Posting on his social media last Thursday, comedy legend John Cleese says that he refuses, despite rumors to the contrary spread by a journalist, to remove the famous “Loretta” transgender scene from Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” for the stage adaptation of the beloved film.
He said as much on Twitter when giving an example of how the media misreports issues, saying (posts condensed into paragraph form):
A recent example of this misreporting ! A few days ago I spoke to an audience outside London. I told them I was adapting the Life of Brian so that we could do it as a stage show ( NOT a musical ). I said that we’d had a table-reading of the latest draft in NYC a year ago…
..and that all the actors – several of them Tony winners – had advised me strongly to cut the Loretta scene. I have, of course, no intention of doing so So someone in the audience had called a journalist and misreported me. Amazingly none of the British media called to check
A recent example of this misreporting !
A few days ago I spoke to an audience outside London.
I told them I was adapting the Life of Brian so that we could do it as a stage show ( NOT a musical ). I said
that we'd had a table-reading of the latest draft in NYC a year ago…(tbc) https://t.co/VPWJGdUZtJ— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) May 25, 2023
..and that all the actors – several of them Tony winners – had advised me strongly to cut the Loretta scene.
I have, of course, no intention of doing so
So someone in the audience had called a journalist and misreported me. Amazingly none of the British media called to check
— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) May 25, 2023
He then, getting a jab in at one of his fellow Monty Python comedians, joked, “Similarly, there are reports that ” Bright Side ” is going to be cut. Untrue, for a very good reason. We don’t want to upset Eric and it’s his only contribution to the Life of Brian script”
Then, responding to a fan asking why the rumor was spreading that the Loretta scene would be cut, Cleese said, “That was what was so surprising. These were absolutely top-class Broadway performers and they were adamant that we would not get away with doing the scene in NYC! I asked them ‘Are Python fans not going to come because we’re doing a scene they’ve been laughing at for 40 years ?‘”
That was what was so surprising
These were absolutely top-class Broadway performers and they were adamant that we would not get away with doing the scene in NYC!
I asked them "Are Python fans not going to come because we're doing a scene they've been laughing at for 40 years ?" https://t.co/EJX6pQdKWe
— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) May 25, 2023
Here’s the scene at issue:
Cleese has been, despite his generally leftist views, a prominent critic of the way that leftist wokism and political correctness is harming comedy. At a conference in Las Vegas, he said:
“There’s always been limitations on what they’re allowed to say. But I think it’s particularly worrying at the moment because you can only create in an atmosphere of freedom, where you’re not checking everything you say critically before you move on. What you have to be able to do is to build without knowing where you’re going because you’ve never been there before.”
“That’s what creativity is — you have to be allowed to build. And a lot of comedians now are sitting there and when they think of something, they say something like, ‘Can I get away with it? I don’t think so. So and so got into trouble, and he said that, oh, she said that.’ You see what I mean? And that’s the death of creativity.”
“You can do the creation and then criticize it, but you can’t do them at the same time. So if you’re worried about offending people and constantly thinking of that, you are not going to be very creative. So I think it has a disastrous effect.”
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