Jane and I went out to a show last night: an evening with John Cleese, who as, as expected, extremely funny. The bulk of the show was a retrospective of his life and career, with anecdotes and film clips.
If I got started talking about all of the funny bits I’d be here all night, but there were a couple of bits that I found particularly interesting. First, before working with the rest of the Pythons, John Cleese and Graham Chapman did a show with Marty Feldman; it was Feldman’s first appearance as a performer (he was a writer, actually), and Cleese was the one who suggested that he be part of the cast. Second, Cleese said his happiest moment from his five years with Monty Python was when he read the Cheese Shop Sketch to the other Pythons, and Michael Palin laughed so hard he fell of his chair and couldn’t get up for a couple of minutes.
Apparently Cleese got his dark sense of humor from his mum, who lived to be over 100; she was born (IIRC) 1899, and died in 2002. She suffered from depression, and John would call and hear about it the things that were getting her down (she was an omniphobe, he told us) and finally one time he said, “Well, mum, I know this man in Fulham, and if you like, if you like, I’ll have him come round and kill you.” And she laughed, amazingly, and it became their private joke. “Well, mum, shall I send round to the man in Fulham?” “Oh, no dear, not this week, I have a sherry party on Friday.”
I guess it’s nice to know he came by it naturally.
The View from the Foothills 
I consider John Cleese the funniest man in the world, and the Cheese Shop Sketch is my all-time favorite Python bit. It seems to me to be a pure, concise, unanswerable send-up of postmodernism. I suspect that Cleese himself *is* a postmodernist, but he can at least see the self-contradiction of the thing.
But I’m probably wrong.
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I won’t say you’re wrong, but I don’t see the link with post-modernism…except, possibly, that it’s a deliberate waste of time.
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It’s a cheese shop, but it has no cheese.
“It’s not much of a cheese shop, is it?”
“Finest in the district, squire!”
“Explain the logic underlying that statement.”
“Well, it’s so clean!”
The cheese shop is about everything concerning cheese, except the product itself. It’s about an exhaustive list of cheeses that it doesn’t actually have in stock. It has names, but no substance.
Postmodernism. At least in my disordered mind.
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