway...

by John Cleese

  As far as I knew. Or cared! It may seem odd, but the whole grisly episode soon faded from my memory. I had no sense that I had missed out on something important, that some talent lurking within me was yearning for expression.

  After all, I was going to be a lawyer – apparently, though I couldn’t remember exactly how the decision had been taken. Law, then, had to come first. And law seemed to be a lot about arguing, about putting your case or dismantling somebody else’s, so maybe learning to debate would help me. Accordingly I went along to the Cambridge Union to see a debate from the balcony, and watched as a series of very young men, aged between nineteen and twenty-two, stood up and pretended to be fifty-five. They all wore suits with waistcoats, they all tucked their thumbs into their waistcoat pockets, and they all spoke a weird, oratorical bombastic language that was utterly unlike normal speech. Clearly, they were trying to create the impression of being promising politicians, yet they had no idea how ridiculous they seemed, all behaving in the same manner when, to the rest of us, they were so obviously inflated, self-satisfied, slow-witted duds. The gap between the impression they were trying to create and the way their fellow students actually viewed them was truly extraordinary. It would have been even more astounding had I known that several of these fat-heads would finish up in John Major’s Cabinet. I’ll say it again. The very group that was most disliked and belittled at Cambridge in the early 60s was running the country thirty years later. Or sort of running it.

  So, since the Cambridge Union was rubbish, what else was there? Well, the one activity that my consciousness had been shaped to accept was sport. So I signed up to play college soccer, took part in a trial game, and made a small impression. As it happens, I wasn’t bad at soccer – I had good control, I could trick an opponent and sometimes thread a nice pass. Playing inside left, I even created the occasional goal. The trouble was that I was far too tall, embarrassingly skinny, a bit slow on the turn, physically quite weak, nowhere near fit enough – and I couldn’t shoot.

  Despite these handicaps, though, I was just good enough to get a place in the team and so became one of two ‘Southerners’ in the Downing XI. A ‘Southerner’ was defined as someone born south of the river Trent, and I was regarded by the rest of the team – with tolerant affection – as ‘posh’. This was a surprise to an insurance salesman’s son, and I wasn’t quite sure how to react.

  You see, in the early 1960s Britain was so ridden with class distinction that it coloured every aspect of life, though generally in an unspoken way. (Ten years later, when we were making Monty Python, we assumed that the whole system was on its way out, that it was fading away, but the fact that it is still alive and well today suggests we were quite deluded.) Take money, for example. In the 60s, money was . . . well, vulgar. At least to talk about it was vulgar, and any blatant attempt to acquire large quantities of it was crude and aesthetically offensive. My friend Tony Jay once summed it up: it was all right to have money; it was just getting it that was vulgar.

  It’s also almost impossible to convey the attitude then to the world of business. Businessmen (there weren’t many women) were regarded as peripheral, half-educated creatures whose academic failures had forced them to earn a living in the dull, second-rate world of commerce. Interestingly, nobody resented their making piles of money, because it was felt that this was the one compensation the world offered them for undertaking such stultifying activities. In my entire three years at Cambridge, I met only one undergraduate who intended to enter the world of business: he was going into soap powder so that he could retire at forty. It was fascinating to see how the aristocratic attitude to ‘trade’ had infected the public schools and even brainwashed little plebeian gits like me.

  What did matter at Cambridge was professional reputation. There were the grand jobs – like being a surgeon or a barrister or a professor – and there were the more mundane occupations, like being a solicitor or an accountant or a general practitioner. The aim in life was to become very good at whichever category of job you went for, and to earn the respect of your colleagues, and enough money to lead a very comfortable life. It was also vital to have a few cultural interests outside your work. The aim was to be ‘well rounded’, educated, accomplished, well informed and comfortably off.

