- John Cleese is a comedy legend worldwide
- His latest show can't quite get off the ground
- HERE is the story behind the cancellation
In 2021, comedy legend John Cleese set the media world abuzz with the announcement of his Channel 4 show, 'Cancel Me', aimed at dissecting the thorny thicket of cancel culture. Fast forward to today, and it seems the project might just be as lifeless as the famed Norwegian Blue Parrot. What went wrong for the 'Monty Python' star's ambitious venture?
A Deal as Elusive as the Holy Grail
Sources whisper that Channel 4 and Cleese couldn't see eye to eye on a deal, while others hint at the impossibility of aligning the stars – or, in this case, the schedules. Despite these setbacks, Channel 4 remains hopeful, a sentiment that may or may not be shared by Cleese, whose representatives have remained tight-lipped.
When the show was first announced, it promised to be a bold foray into the minefield of political correctness, with Cleese at the helm, ready to question, challenge, and possibly offend.
"There’s so much I really don’t understand," Cleese mused, expressing a desire to bring clarity to the debate surrounding cancel culture. His previous endeavor, 'The Dinosaur Hour' on GB News, saw him wading into similar waters, discussing cancel culture and 'wokery' with his characteristic wit.
If this is upsetting news, don’t worry: Cleese has addressed his thoughts on "wokery" multiple times already. In 2023, he suggested that Monty Python were "early targets of cancel culture" because some members of the Christian community hated 'Life Of Brian.'
In what’s now become a pretty standard rant, Cleese has also stated that 'one of the problems we have [in comedy] is we have the woke generation," who "started out with a good idea, which is ‘Let’s not be mean to people.’ Then they take it rather the wrong way by assuming people are rather more sensitive than I think they are."
The previous year, he not only signed a letter supporting J.K. Rowling, but doubled down on Twitter/X, writing: "Deep down, I want to be a Cambodian police woman[.] Is that allowed, or am I being unrealistic ?"
If Cleese really wanted to be canceled so badly, he didn’t have to go through the hoops of announcing and then never filming a show to make that happen.
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The question on everyone's lips is: Will Cleese's project on cancel culture ever see the light of day? Or will it remain a tantalizing 'what could have been', a dead parrot in the annals of television history? Only time will tell if Cleese and Channel 4 can resurrect this seemingly doomed project.
Until then, fans of the comic legend and followers of the cancel culture debate are left waiting and wondering.
