It was a really bad, stupid joke.
Cleese is a funny guy, and as I have gotten older, I appreciate the Monty Python movies more each year. They anticipated some of the most absurd aspects of 21st-century culture. They made fun of Woke before there was such a thing.
Cleese, though, has a really bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, and like so many TDS sufferers, he has to scream out his bad takes to the world. And like all people with TDS he has a lot of really bad takes about the former president.
Bad takes like this one:
Cleese insisted that this was a funny joke, and we just didn’t get the “context.”
Unlike some people, I am always a bit glad these days when TDS sufferers spew out their bile. First of all, I believe in free speech on principle, and secondly, it helps me identify people who have gone insane.
It’s always good to know who the crazy people around you are.
Cleese initially apologized for the tweet; then, he decided to double down on it. He did so not because he maintained that the joke was actually good but because he rightly argued that bad and/or offensive jokes shouldn’t be suppressed. That’s why he kept it up even when the backlash got pretty harsh.
But as the inevitable backlash began to pour in, the Monty Python co-founder, who has never been shy about his disgust with the former president, continued to double down and defend his right to make “very bad jokes,” even if some people find them offensive.
In response to one person who informed him the original tweet was “not funny” and “not true, either,” Cleese replied, “Some people think it was funny, AND not true.”
When someone else told him that his “best comedy days” were obviously behind him, he wrote, “At the age of 84 I should hope so.”
“So you prefer Hitler to Trump?” another incensed user asked, to which Cleese said, “I should have thought that was obvious to any idiot… If not to anyone else…”
Cleese’s defense of free speech–even harmful or offensive takes–immunizes him from too much criticism from me. He is one of the relatively few liberals who is willing to stand up for others’ rights to be wrong, offensive, or unpopular. The right to be so is under tremendous attack.
And, as we all know, it is often the unpopular ones who change the world, often for the better.
Trump won’t win or lose the next election because liberals spout off about how bad he is–not a single sane person on earth hasn’t already formed their own opinion about the guy. But having a liberal willing to stand up and be counted in the fight for freedom of thought is priceless these days.
There are so few of them, and liberals own the cultural means of production, meaning that we need as many liberal allies standing up for dissenters as we can possibly find.
So, I am in an odd position, defending a joke that I think was offensive and wrong. Cleese was an idiot for posting the joke but displayed courage in admitting it was bad and using it to defend free speech.
I count that as a modest win for sanity, oddly enough.
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