It’s hard to feel sorry for South by Southwest residents. Each year they meet to discuss their virtues publicly, to hold their bright intellects open for discussion, and to propose ways that they could drag us all onto their plane of learning. They want to talk about wind farms and vegan bologna and the “Latina Power Pipeline.”
It goes smoothly most years and everyone returns home happy to help fight for microbrews that are sustainable or pansexual Nickelodeon character. John Cleese was invited to join a panel by some unprincipled knucklehead. The decidedly unwoke Monty Python founder has caused much tutting among elites lately for insisting that people should have a sense of humor, and for defending J.K. Rowling’s heretical opinion about men being men and women being women. Cleese, predictably, ended up being the proverbial skunk in the wine and local cheese party.
According to The Hollywood Reporter’s disapproving report, the Friday evening panel was titled, “John Cleese in Conversation.” Dan Pasternack, the creator of “Portlandia” moderated the panel, which also included Jim Gaffigan, Dulcé Sloan and Ricky Velez. The group could only take so much of Cleese’s conversation.
Things were apparently okay until Sloan, a black woman correspondent for “The Daily Show,” brought up colonization (like ya do).
Cleese said people “forget the British Empire was the basic political unit of organization for 6,000 years – the British didn’t start [colonizing].” In other words, colonization and empire are as old as history itself.
The session was then closed by him opening a book of historical perspectives on the topic:
History is a history of crime. It’s a history of people who were stronger beating up people who were weaker and it’s always been that. It’s deeply, deeply distasteful. But to pretend that one lot were worse than another – you do know the British have been slaves twice, right?
Oh dear. He may as well have been reading aloud from the “Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook.” He couldn’t be stopped:
“[People] get competitive about this business of being oppressed,” Cleese said (seemingly unaware he was doing exactly that). “We were oppressed, the English, by the Romans for 400 [years], from about 0 to 400.”
“You’re really going back, Pasternak scoffed and Velez said “This is getting so uncomfortable,” asking if the panel was “a new Dave Chappelle special?” Chappelle too has a bad habit of saying things good progressives find icky.
Cleese wasn’t deterred.
“I want reparations from Italy,” Cleese said drawing shocked gasps. “… and then the Normans came over in 1066 … they were horrible people from France and they came and colonized us for 30 years – we need reparations there too.”
All this eventually led Sloan to take Cleese’s microphone away, temporarily. It was probably done in jest, but it may not be funny for the reasons she thinks …
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