The Left hates it when you don’t help them with their agenda. Monty Python Actor John Cleese was interviewed by BBC World about his upcoming shows in Asia, but his interviewer Karishma Vaswani was clearly not interested in covering that, so she tried to force him to talk about cancel culture instead. She was trying to point out that his humor did not provide a safe space for audiences, and that he was out of touch. But Cleese was not having it…
“What is it about cancel culture that interests you?” BBC World News’ Karishma Vaswani asked.
“Well, it’s a relatively new phenomenon, and of course, it affects comedians because a lot of us do jokes that the cancel culture people…woke people don’t think are right, or don’t think are correct, ” Cleese asserted. “So, I’ve been asked to do the program, and so I’ve been exploring and I’ve been reading quite a lot of books, and trying to understand what it’s all about. But it’s quite a complex matter, and it seems to be boiling down to the fact that…I think some people are rather overprotective.”
“I mean, we all want parents to be protective, but we don’t want them to be overprotective because that raises children who are no, perhaps, very well going to adapt to the real world,” the Monty Python star elaborated.
“I think it’s very important that things should go wrong and that minor bad things should happen, because that helps people to learn to become a little bit tougher when they go out into the world, which is not a terribly friendly place a lot of the time,” before concluding, “And if we overprotect them, then I think that doesn’t work very well,” Cleese concluded.
“But John, you know, some would say that what you’re suggesting is that it’s an,” uttered Vaswani before Cleese interrupted her asking, “Why do you say ‘but’? Wouldn’t you like to just explore what I’m saying here?”
Vaswani then proceeded to tell Cleese his comedy was“old-fashioned” and suggested that Cleese is not “taking into consideration the feelings of people who have been hurt… For instance, in Britain, where racist behavior was couched as a bit of banter…is that acceptable in your view as a joke?” Vaswani asked
“I think it’s a very poor question,” Cleese responded.
Vaswani pushed for Cleese to answer.
“Well, it’s hard because it’s so scattered, and it has so many different ideas in it, and I don’t know which place to start with to answer it,” Cleese started.
“What I’ve said is, the important thing is that people are protected to the right degree, not only overprotected or not under-protected,” he declared. “So the question becomes, ‘what is the right degree?’ Now, practitioners of cognitive-behavioral therapy — which is a very successful therapy, which is used a lot to treat depression and anxiety in young people — say that the woke ideas are pretty much the opposite of what they use to make people less depressed.”
“Now, it doesn’t matter whether that’s old-fashioned or new-fashioned or even from the early 12th century,” he added. “That is a very interesting idea, and needs to be explored without using these emotional terms like ‘people being hurt’ and all these kinds of things.”
Cleese then pushed to talk about the subject he had agreed to talk about, the comedy shows he is putting on in Asia. But Vaswani couldn’t help herself and tried to get Cleese to talk about cancel-culture again.
“John I want to ask you about your thoughts on another comedian. I don’t know if you know this American comedian Dave Chappelle, who faced a huge backlash…” Vaswani asked.
“We’re back on cancel culture here,” the actor retorted. “I thought we were going to be talking about shows and comedy but I’m not interested in doing this interview anymore, so I’ll leave you now. Bye-bye.”
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Vaswani was out of line. She was trying to demonize Cleese and refused to stay on the subject that he was brought on to talk about. He was polite and tried to help Vaswani stay on subject but she was clearly setting him up. He was right to walk away from that hostile interview.