long conversation with his father. When he got to the age of 20, he was surprised at how much his father had learned in the previous five years. SAVAGE: That’s exactly right. Now about this book – wait, I was going to ask about lemurs. CLEESE: Oh! Ask about the lemurs. SAVAGE: What is it with the lemurs? CLEESE: I just think they’re the nicest little creatures. I wish I had married one. It would have simplified my life. They are the dearest, dearest little things and I see one of them is carrying an advertisement for a movie – oh no, it’s a raccoon, isn’t it? That’s right. No, I just love lemurs and I think they’re absolutely adorable, so I do a little bit to help because they are getting wiped out in Madagascar. It’s the only place [they live] – this huge island. We think it’s small because we look at the map next to Africa; it’s the size of France. They keep discovering more species. In fact, I have a species named after me. SAVAGE: No! CLEESE: Yes! SAVAGE: A Latin name? CLEESE: Yes. Avahi Cleesei, Cleese’s woolly lemur. Isn’t that wonderful? SAVAGE: That’s fantastic! CLEESE: Lovely. And I turned down a peerage. SAVAGE: I think you’ve got your priorities. CLEESE: I’ve got my priorities right. I’ve got a lemur named after me. So when I pay off the alimony, I must give them something. SAVAGE: The characters you guys [in Monty Python] took on are very specific. Thirty years after the last live performance, when you went to the ’02 [live performance], did [you and] Michael [Palin] go back into the exact same characters? Or did those characters get modified over the years? CLEESE: I don’t think they get modified much. I think my voice has dropped a little bit as I’ve gotten more relaxed, or rather because I’ve gotten older. I think there used to be a tightness in my voice, which a certain amount of therapy helped to clear. I can really just go straight back into it and it’s peculiar then. There are certain characters – if you played characters a great deal – it’s as though they continue to
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exist somewhere in you and you can just connect with that place and go. Even the gestures will be right. SAVAGE: I think one of the main things I got from the book that I didn’t know was that you are a writer first and foremost. CLEESE: I’ve always thought of myself as a writer. I’d gotten to Cambridge on science and switched to law, because I wasn’t really interested in science. And I just discovered one day, by chance, that if I was given sheets of blank paper, I could write something down and if somebody – perhaps myself, not necessarily – performed it right, people would laugh. It was an astonishing discovery to me. But from the very beginning, I was always
“I’ve got my priorities right. I’ve got a lemur named after me. When I pay off the alimony, I must give them something.” performing what I had written. If you actually look back over the things people know me from, which are Python and Fawlty Towers and A Fish Called Wanda, all of those I wrote or co-wrote myself. SAVAGE: You said that the tension that existed among the Pythons while writing existed within the writing but not within the performing. CLEESE: That was the bizarre thing, because we did fight and argue a lot. The arguments were always about the script. Was the script good enough? We never argued about who was going to play what role, because it was quite obvious that Graham was going to play that or Michael would play that. It was obvious. We never argued about that. But when we got into arguing about the script, we used to get extremely worked up, much too much so. One of the problems was there were two really difficult people in the group. The first was Terry Jones and the second was me. We used to butt heads, and it was sort of temperamental. I don’t usually say this in public, but it is sort of known. Terry
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is Welsh. I once explained to Terry that God had put the Welsh on the planet to carry out menial tasks for the English. He could never get his mind around it and insisted on behaving as if he was an equal. So there were a lot of fights with Terry. SAVAGE: Did you guys end up fighting over the same territory? CLEESE: No it was just whether something was funny. This is how ridiculous it got: Somebody had written a funny sketch in a dormitory, and somebody said it should be a really dusty, rundown sort of place. Somebody said, “Yes, but with one magnificent Louis XIV chandelier.” And somebody said, “Yeah, that’s funny, but not a chandelier, a dead stuffed farm animal with a light bulb in each one of its four feet.” And somebody said, “Obviously a sheep.” And somebody said, “What do you mean a sheep?” One guy said, “Well, obviously it’s funnier if it’s a sheep.” And another guy said, “No, it’s obviously funnier if it’s a goat.” “A woolly chandelier, that’s funnier.” “No, no, a goat with the horns.” This argument went on, and I remember quite seriously it went on for a quarter of an hour. Three were passionate that it should be a sheep. Three were passionate that it should be a goat. I remember I sat back and I thought, “This is insane! What are we arguing about? It’s obvious that it’s going to be a f--king goat.” [Laughter.] A lot of passion went into it. It was really ridiculous. SAVAGE: Did you guys write Meaning of Life in Hawaii? CLEESE: No, we wrote a bit of it in the West Indies. What happened was that after Life of Brian – which the Pythons all pretty much think is our best show, our best film. And I agree. I think the first half of Holy Grail is very, very good, but I don’t think the second half is. I thought, in Brian there was a real story there and it was about something important, too. When we got to Meaning of Life, we could never agree on a story. We kept meeting and writing for a month and we had masses of material and nothing could come together to unify it. So we all went off, after we finished The Life of Brian, to the West Indies for two weeks and I said on the first night, “I have a plan. Let’s not do any work at all. Let’s just have a wonderful holiday on the beach in the sun and