  My position in all this was a delicately poised one. I knew that the real toffs would never accept me as a kosher English gentleman, but because my parents had spent their savings on sending me to Clifton, I was at least able to pass myself off as middle-middle class if I wanted to, which I eventually did all the time in the roles I was acting. Casting agents never thought of me as Mexican bandit-chief material; nor did cheerful cockney or Slovenian hit man roles come my way. No, only the respectable and even slightly grand professionals. If I wanted to play anything else, I had to write it myself. And I could see no harm in trying to turn myself into a fake English gentleman, because I had incorporated my father’s view of gentlemanly behaviour. I recalled being told stories about guests at royal banquets who had picked up the ‘wrong’ fork, whereupon the king had done likewise to avoid embarrassing them, and all the other guests had followed suit. And I was touched by this. It was nothing to do with snobbery. I read once that the journalist Auberon Waugh reproached a guest who had taken off his jacket and put it on the back of his chair, telling him it was ‘not gentlemanly’. I thought it was not gentlemanly to have pointed this out.

  I saw little friction between the classes at Cambridge. I met very few of the upper classes, but when I did, I realised how different their lives were. They genuinely liked chasing things and shooting them and hooking them out of the water and asphyxiating them. Death seemed the inevitable result of all their entertainments, despite their excellent manners. The working-class students – they were more students than undergraduates – seemed, by contrast, a little less outgoing and took work much more seriously than my upper-middle-class friends. Few if any of them regarded university as any kind of finishing school. The scientists were especially formidable in this regard, preferring their chemistry labs to ordinary habitations. And if the average public school boy was not a natural dancer, the chemists were unnatural dancers. They looked as though they had borrowed their bodies for the weekend and had not yet figured out how to work them. One tall, red-haired chemist with half-mast trousers moved like a Bournemouth proto-skater even when he was just crossing the quad. Alan, Martin and I would watch out for him, and were once treated to the sight of him completely losing the knack of walking, and falling in a heap on the ground.

  The only slight awkwardness that existed between the classes seemed to be between the public school boys and the grammar school boys. The latter were just as bright, but the fact that their parents had not had to pay school fees drew attention to the fact that they came from less affluent homes, and they could seem a little ill at ease socially. As I got to know them, they all told me the same thing: that most public school boys had a confidence that they felt they lacked, and so, in social situations, they often felt ill at ease. They wondered how the public school chaps had acquired their sense of self-assurance, and I certainly couldn’t tell them. I guessed that some people took their position in the social hierarchy so seriously it made them feel superior and act accordingly. Since most of the really confident people I met were actually rather stupid, it was very easy for them to think that it was class rather than intelligence that mattered. Self-confidence seemed to me more mimicry than anything else and I suggested visiting Clifton Zoo to watch the leaders in a group of baboons, and learn from them: make your gestures slow and deliberate; cultivate a deeper voice; appear casual at all times; eschew all rapid movements. That was all you had to do to look confident. I also knew that I could ‘do’ confident, and it helped enormously socially that I appeared to be able to fake it no matter how insecure, anxious or inferior I actually felt. And I did feel insecure. It was the Bartlett effect: the sense that I should be formidably well informed about everything, when in reality I was quite ignorant
. Since I believed that knowing lots of facts was a sign of superior intelligence, my life was one long struggle to suggest (subtly) that I knew a lot.

  And then, after just a few weeks, I had an epiphany. I was talking to a very well-informed fellow called Peregrine something-or-other, and nodding knowledgeably, and smiling wrily at I knew not what, when on an impulse I suddenly said, ‘I don’t know about that. Will you tell me about it?’

  There was a moment of silence, but the ceiling did not fall in. Peregrine something-or-other did not slap me contemptuously with the back of his hand, or spit in my face. Instead, he visibly brightened and proceeded to give me a thoroughly good explanation of what he had been talking about. He enjoyed explaining it, and I enjoyed understanding it, and he clearly liked me better for having given him the opportunity to display his learning. Instead of humiliation, then, I had initiated a profitable transaction. It was a revelation, and I found it such a liberation, and a relief, to be able to abandon that phoney omniscient posturing.

  The other main cause of my social insecurity, my painful inability to talk to women as though they were from the same planet, lay a little ahead, since I was seldom within earshot of anything female in my law lectures. There were, in fact, just three women in amongst 200 men and, overall, eighteen all-male colleges to set alongside the all-female Girton and Newnham.

