Comedian John Cleese blasted woke culture, saying comedy has been ruined by a need to be politically correct.
While speaking at FreedomFest in Las Vegas, the Monty Python star highlighted the need to cultivate creativity and warned “wokeness” is threatening the future of entertainment.
“The woke people seem to have no real understanding of meaning because a word or a phrase — what its meaning is — depends on its context and not on its dictionary definition,” Cleese told the Babylon Bee, saying that woke culture compromises truth in an attempt to gain attention.
Cleese also explained that woke culture gives space to the “critical mind” to suppress creativity, telling Fox News they are “definitely in opposition to each other.”
“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 told Fox News. “What you have to be able to do is to build without knowing where you’re going because you’ve never been there before. That’s what creativity is — you have to be allowed to build.”
Cleese called the impact of woke culture on comedy “disastrous.”
“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,” Cleese said.
“I would say, at the moment, this is a difficult time, particularly for young comedians, but you see, my audience is much older, and they’re simply not interested in most of the woke attitudes,” the comedian added. “I mean, they just think that you should try and be kind to people and that’s no need to complicate it, you know?”
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Cleese added that he feels a “great sadness” that there are “very, very few really good comedy scripts” today, noting that onetime banned topics, such as sex, are now considered acceptable.
