by John Cleese
Thinking quickly, and realising that the situation was lost, I ad-libbed:
‘I . . . am . . . Lu . . . dicrous!’
Another big laugh.
Later that evening, at the actual performance, things began to go downhill early in the proceedings. I took up my position behind the black drapes, but this time a different boy was standing there, in the darkness. I peered at him.
‘Who are you?’
‘Tupman. Gould has a music lesson.’
‘So you’re parting the drapes for me?’
‘What?’
‘You’re parting the drapes? So I can get on stage.’
‘I don’t know about that.’
‘What?! What are you doing here?!’
‘I don’t know, Cleese. He just asked me to stand in for him.’
And now I can hear my cue coming up in about ten seconds, so I start groping the drapes in the dark, trying to find the gap myself, desperately grabbing at the pitch-black cloth in search of an opening, as the seconds tick away. And there’s my cue! So . . . I just walk forward into the drapes and keep trudging onward against the weight of all the velvet cloth that is clinging to me, and the audience start to giggle at the sight of this strange, increasingly large bulge in the backcloth that is, ever more slowly, making its way towards them. The actors step back in alarm – at least I’m frightening someone – and I manage, just, to keep moving so that when I have reached a point about halfway to the front row of the stalls the drapes, at full extension, start sliding back over my head and finally fall back, revealing a strange creature, a lacquered stick-insect apparently in a fright wig, who announces:
‘I am Lucifer!’
By which time most of the audience have lost contact with their chairs.
I didn’t try straight acting again for another thirty-seven years, when I played Kenneth Branagh’s tutor, Dr Waldman, in his film of Frankenstein. But this time, I was a triumph! I didn’t get a single laugh, not even when Robert De Niro stabbed me to death.
British journalists tend to believe that people who become good at something do so because they seek fame and fortune. This is because these are the sole motives of people who become British journalists. But some people, operating at higher levels of mental health, pursue activities because they actually love them. Thus I was drawn to comedy in a way I can’t quite explain but can definitely acknowledge. (And it was much more than loving to laugh, even if as a teenager I was still capable of those helpless, glorious paroxysms, when you really want to stop, because it’s actually hurting too much.)
For example, I sometimes saw a comedy film or a play that elated me, that excited me and made me feel that there was something going on that I wanted to be connected with: when Dad took me to my first Marx Brothers film, A Night in Casablanca; when we had a school visit to the Theatre Royal to see N. F. Simpson’s One Way Pendulum; when I saw Laughter in Paradise with my favourite comedy actor Alastair Sim; when I watched comedy films produced by the Ealing Studios like The Ladykillers and Kind Hearts and Coronets. Of course, this feeling of being inspired faded away each time, but every now and again it was rekindled, like an itch I didn’t know how to scratch.
Another more eccentric example: each term at Clifton we were given a Blue Book, a small, soft-covered notebook with masses of information about schedules, and lists of masters and boys and the big sports events and so on. We carried it everywhere; losing it was like mislaying your mobile phone. But I filled mine with humour: wherever there was a square centimetre of white paper, I wrote the latest good joke I had heard. Nobody else was doing this . . .
In addition, some Saturday nights the Clifton houses would organise ‘entertainments’ and now and again I’d do a little sketch or spoof. I learned how to mime to records. On one parents’ evening I did a silly orchestra skit with me as conductor. Afterwards I asked my mother how good it was. I very much hoped she would say, ‘Really good!’ What she actually said was, ‘Quite good.’
On top of all these indications of an unorthodox passion, every evening after I’d had supper and done my prep, I’d join my parents in the living room and watch television; and although Dad and I would sometimes look at thrillers or live sport, most of the time it was . . . comedy. The odd thing, in retrospect, is that so many of the best shows were American. We loved Jack Benny, and George Burns, and ‘Amos and Andy’ (now Orwellian ‘non-persons’, as they were played by white guys in ‘blackface’), and Joan Davis, and Ernie Kovacs, and our favourite, Phil Silvers as Sergeant Bilko. Well written, totally uncontroversial, funny . . . though not exactly adventurous . . .
