I’d been Zooming with John Cleese for about an hour when he threatened to come over and smack my ears. I had asked about his announcement, two years ago, that he was disenchanted with England and was relocating, at least temporarily, to the Caribbean island of Nevis. There was much about contemporary England that Cleese had found irksome, compared to the “calmer, more polite” country that he grew up in. But his “particular beef,” he said at the time, was with the state of the British media, as well as with the scuttling of Leveson 2, part of a government inquiry that grew out of the 2011 News of the World phone-hacking scandal and might have led to reforms of England’s aggressive tabloid culture, which has been the bane of many celebrities and royals.
Hours after our interview, Cleese complained on Twitter that “some US journalists have been pressing me on statements I have not made,” singling out my assumption that one of his reasons for his self-exile was the mindless level of discourse over Brexit. He blamed my bad information, again, on the scurrilous British tabloids. (In fact, I had got the Brexit impression from an interview that he gave to the BBC, in which he said, “One of the most depressing things about this country was the standard of debate about Brexit.”) His 5.7 million followers would not have been surprised by his pique; Cleese, who turned eighty last fall, has used Twitter to rail against political correctness, the “wokes,” climate-change deniers, the Trump Administration, the “petty bureaucrats” at the BBC, and all manner of what he considers stupidity and nonsense.
Stupidity and nonsense, of course, were the prime targets of Monty Python, the anarchic comedy group that Cleese formed, in 1969, with Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, and Graham Chapman. “Monty Python’s goal,” Dave Eggers wrote in The New Yorker, in 2004, “was not only to make audiences laugh but, just as important, to tear apart the medium of television with extreme prejudice.” Its début series, “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” stepped like a giant, naked foot on the mannerly English culture that Cleese now reveres. But Cleese’s career has stretched far beyond Monty Python, notably including the farcical sitcom “Fawlty Towers” and his Oscar-nominated screenplay for “A Fish Called Wanda.” He’s also written several books, including a best-selling memoir of his early years, “So, Anyway...,” and a new handbook called “Creativity,” which is billed as a “short and cheerful guide.”
“I wanted thirteen-year-olds to be able to read it in an hour,” Cleese told me, when he appeared in our Zoom room. He was speaking from—of all places—London, where he was passing through after shooting a movie in York. (“We were in a bubble, or whatever they call it.”) He had spent much of the pandemic Stateside, at a hotel in Bel Air, working on a musical version of “Wanda” and a stage adaptation of “Monty Python’s Life of Brian.” Next, he was off to Mustique with his wife, and after that—who knows? “We’re lucky to be alive, really,” he said, sitting in front of a picture of nuzzling zebras. Before we got to his recent spate of political skirmishes, our conversation (which has been edited and condensed) began on the subject of his new book.
Some might see a guide to creativity as an oxymoron. Do you believe it can be learned?
You can learn the circ*mstances in which you are likely to become more creative. A professor of psychology said to me once, “If you’re sad, you have sad thoughts. If you’re angry, you have angry thoughts.” So, to be creative, you have to have creative thoughts. You need to be in a creative mood. How do you get in a creative mood? Well, a creative mood, by definition, is a playful one. Why can children play so naturally? Because the parents are minding the shop. The kids don’t have to worry about who’s making dinner. So, if you want to play as an adult, you have to create a space where you get away from the ordinary responsibilities of everyday life.
You write a lot about a book by Guy Claxton, “Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind.” Can you explain the concept?
It was a huge part of a jigsaw that I put together, because he pointed out those two ways of thinking. There’s the fast, default way, and then there is a slower, pondering kind. In our society, we think that intelligence is always to do with quickness, which is wrong. Quite wrong. The more a problem is like a maths problem, where you know all the factors and you’re given the values of measurements, that’s ideal stuff for hare brain. The more it becomes indefinite and about feelings and people, the more you need the slower way of thinking. And allied to this is the idea that the unconscious is so extraordinarily powerful, but it’s very, very difficult to control. It’s a little bit like a woman. You can’t order it about. You have to coax it and be nice to it. If you pursue it, it seems to get further away.
You write that “much of our ‘Tortoise Mind’ work takes place in an atmosphere of uncertainty and gentle confusion.” How do you get into that state of mind?
You can’t hit it with a stick. What you do discover, when you’re not functioning very well and coming up with much, is that you do seem to be able to achieve a steady average. Chapman and I could do fifteen to twenty minutes every week of good material, which is a little bit more than was needed for a “Monty Python” episode, with all the others contributing. If it doesn’t come one day, you just stick at it. When you’re eating, and the food’s coming towards you on the fork, you can’t say, “Well, that’s the good bit, and travelling back empty from your mouth to the plate is the bad bit.” It’s all part of one process. If you start beating yourself up, that doesn’t help.
It seems like you learned a lot about creativity from people you admired, like David Frost.
The person of my generation that everyone thought was a genius was Peter Cook. He was a wonderful sketch writer and performer, and a mon—what do you call a man who does monologues? A monogamist! I used to get my dear old vinyl record and play one of his sketches—like the man trying to teach ravens to fly underwater—and I would try to write it up from memory. And then I would listen to the record again, until finally I had, on about the sixth draft, pretty much the script that I’d been listening to. I was learning technique rather than creativity. In the old days, they used to get artists to copy great master paintings.
Right. One of the tips you give is to “borrow” from people you admire.
Yes! Except, if you’re an artist, you say you were “influenced.” You know, “I was much influenced by the work of Michael Schulman.” Of course, if you just steal something in the present form and you don’t do anything to it, then that is stealing. You learn nothing. But, if you are actually able to borrow a style from someone and use that, then it comes out as yours, because you’re doing it. I don’t think Shakespeare ever thought up a plot in his life. He just took other people’s stories. He never seems to lose any marks for that.
In “So, Anyway...,” you talk about the things that made you predisposed to creativity. You write, “So, creatively, I was doubly blessed: constant relocation and parental disharmony.” What do you mean by that?
If you grow up where there’s only one version of the truth and only one way of doing things, then you’re likely to think that that is the only version. If you grow up travelling a lot or hearing arguments between your parents, you discover there’s lots of different ways of living, lots of different ways of thinking, and you can compare the two and say, “I liked the last town better.” Comparing experiences, even if it’s with your mum and your dad, makes you think about other possibilities. Whereas with people who grow up in Iowa, there’s not a lot else on show, so that they’re not terribly good at imagining other scenarios.
