John Cleese is Bad now. Or has he been thus for ages, but thanks to a Twitter and J.K. Rowling angle, his Badness is now evident to the very young or those with attention spans only for the latest controversy cycle?
Sarah Ditum asks why exactly anyone was expecting Cleese to be their impeccably with-it role model to begin with. It’s an interesting question, if not one that lined up with what I saw in my own Twitter world. There, the consensus (among members of the team in question) was that Cleese was simply an unfunny person. He’s cancelled now? No great loss, they said.
Déjà vu, but why? Woody Allen. When it got declared — redeclared — that Allen was Bad, there was quite a bit of ‘well fair enough I never liked his movies anyway.’ A 1979 Joan Didion essay unfavorable to Allen made the hot-take rounds, held up as evidence that Allen’s movies sucked.
There are a couple possible interpretations. One is that certain people simply do not like the oeuvres of these two comedy greats, either because nothing’s universal, or because they were introduced to Cleese and Allen via, like, a weak Monty Python sketch and one of the later films, respectively. Of course if you never liked someone’s art to begin with, why do you care if their views or behavior also isn’t to your liking? Shouldn’t it just be a non-issue for you, like those NYT commenters who show up just to say they don’t care about the topic?
Or is it that your aesthetic preferences have somehow vindicated your views? Are you Good because of a premonition you had, as a 12-year-old watching a rerun, that some public figure would turn out to be Bad? Is it something in that general area?
The other interpretation is that ‘the work itself is bad actually’ is coming from fans, or ex-fans, disappointed in their hero, or in themselves for having found work that (as Ditum points out) often doesn’t meet today’s sensitivity standards or those of its own time (remember Didion knew not to be Team Allen even back in the day).
Once you’ve fully internalized the message that comedy punches up and never offends and is actively about making the world a better place (see the Feminine Chaos Bloggingheads on “Nanette”…), you sort of do have to retroactively declare things unfunny that perhaps did make you laugh. Or (forgive an additional self-link but my newsletter my rules) maybe you do keep laughing, but in private, while compensating with a public performance of non-laughter, either (generous interpretation) to do your own part to save the world from Bad, or (ungenerous) because you imagine yourself unique in your personal ability to separate art from artist or to think that issues and individuals’ lives may not fit into just one part of a good-bad dichotomy.