The only sign of anything a bit quirky, or ‘wild’, came in variety shows, when wonderful, original comics from the era of music hall (or ‘variety’) would do unclassifiable routines: Max Wall; Tommy Cooper; Sid Millward and the Nitwits; Frankie Howerd; Wilson, Keppel and Betty; Professor Jimmy Edwards; Norman Wisdom; Chic Murray . . . To me they were the funniest performers, but there were only occasional sightings of them. As a rule, British TV was devoid of zany, madcap, anarchic, crazy, wild, wacky, out-of-left-field, Pythonesque (sorry! I’m jumping ahead), off-the-wall comedy, of the Max Wall variety.
But not British radio. Because in the relative backwaters of BBC Radio lurked the Greatest Radio Comedy Show of All Time: The Goon Show.
If you know The Goon Show, fine. If you don’t, I envy you. Because you are in the incredibly privileged position of being able to listen to it for the very first time! It made the best use of radio that has ever been achieved in comedy, mixing a huge variety of wonderfully silly voices and astonishingly creative sound effects to tell ridiculous stories with humour that was witty, insane, insanely logical, breathtakingly stupid and thoroughly subversive (all three performers had been in the armed forces and held the same views of the officer class).
I loved this show with an intensity that almost defies analysis. It was not just that it was wonderfully funny when I listened to it on the wireless in my bedroom, or two days later when I prepared myself to hear the repeat, by laying the radio on its side on my bed, putting my ear against it, and holding a cushion over my other ear, in an attempt to hear the five jokes I had missed (due to the audience laughter) on the original broadcast. It united me with my friends. We adored it, and discussed it, and swapped jokes from it, and it made us feel more alive. In some way, it was cathartic: it exhilarated us by lifting us up above our everyday frustrations and boredoms. It gave us a liberating perspective on this odd event unfolding around us, called ‘our life’. And when, years later, I became bewildered by the reception of Monty Python by some of our looniest fans, I suddenly realised they were experiencing exactly the combination of emotions that had rendered me such a devotee of the Goons, and so I was able to forgive them.
So, let us raise a glass to the Goons: Peter Sellers, the greatest ‘voice-man’ of all time; the adorable Harry Secombe, who played the raspberry-blowing nitwit around whom the stories always unfolded; and Spike Milligan, the genius who wrote the best radio comedy scripts of all time. Salute!
And if God had told me that, ten years later, I would be performing a Goon Show with these three titans . . . I would have ceased to believe in him (not that we were particularly close at that time).
My last year at Clifton started on a sour note. On the first day back, I walked into North Town and strolled up to the noticeboard to confirm that Mr Williams, my housemaster, had finally made me a house prefect. This was not an unreasonable assumption: in the summer, I’d been in the School XI, captained the House XI, passed three A levels, completely reorganised the house library, played the lead in the house play, and stolen more cricket equipment from the other houses than had ever been nicked before. Besides, all my other friends were not merely house prefects, but school praepostors, official Big Cheeses, and none of them seemed so vastly superior to me as the discrepancy in our social status would suggest; not to mention the fact that the position of house prefect was an almost automatic promotion in your la
st year, no matter how inept, malevolent and disgusting you were. It never occurred to me that ‘Billy’ Williams would withhold this trivial act of recognition any longer.
But, as you have guessed, he had. I stood there, staring at the blank space where my name should have been, as I experienced first utter disbelief, then hurt, and then contempt. The hurt was not that I had wanted so much to be a house prefect; actually, that hardly mattered at all. What wounded me was the put-down, the undeserved insult. The dull ache of this stab in the ego began to throb, but was suddenly engulfed in an extraordinary upsurge of high-minded contempt, not just for Williams but for a system that could ignore merit and allow personal prejudice to produce such a ludicrous decision. It was not fair and therefore it was unworthy of my respect. It was as simple as that.
