John Cleese slams ‘simple-minded’ critics upset with Trump-Hitler joke

Article content

Monty Python star John Cleese has sparked controversy after comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler in a viral social media post.

Article content

The British comedy legend drew ire from some of his “simple-minded” fans after he jokingly shared the “Five ways that Hitler was preferable to Trump” with his 1.8 million followers on X.

Article content

“1. He fought for his country 2. He never used a teleprompter 3. He was nice to dogs 4. He wrote his own books 5. He never played golf 6. He wasn’t a big fat slob,” Cleese, 84, wrote.

Article content

Article content

He then continued by trying to list five ways Trump is preferable to Hitler, writing, “1. He doesn’t practice genocide 2. He has nicer hair.” The other three spaces were left blank.

Knowing that his words were bound to inflame, Cleese quickly apologized for the wisecrack, writing, “I would like to apologize for my last tweet It was a very bad joke, especially on Boxing Day.”

But Trump fans weren’t ready to forgive so quickly, with Cleese then having to fend off his most vocal critics one at a time.

After one person wrote, “Your best days in comedy are obviously behind you,” Cleese replied, “At the age of 84, I should hope so.”

When another asked, “Holy s***, why would you write this?” Cleese fired back: “Because I’ve never tried to amuse the simple-minded. There are plenty of comics who do, and you will enjoy them.”

Article content

After one person tried to claim he would eventually delete the post, Cleese tauntingly wrote back, “Don’t hold your breath. Receiving insults from the literal minded is like being booed by a flock of sheep.”

Cleese’s fiery back-and-forth comes after Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner in 2024, delivered anti-immigrant remarks in which he spoke about “blood” purity earlier this month, echoing Nazi slogans Hitler espoused in the lead-up to the Second World War.

“They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump said about the thousands of immigrants flooding the U.S. without immediate legal status. “All over the world they’re pouring into our country.”

Article content

Last week, Trump doubled down, telling a crowd in Iowa, “They come from Africa, they come from Asia, they come from South America,” he said, calling the migrant crisis a “border catastrophe.”

But Cleese hasn’t just upset Trumpers. Despite describing himself as an “old-fashioned liberal,” Cleese’s commentary has put him at odds with the “woke folk.”

Last year, the veteran actor lamented that political correctness was killing comedy during an appearance at FreedomFest in Las Vegas.

“I think it’s particularly worrying at the moment because you can only create in an atmosphere of freedom, where you’re not checking everything you say critically before you move on,” Cleese said.

“A lot of comedians now are sitting there and when they think of something, they say something like, ‘Can I get away with it? I don’t think so. So and so got into trouble, and he said that, oh, she said that.’ You see what I mean? And that’s the death of creativity.”

Article content

Cleese elaborated further in a 2021 conversation with Postmedia when he criticized today’s youth for being “far too sensitive.”

“If you express any clear opinion, you’ll always upset someone. This is why politicians try to say nothing because the moment you say something definitive, you’ve upset someone,” he said. “Woke people … are often sensitive in a way that I don’t really admire. There’s a lot of posturing and virtue signalling … and they find it very hard to understand irony. They think if you say a word, that can be bad. No, a word’s meaning comes from its context, not from a dictionary. That’s why if you’re being ironic and sarcastic, you are using words that are completely opposite of what it is you are trying to convey. This kind of subtlety is beyond many of the woke folk because I think many of them are literal-minded and they’re lacking in a sense of humour, which after all is a sense of proportion.”

Article content

But even then he worried about the future of comedy and whether or not we could even take a joke anymore.

‘I think there’s two things going on at the moment that are incredibly important,” he said, as he contemplated what lies ahead for comedians. “One is the Trump Republicans trying to destroy democracy in America. The other is the people on the left — the woke folk — trying to destroy everything to do with humour and actually not preparing people for the real world.”

[email protected]

X: @markhdaniell

Article content