John Cleese talks 'Clifford' and how 'woke folk' are ruining comedy

https://torontosun.com/entertainment/celebrity/john-cleese-talks-clifford-and-how-woke-folk-are-ruining-comedy

The Monty Python comedian recently returned to the road with his ongoing Why There Is No Hope tour, in which, among other things, he riffs on humanity’s intractable idiocy.

“What I like about this stage of my career is the people who hate me don’t buy tickets,” the British comedy legend, who just turned 82, tells the Sun. “I have a preselected audience of people who like me and what I do. I don’t have to worry about woke folk or anyone like that because there aren’t any in the audience.”

You mentioned the woke folk right off the top. Your comedy was a big part of my household growing up. Are people more sensitive to comedy nowadays?

I’m sure they are … If you express any clear opinion, you’ll always upset someone. This is why politicians try to say nothing because the moment you say something definitive, you’ve upset someone. It doesn’t particularly bother me. I’ll listen to why they’re upset and sometimes I’ll think, ‘Maybe that wasn’t quite right.’ But most of the time, I think, ‘No, people, particularly woke people, are far too sensitive.’ They are often sensitive in a way that I don’t really admire. There’s a lot of posturing and virtue signalling … and they find it very hard to understand irony. They think if you say a word that can be bad. No, a word’s meaning comes from its context, not from a dictionary. That’s why if you’re being ironic and sarcastic, you are using words that are completely opposite of what it is you are trying to convey. This kind of subtlety is beyond many of the woke folk because I think many of them are literal-minded and they’re lacking in a sense of humour, which after all is a sense of proportion.

So what’s the future of comedy then?

I don’t know. I think there’s two things going on at the moment that are incredibly important. One is the Trump Republicans trying to destroy democracy in America. The other is the people on the left — the woke folk — trying to destroy everything to do with humour and actually not preparing people for the real world. The woke people are often very sensitive and what I’ve discovered in my research is a lot of the cognitive behavioural psychologists, who do a good job of dealing with young peoples’ anxiety and depression, do the complete opposite of what woke people advocate. In other words, woke people advocate for certain ways of behaving and that makes these anxieties and depression problems worse.