  So my social life was very uneventful: the odd curry, the occasional film, regular coffee with a few friends, and now and again, a party.

  At one of these I got drunk for the first time. My old Clifton friend Adrian Upton asked me over to his birthday party and met me with a challenge – to down a glass of Yugoslavian Riesling in one go. Which I did, thinking myself dead cool. Some fifteen minutes later, he repeated the challenge. Down the hatch! Soon I was feeling unaccountably happy, then a little dizzy but even happier, for Adrian had spiked my drinks. Two-thirds of each glass of Riesling had been gin. God now provided some cabaret. The son of the Secretary General of the United Nations started quarrelling with Adrian, and blows began to fly. But not to land, because Adrian and he were standing so far apart that contact was made only when, in the course of frantically windmilling at each other, their knuckles occasionally brushed. It was wonderful.

  The sight of such frantic aggression producing such tiny results struck me as epoch-shatteringly funny. Add to this the fact that one combatant was the son of the man who, above all others, was trying to reduce the amount of fighting in the world, and the punch-up seemed to have all the appearance of a divinely scripted farce. I laughed so much that I made a spectacle of myself. This annoyed the combatants, and the speed of their windmilling became even more frantic – and funnier. At which point the room began to revolve, nausea, panic and regret took over, and I was forced to focus on survival.

  I have never got really drunk since.

  My Cambridge life now settled into a routine, and I became a rather dull fellow. Martin Davies-Jones says he always thought of me as ‘odd’. Well, I was six feet four inches tall, extremely thin and bearded, so I certainly looked odd. And I had a hamster, which was unusual, and a strange wheezing laugh, and I spent quite a lot of time in my own company (and the hamster’s). But odd? No. Dull.

  And then in an attempt to liven me up, fate intervened. Alan Hutchison happened to bump into an old friend from Radley College who was on the Footlights committee. He asked Alan if he was interested in such things, and Alan said he wasn’t particularly but he had a friend who had done shows at school, and somehow Alan and I finished up in the Footlights clubroom, chatting with this guy. This time, there was no mention of singing and dancing.

  From our point of view, the main attraction of the Footlights was the clubroom itself. It was relaxed and comfortable, with a tiny bar and some lunch tables and sofas, and at one end a small permanent stage with curtains and lights. But what really excited us was that it was plumb in the middle of Cambridge – the perfect place to pass time between lectures or to grab a quick and incredibly cheap lunch.

  To gain membership, one had to do an audition piece at one of the ‘Smoking Concerts’ that were produced every month by a couple of the senior members. These were very friendly events, for the simple reason that because every member of the audience was expected to do a turn at some point in the evening, it was in everyone’s interest to keep the atmosphere jolly and encouraging.

  So Alan and I trudged back to Downing and sat down to figure out an audition piece. After discarding several ideas, we hit on the notion of doing a mock television news broadcast. Fifty years later a more hackneyed and overdone format could not be imagined, but in early 1961 it was quite unusual.

  To understand how this could conceivably be the case, you have to grasp just how deferential, stuffy, compulsively super-polite and excruciatingly cautious British culture was at that time. I can recall a brief TV interview from the late 50s where a journalist, asking the Chancellor of the Exchequer about the budget he was about to present, came up with the following convolutedly polite question: ‘I wonder, sir, if you would be prepared to say a few words about what you are about to reveal to the House of Commons?’ It was like a head boy at a major public school doing a pretend-spontaneous interview with his headmaster. And this reverential attitude towards authority extended to the BBC itself, where seriousness of purpose easily toppled into pomposity. So for us to send up the evening news was ever so slightly daring.

  Drawing on the fact that the newsreaders at the time read the news from sheets of paper, rather than any form of prompter, the first thing Alan and I wrote went as follows:

  Good evening. Here is the news. (Newsreader stops and peers at sheet of paper) I’m sorry, here are the news. The Queen . . .

  The newsreader smiles beatifically, lays that sheet of paper reverentially aside and turns to the next sheet.

