JOHN CLEESE ON HOW WORKNESS SMOTHERS CREATIVITY: The Monty Python legend on giving offense and getting laughs.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick

N A CAREER that has spanned seven decades--and included such classic shows and movies as Monty Python's Flying Circus, Fawlty Towers, Life of Brain and A Fish Called Wanda--the comedian John Cleese has relentlessly satirized politics and religion while stretching the boundaries of decorum and good taste.

Now 83, Cleese--who studied law at the University of Cambridge--has set his sights on political correctness, which he says is the enemy not only of humor but of creative thinking in all areas of human activity. "There are people sitting there who are deliberately waiting for the thrill of being offended," he says, emphasizing the importance of paying attention to context, without which irony and sarcasm can't be properly understood.

Reason's Nick Gillespie caught up with Cleese at FreedomFest, an annual July gathering in Las Vegas. Cleese was the keynote speaker, there to discuss creativity, which was the subject of his 2020 book of the same name. It's a myth "that creativity is something you have to be born with," he argues, contending that "you can teach people how to create circumstances in which they will become creative."

In a wide-ranging conversation available on The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie, Cleese discusses the importance of freedom of expression to being creative, the difference between solemnity and seriousness, and why creativity remains necessary for the progress of civilization.

Reason: Do you regret not becoming a lawyer?

Cleese: My favorite joke about lawyers is that the U.S. Postal Service a few years ago issued a commemorative series of stamps commemorating famous American lawyers, but they had to withdraw it within a couple of weeks because people couldn't figure out which side of the stamp to spit on. You heard that before?

That's great. I have your book, Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide. I highly recommend it. Why is creativity so important for a thriving society?

I think the most natural impulse that people have other than curiosity is to figure out: Can we do this better? Whatever it is. I think that's a pretty natural kind of response, but I'm afraid the educational system doesn't encourage it. I mean, it's not as bad as Japan was, for example. I had a friend who studied there and said that the Japanese educational system was specifically designed to stop people thinking for themselves.

You grew up in England at a time when the school system was famous for being rigid and domineering. Has it changed? America is often seen as a place that's not structured enough. Is this a better environment?

It's always a question of balance. Discipline is essential to any kind of learning. It's essential, but at the same time, if you have too much, then you have a Chinese or Japanese system, where they don't want anyone to be creative because they're frightened that they will lose control. All I can tell you is I can only think of one example where my creativity was stifled. We had a very nice teacher and he taught me English, which seemed to me a bit redundant because I spoke it pretty fluently anyway.

He asked us to write an essay on time and I'd already realized it's a very hard thing to write about. You look it up in the dictionary and it says, "duration." Then you look up duration and it says, "time." So I wrote the whole essay about the fact that I'd not had time to write the essay. Now, you giggle at that. It's not bad, is it, for 15?

But he said to me, "Cleese, this isn't a proper essay." He didn't have a go at me. He wasn't nasty. He wasn't particularly critical. He says, "No, we just don't do things this way," and that's how our creativity gets stifled.

I always thought that teachers didn't understand that they needed to explain things. For example, I learned lots about the Protestants and the Catholics and [Oliver] Cromwell and Charles I, but no teacher ever told me what was the difference between them. There...