Was John Cleese ever funny?

Like many of my generation I was enchanted by the surrealistic irreverence of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, until I overheard other boys — it was never girls — excitedly murdering the Parrot Sketch: ‘Ah yes, the Norwegian Blue — lovely plumage…’ This was not out of a snobbish disdain for popularity; I still loved the Beatles, after all. What made me wince was that the boys in question obviously lacked any sense of humour, and had adopted the show as a kind of prosthesis — which would explain its huge success in Germany.

This planted in me the appalling suspicion that Monty Python wasn’t really funny at all, and earlier this year, as the humourless boys held mass rallies at the O2 Arena, that suspicion was confirmed when I watched some old clips on YouTube. Beneath their undergraduate wackiness, the jokes are as desperately conventional as Dick Emery’s.

No one loves a critic, especially not performers, but John Cleese’s hatred of the trade is remarkable even for a performer, so it is sporting of him to include in his memoirs the New York Times’s response to Cambridge Circus, the revue that made his name, taking him from the Footlights to Edinburgh and the West End, and then on to New Zealand and America: ‘The visitors behave as if what they are doing, singing or saying is hilarious, but what emerges seems obvious or pointless.’