  . . . and Prince Philip (another ethereal smile) together visited Balmoral . . .

  I remember we included a few topical items, one of them inspired by the news that General de Gaulle had just blocked Britain’s entry into the Common Market:

  At a moving mid-Channel ceremony, the traditional Anglo-French entente cordiale was rekindled when President de Gaulle and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan opened the escalators connecting the French Channel Bridge to the English Channel Tunnel.

  Transplants were also in the news:

  Mr Gerald Dawkins, who in a major transplant operation last year received the heart, liver, lungs and spleen of a pig, is now completely recovered. He is back to his former weight of eleven stone, he takes two brisk walks a day and costs eight shillings a pound.

  Then there was a long final item about a Cornish mine disaster, sending up the serious tone that the BBC adopted when tragedy was in the air.

  This evening, prospects of a successful rescue are rapidly diminishing. Nevertheless, whilst any hope remains, operations are being continued by floodlight. Betsy, the eight-year-old collie belonging to the Clark family of Mabshurst in Cornwall, who has been trapped on a ledge a hundred and twenty feet down a disused tin mine, is weakening, despite quantities of brandy and rabbit lowered to her. Earlier, Mr Clark and his son Ronald tragically fell to their deaths during the descent, when within barking distance of the dog. Julia, Mr Clark’s teenage daughter, then descended, and actually reached the ledge; but fell to her death when bitten by the dog. Mrs Clark (thirty-nine), the one surviving member of the family, said before attempting the perilous descent this evening: ‘Inhuman people will say this is madness, but I know it is what my husband would have wished.’

  This was about as far as satire went in early 1961.

  Alan was to play the newsreader, so I needed my own piece to perform, and I decided to use a monologue I had written when I was still at school. I had stolen the idea for it from a television performer called Professor Stanley Unwin, who managed to talk complete nonsense that somehow sounded just like English. The first time I heard him I became so hysterical with mirth that I frightened my parents; further expos
ure to Unwin’s jibberish had the same alarming impact. (I had a similar reaction when I first heard Charlie Chaplin’s fake German in The Great Dictator.) I didn’t understand why this kind of nonsense so convulsed me, but I watched Unwin obsessively and slowly figured out how he did it – which was to take certain syllables from very ordinary words and mix them up with syllables from other equally common words, so that the sounds were totally familiar English ones, but the overall effect quite meaningless. His version of ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’, for example, began: ‘Once apollytito and Goldiloppers set out in the deep dark of the forry. She was carry a basket with buttere-flabe and cheesy flavour.’

  I have at times suspected that what I seem to laugh at most are the things that frighten me. I find anger, like Basil Fawlty’s, hilarious – provided it is ineffectual, as real anger might be too disturbing. I’m terrified of violence, yet I shout with laughter at great slapstick comedy that threatens people’s physical safety (think of Harold Lloyd or Chaplin, or of Eddie Murphy crossing the freeway in Steve Martin’s Bowfinger). My sense of humour has been described as cruel (mainly by BBC executives), yet I am almost obsessively appalled by torture. And I howl at absurdity and nonsense when my deepest psychic fear is a sense of meaninglessness. Am I trying to diminish a fear by laughing at it, and thereby belittling it, reducing its threat?

  So, anyway . . . once I had worked out how Stanley Unwin produced his strangely convincing gobbledegook, it was easy to scribble out another example for the Footlights audition. Of course, it was an absolute bugger to learn, but I decided to present the piece as a scientific lecture, which allowed me to glance at my notes whenever I thought I was about to panic.

  The show we were auditioning for was being produced by two experienced third-year Footlighters and they encouraged me to do another idea, which I had stolen from a BBC radio show. It was a parody of the last two minutes of a typical BBC detective thriller, when all the suspects gather together and the detective explains the whole plot. The idea that I pinched was that in order to make the plot exposition less boring, the detective delivered it during a final hand-to-hand combat with the villain, who himself added plot clarifications at appropriate moments between punches. The dialogue was easy to reproduce: