From seminars on script writing to lectures on psychology and human development, Cleese’s appearances at Cornell lead to riveting, sometimes hilarious, and often controversial conversations. These appearances draw hundreds of people, and their enormous popularity should offer Cleese some reassurance that he may not need to fear censorship, and that his wit-while it might not be as well appreciated in today’s mass entertainment-still has plenty of currency in places where smart people gather. Cleese has railed about the evils of political correctness, especially on college campuses, while spending the past 20 years as a “professor-at-large” on the prestigious campus of Cornell University, where he has delivered “incredibly popular events and classes-including talks, workshops, and an analysis of A Fish Called Wanda and The Life of Brian.” In curmudgeonly interviews, he complains about hypersensitivity with examples of jokes contemporary audiences simply don’t find amusing, or at least not coming from him. (He called, surely in jest, for the hanging of EU president Jean Claude Juncker, for example, during the Brexit campaign). He has also come off lately as a “classic old man yelling at a cloud,” writes Fiona Sturges at The Guardian. Many listeners of a recent BBC Radio 4 show found his act a little stale. “Sometimes very, very silly things,” he says in the interview with Cornell University Press director Dean Smith below, “have the power to touch us deeply.” Then he tells the old joke about a grasshopper named Norman. We are moved by stupidity, Cleese believes, and silliness is the engine of good comedy. But you can also call them very smart kinds of stupid, a description of some of the highest forms of comedy, I’d say, and one that applies to so much of Cleese’s best work, from the Pythons, to Fawlty Towers, to A Fish Called Wanda. You can call sketches like the “ Ministry of Silly Walks” and “ Dead Parrot” surrealist, and they are comparable to the absurdist stunts favored by certain early 20th century modern artists. John Cleese and his Monty Python colleagues are a premium example.

It takes real intelligence to successfully make dumb comedy.

John cleese professor at large