I believe that this moment changed my perspective on the world. Till then the example given by my father and the teachers at St Peter’s had fostered in me a belief that people in authority over me were basically fair. Williams’s behaviour gave me a terrific jolt. I responded rather splendidly, throwing away my North Town cap that very day, and ‘borrowing’ one from Wiseman’s House, where many of my friends were located, and wearing it defiantly throughout my last year at Clifton, even inside the North Town House.
Up to that point I had tolerated Williams, but now I realised that I really disliked him, and I knew exactly why: he didn’t know the difference between being solemn and being serious. He was a dour, grim little gnome who could not understand that you can try to do your very best at something, and at the same time have fun; or that you can have a perfectly serious discussion, while making your points humorously. No, for him laughter was a sign of fecklessness. Pomposity and humour never go together.
To be fair, Williams was not a pompous man. He would like to have been, but he was so tiny he simply couldn’t pull it off. It’s tough being weighty when people can knee you in the head. So he had to make do with the kind of Cromwellian joylessness that banned Christmas puddings. Thus he wrote in my final school report: ‘I commend him for his dedication in practising his cricket.’ Dedication?! You might as well praise a boy for his dedication to strawberries and cream, or masturbation. I practised cricket whenever I could because I enjoyed it! Typically, that summer Williams awarded the house fielding prize to a boy who was noticeably bad at it, for no other reason than when he dropped a catch, as he usually did, he cursed so vehemently that it proved just how seriously committed he was to winning the game. Not surprisingly he had also been made head of house.
Much more significant than my disdain for Williams was the fact that I started to become sceptical of authority as a whole. I’d always been naughty in class (when I thought I could get away with it), but now I began to find my way around school rules, and to take the major authority figures less seriously. The school marshal was one victim of my new-found disrespect. Responsible for a wide range of disciplinary matters, he had always struck me as rather forbidding when he entered the classroom every morning to check on attendance. However, when he asked me, a few weeks after the beginning of my micro-revolt, why I had missed chapel that day, I told him that I had been walking along Lower Redland Road, and that as I’d passed the big block of police flats opposite the police station, someone had opened a window on the top floor and thrown a pan of hot fat all over me; and that, because of this, I had had to go back to shower and change my clothes. There was a stunned silence. The marshal stared at me, as did the class. I held my nerve and looked straight back at him. After about half an hour, he said, ‘Do you really expect me to believe that?’ ‘Marshal, I swear that is exactly what happened,’ I replied. He gave me an odd look. I knew that he knew this was an outrageous fib. ‘All right,’ he said, and he ticked his clipboard and left. The class looked at me admiringly. But I think that he had enjoyed it too.
I was as surprised as anyone by what had happened. It was completely unplanned, and my sudden boldness startled me, but in a very positive way. It exemplified a growing confidence, or independence; instead of just fitting myself into the school schedules, I was acting more autonomously. And the timing could not have been better. My Cambridge and Oxford entrance exams were coming up and I needed to be able to wangle my way out of corps and games and Old Testament classes so that I could study harder than I had ever done before. Over the next weeks I crammed with a fierce discipline that I did not know I possessed, feeling that this was the first really important challenge I had ever faced.
I liked Cambridge very much when I arrived to take the Downing College exams, but found the college campus rather bleak. The exam papers were not particularly difficult, but then I had no way of knowing what standard was expected. A week later I was at University College, the oldest of the Oxford colleges, taking the science papers there. Halfway through the physics one, I realised I was not doing well. I’d given two rather sprawling and muddled answers, and had fallen badly behind on time. Looking for a calculation question to help me catch up on the clock, I started answering one about rocketry. This was not a good idea as I had never studied the subject. I had panicked. I finished the three hours in total disarray. I knew I had failed a key paper, and that there was no way back. I walked around Oxford for the rest of the afternoon, feeling terrible and wondering if I should bother to sit the remaining exams. I got back to the room I was staying in, too gloomy to eat dinner. Then the phone rang and Dad told me I had been accepted by Downing.
