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When I first saw John Cleese’s bizarre X posts this morning, I did what many of us reflexively do when confronted with the musings of the chronically online: I scrolled, winced, and kept scrolling.
But something made me go back. I don’t know if it was out of morbid curiosity, boredom or something deep in my millennial heart craves outrage, but I wanted to get a closer look.
‘Sorry to have to say this… The British do not like the kind of diversity that intends to take over Britain and kill any infidel,’ the 86-year-old wrote in response to a video of London mayor Sadiq Khan, whom he refers to in multiple posts as a ‘silly little man.’
‘Traditional British values are under attack from Muslim belief systems’ was another one.
Elsewhere, he shared videos that are misleading at best, outrightly fabricated at worst, including violent AI-generated clips.
As you scroll through Cleese’s posts, you realise that these aren’t outliers. They’re not one-off misfires or poorly judged jokes from the man many would consider to be an icon of British comedy.
Instead they’re just a few of the thousands of entries that form the years-long, dispiriting arc of Cleese chipping away at his own legacy.
It feels like we’re witnessing a real-time radicalisation.
This is the man who helped shape Monty Python’s Flying Circus and gave us Fawlty Towers, shows that didn’t just define British comedy but exported it to the world. They were bold, irreverent and inventive.
There is something uniquely deflating about watching a figure once synonymous with sharp, absurdist brilliance slip into reactionary cliché.
Cleese’s descent into this brand of grievance politics has been a slow slide. In the late 90s, he served as a spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, espousing broadly tolerant, liberal views. But flashes of thinner skin appeared early.
In 2003, he successfully sued a journalist over an Evening Standard piece asking if he had ‘lost his funny bone’, a move that hinted at a man less comfortable with criticism than his on-screen persona suggested.
By 2019, that discomfort had hardened into something else. Cleese sparked backlash for claiming London was ‘not really an English city anymore’, and that multiculturalism had watered down the English-ness of the capital.
He elaborated in an interview: ‘I don’t know what’s going on in London because London is no longer an English city… we’re the most cosmopolitan city on Earth but it doesn’t feel English.’
It isn’t hard to figure out what is probably meant by ‘English’ in this context.
Even Boris Johnson, hardly a poster child for progressive multiculturalism, pushed back at the time, saying London’s diversity was something ‘we should celebrate’.
At the time, Cleese insisted he ‘wasn’t a racist’, a defence that rarely strengthens the case of the person making it.
By 2021, he was announcing a show titled John Cleese: Cancel Me, aimed at interrogating ‘woke’ culture and free speech. The project never materialised, but the posture seems to have stuck.
This trajectory feels well-trodden, and we’ve seen it play out with other high-profile figures who are fond of spending a lot of time on the internet.
A controversial comment from a public figure is met with backlash. Unused to ever facing criticism or scepticism, the individual goes on the defence and doubles down.
As a result, the backlash intensifies; so does the rhetoric. At this point, the echo-chamber of the internet is primed to step in and do its thing.
Before long, what may have started as a clumsy or ill-informed – but not always intentionally malicious – remark calcifies into a defining identity.
The person becomes fixated on being ‘allowed’ to say whatever they want, a middle finger raised to ‘wokeness,’ – especially if it’s in the name of comedy. It’s less about wanting to be right than refusing to be wrong.
In Cleese’s case, that has meant drifting from nostalgic grumbles about ‘Englishness’ into frequently amplifying narratives that portray Islam as violent and incompatible with British life.
The pursuit of humour that so defined his career seems to have been abandoned in favour of fear and vitriol.
It would be easy to dismiss Cleese as an out-of-touch octogenarian who’s been unwittingly absorbed by an online hellscape that has only existed for a small portion of his life, but this is not just any little online voice we’re talking about.
Cleese is a comedian whose work helped build the foundations of modern British comedy – a foundation that often included mocking the kind of close-minded, isolationist, pompous Brit with which he now seems to earnestly identify.
British comedy is ever-changing. Today, it’s broader, more inclusive, and more reflective of the country it speaks to, as demonstrated by the multicultural cast of the uproariously funny new UK Saturday Night Live.
But there are certain elements of it that are enduring. Its ability to be confident enough to laugh at itself and open enough to evolve, for example.
John Cleese was once a figurehead of this mentality, and many would still see him as a representative of it. That’s a big part of why this is so difficult to witness: it’s not just regressive but actively corrosive to the nation’s comedic identity.
Watching him railing against imaginary enemies online, you can’t help but feel that what’s really being lost isn’t ‘Englishness’, but perspective. And that loss, unlike any imagined cultural erosion, is entirely self-inflicted.
Tragically, it means that John Cleese’s comedic legacy is probably going to be overshadowed by his rancid politics, and all that will remain is an evolving comedy tradition that has a lot to thank him for – but no room left for him.
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