Monty Python is funny.
John Cleese is funny.
And in a recent interview*, a reporter asked Cleese what is the funniest thing he has ever said.
But I don’t get it.
So will someone please explain it to me?
The joke is short and simple:
Question: Did Queen Elizabeth kill Princess Diana?
Answer: Not with her hands.
Please fight my ignorance. 'Cause I don’t get it. (and please go easy on me. Don’t send me to join the choir invisible, pushing up daisies, etc,etc
*Cleese tells the joke and its context in the last paragraph of the linked article.)
Because she’s the queen, and it’s crude to consider her doing anything base with her hands? WAG. That’s the exaggeration. Wouldn’t be caught potting her own plant, much less committing her own murder?
ETA I think the entire quote is “Certainly not with her hands.” That helps.
I think he means the queen killed her indirectly, by slowly driving her to what would ultimately lead to her death, but first starting with destroying her happiness and will to live.
Right, but the other implication is that the first thing that’d pop into a reasonable person’s head upon being asked that question is the idea that the Queen may have done it with her own two hands; and that the key thing, the single most important detail, the point we absolutely should address first before we consider any secondary stuff, is whether she did it physically.
Which is, of course, (a) irrelevant, to the point that it’s (b) not what anyone has in mind when they ask if the Queen killed her.
Okay… but are those levels humourous? I don’t see how.
Sure, the Queen is a nice proper lady, who has servants to do all her physical labour
So there’s a small element of surprise in Cleese’s answer to the question, implying that Her Majesty might be the exact opposite of her image.
But it’s only a small surprise, and not at all sophisticated, and not really funny.
Yet Cleese seems to think that this is the absolutely funniest thing he has ever said.
Python fans can all quote dozens of funny lines from the TV show and movies…Those quotes get thrown into Sdope threads every day.
But I can’t imagine this line (“not with her hands”) ever being included alongside “pining for the fjords” or “my hovercraft is full of eels”, etc
Maybe I’m just unworthy of being a John Cleese fan.
The main thing that interview did for me was to taint my appreciation of Cleese: he comes across as an arrogant, bitter old man with very little insight into himself or into humor. I kind of wish I hadn’t read it.
He has always been the prickliest of the Pythons. Pushing 80 certainly isn’t helping that. I saw him a few months ago on his tour where they show Holy Grail and then he speaks after. He was funny, insightful, and at times charming. He was also a bit dismissive about how others view his work. He doesn’t seem to like The Grail very much and doesn’t understand it’s popularity in America. He also enjoys the hell out of a good offensive joke which doesn’t bother me in the least. Other than the amount of alimony he had to pay the last ex I don’t think he’s bitter. Cranky, yes. Not bitter.
Gotta admit I’m with the OP on this one. Seems neither funny nor insightful, much less biting. I do appreciate the attempts to explain it, but for me at least it isn’t working. Oh well.
I read the article a few days ago, and this was my take on him also. I liked how the article pointed out that Cleese was always rather conservative compared to the others, and from other bios and Python compilations, my impression is that John would belabor a point about whether or not something was funny for so long that it was no longer funny. I think he has always been a rather tedious fellow. Brilliant, but tedious.
Don’t forget he was sick and fighting some kind of leg infection when he talked to the interviewer, and may have been feeling extra tedious.
He’s just turning into the grumpy old codger we always knew he’d be.
As to the joke, I read it as just his (increasingly) morbid sense of humor. His comments about how their jokes on human paradoxes are becoming ever more real, well…that jades anybody’s outlook. I know it does mine.
What he said about Terry Jones’ advancing dementia makes me sad and slightly angry, so I can only imagine how it makes John Cleese feel.
The things that stood out to me in the interview:
-When confronted with the fact that different folks have different tastes, he ascribed it to a difference in intelligence: southerners and midwesterners don’t like his stuff because they’re dumb. No awareness of how culturally specific humor can be. (I’d be interested in his analysis of why teenaged boys seem to be the biggest fans of his stuff).
-He told a joke where undocumented Mexican immigrants are portrayed as an invading army, and that’s the entire joke, and he can’t understand why anyone would find it mean-spirited. If he defended the joke that’d be one thing, but to fail to understand why folks would object to that is just foolish.
-When the interviewer asked him about the idea that he was controlling, he deflected by telling mean stories about other Python members and claimed they were the real controlling ones.
I read the interview. This was assuredly NOT what John Cleese thinks is “the funniest thing he ever said.” It was just an example of something he said spontaneously. They’d been talking about the crafting of comedy, in the lead up to it.
I found it quite amusing, but then I have a much deeper British heritage than most here. If you aren’t in to exceedingly dry wit, there are lots of things that will confuse you.
The humor in that particular instance, was involved with contrasting Cleese’s absurd response to someone’s serious, paranoia and conspiracy-theory-based question, which essentially toyed with them nonsensically.
Humor is rather subjective, after all. I for one, have never managed to figure out why anyone laughs at the three stooges. Each to their own milieu, I suppose.
