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The Python Strikes

John Cleese’s Redwood City ‘alimony’ show shows he hasn’t lost his bite.

by Steve Palopoli on Nov 09, 2009
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At his show in Redwood City Sunday night, John Cleese talked a lot about how he’d had to stand up to anxious producers and easily offended focus groups to get away with the edgy black humor that he’s now best known for. OK, talking about it is one thing. But in the first 15 minutes, he proved without a doubt that even at 70 he’s still willing to step up to the line of sheer tastelessness, and then do a very silly walk right over it.

This time, it wasn’t lopped-off limbs, assassinated dogs or French fries up Michael Palin’s nose—although he did show those clips from Monty Python and the Holy Grail and A Fish Called Wanda, among others. No, this time it was about his famously bitter recent divorce, after which he was ordered to pay $20 million to his ex over the next several years. And there was no way he was holding back. It’s one thing to call your show “The Alimony Tour, Year One.” It’s a whole other level to compare your ex’s lawyer unfavorably to an orc, imagine how much more you’d have to pay if your former schmoopy had actually contributed anything to the marriage, and project a supposed pic of the former Mrs. Cleese at the ATM withdrawing a stack of bills that would have made Scarface’s Tony Montana proud.

It was all, in a word, hilarious. And the more vicious it got, the more it pushed the I-can’t-believe-he’s-doing-this needle into the red, the more it made the sold-out audience at the Fox Theatre laugh. As Cleese would point out throughout the show, that’s often been the key to his comedic success. Frontloading the divorce material was also a clever way of getting that much-hyped topic out of the way. He imagined who he could have divorced for less money—including making $13 mil divorcing Britney Spears—and what he could have done with the $20 million, like buying 20 million things at the dollar store.

Some of it was nasty stuff, but Cleese pulls this kind of thing off not just with the ultrapolite British delivery, but also the way he often seems to be doing his best to hold back a grin—he knows it’s shocking, and he hopes it’s as funny as he thinks it is.

On Sunday night, it was. There have been a lot of Python documentaries, and a couple of the stories he told were in the most recent two-parter on IFC. But hearing him tell it in this one-man-show format was far funnier (how do documentaries about Monty Python manage to be so unfunny sometimes?), and some of the previously untold bits were choice. There was footage that recently turned up from a lost TV show he did in the '60s with Graham Chapman, stories about how producers wanted to cut scenes like the Black Knight in Grail, only to have them turn out to be audiences’ favorites, and a re-enactment of one of many times Palin made him crack up on stage. Oh, and two killer jokes about France.

It was hard to know what to expect from Cleese’s show, especially since he pulled the classic Sex Pistols “only in it for the money” dodge, but this was great stuff. Thank God for alimony.



by Steve Palopoli on Nov 09, 2009
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