But there was a twist to this. Because National Service had just been abolished, there was a bottleneck at all the universities, with people who had just completed two years’ military duties immediately after their schooldays competing for entry with those who were about to finish their final year at school. So although I’d been offered a place at Cambridge, I was told I would have to wait two years after leaving Clifton before I could take it up, in October 1960.
Not that it concerned me at all. I never even speculated upon what I might do to fill this two-year gap. I still had some nine months of school left ahead of me, and that took considerations of the future over the horizon for a Cleese who’d only just turned eighteen. Moreover I was now encountering a new feeling of spaciousness, due to being free, for the first time in years, from the pressure of exams. I have always noticed that any kind of pressure narrows my awareness and stunts my curiosity, because once I apply my nose to the grindstone I find it difficult to stick it up in the air again to smell the flowers. Of course a degree of obsession often produces the best work; but it does not produce the best life.
But now, with my place at Cambridge secure, I didn’t care whether or not I passed my S level exams. In fact, although I didn’t register the significance at the time, I now paid very little attention to my scientific studies, and started to look around for other, more interesting matters.
My main criticism of my time at Clifton is that, at this point, when any master could easily have steered me in the direction of a new interest, I was left entirely to my own resources. And the truth is, I was not very resourceful. But then, in fairness to me, no teacher ever tried to stimulate my intellectual curiosity either. Nor, in five years, did any of them spot that I had any creative abilities whatsoever. I remember writing an essay on ‘Time’, which I thought rather ingenious: I spent the entire essay explaining how I had failed to get down to writing the essay because I had prevaricated and procrastinated and wasted time, and the last line of the 1,500-word essay was an apology for not having written it. If I’d been a teacher reading this, I would have spotted talent. Unfortunately you have to have some creative ability before you can recognise it in others. At Clifton, I don’t think any of the masters had this innovative talent and the institution itself seemed to limit its recognition of it to English essays that contained phrases like ‘carpet of snow’ and ‘verdant foliage’ (see earlier) and ‘autumnal hues’, and to drawing and painting.
So in that last year, no teacher suggested that I should read a particular book or play, or try to acquire a new
skill, or visit an exhibition, or anything that would have expanded my intellectual horizons; and these were very limited indeed, given that from 1955 to 1958, of the thirty-six lessons that I attended each week, thirty-one were in maths and science, and the remaining five in PE and Old Testament studies. I don’t blame Clifton for this ludicrous imbalance, as it was dictated by the educational ‘authorities’ of the time, via A levels. It was only thirty years later, when I read Howard Gardner’s Frames of Mind, that I realised that there are many different intelligences (Gardner believes there are nine, which are almost unrelated to each other, which helps me to understand why I sometimes think I am quite bright, and sometimes feel like a complete dolt). Of these, the traditional English system of education developed only two: ‘logical-mathematical’ and ‘linguistic’, with two others – ‘musical’ and ‘bodily-kinesthetic’ – worked on outside the classroom. The other five were totally ignored. The staff couldn’t have taught them anyway.
Consequently it was only in my mid-forties that I realised just how appallingly narrow this English ‘left brain’ education was; and this enabled me finally to understand why so many people who had been academically distinguished did not seem to accomplish a great deal once they left university.fn1
So there I was, in December 1957, with a place at Cambridge, and time to broaden my horizons; but finding no stimulation from Clifton, and lacking the awareness or audacity to strike out on my own in any intellectual direction, I wasted my chance and enjoyed myself instead. I read adventure stories like Conan Doyle’s Exploits of Brigadier Gerard, and detective stories like Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and the Father Brown tales of G. K. Chesterton. In the spring term I played soccer every day and pretended to be Tartuffe (we were rehearsing the play for that year’s inter-house play competition). I began to realise that these two activities had a lot in common: I really liked being in teams – the collaboration, the ‘team spirit’, the in-jokes, the sense of belonging, of support; all probably giving me a sense of family I’d never experienced before. And obviously I’m still at it. One of the happiest memories of the 2014 Python reunion was that the Python team took the curtain calls together.
