John Cleese's balls-up

I've been in Canada for the past week, doing shows with John Cleese. That's a heavyweight piece of name-dropping. I imagine that the reader's appetite for the rest of my diary is now at fever pitch. Let's hope I don't disappoint: nothing's worse than being disappointed, as my dear old friend Gore Vidal would agree. Cleese was hosting a show at Just For Laughs, Montreal's renowned comedy festival, in which I also performed.
The show was billed as a "showcase of Britain's top talent", although, it must be said, the "talent" was exclusively comic. There was nobody balancing things on their chin, or peeling an orange without getting annoyed.

We had all assumed that Cleese's "hosting" would be minimal, a brief appearance to milk the adoration of the 2,500 fans, perhaps with a token bit of long-leg-waving or hitting a Spaniard over the head with a tray. Instead he took the opportunity to deliver a vicious monologue, complete with PowerPoint slides, about his recently estranged wife and the various ways she'd left him bereft (he's had to pay her $20m and, as he said to the Canadian crowd, "real dollars, too, not your ones"). It was funny - very funny at times - but the laughter was tainted with sadness: most comedians draw on regrets and grievances for material, but most of us would hope not, at 70, to be basing an entire routine on the implosion of a 15-year relationship. Still, a laugh is a laugh.

After belittling his wife for two successful nights, Cleese fell prey to a bout of prostatitis and had to cancel the third show. I've never believed in any literal form of karmic retribution, otherwise Jeremy Clarkson wouldn't be able to go out in the car without a tree falling on him, but this was the most abrupt punishment of ill-will I've ever seen. Could it be that karma does operate after all, but as a safety measure, applying only to people who are already in a near-impregnable position of wealth and fame? If so, I'm going to have to either downgrade my ambitions, or cut out all these petty crimes I keep getting away with.

I spent the week in Montreal, where about 80 per cent of people speak French as their first language. Unlike the genuine French, with their notorious lack of tolerance for non-francophones, French Canadians are perfectly capable of speaking English, switching into it at the first hint that you might be from Britain, as people across the globe routinely do in the face of British linguistic incompetence. I did my best to meet them on their terms: having done A-level French, I positively sought out opportunities to ask people where the station is, what there is to do in the area, and other essential phrases last used in oral exams. Even when this went well, it was alarming to find I was mentally congratulating myself for managing to change money or order food without indignity. Did I study for seven years so that I could scrape the same level of competence in French as most French people take for granted in English?

When I mentioned this to a friend, he gave the standard English response: "English is universal. There's no point in us learning loads of other languages." This may be true pragmatically, but successfully speaking another language gives you a nobility, a sense of being
a world citizen. Saying that others' competence in English makes it "pointless" to learn languages is like saying there's no point in learning the piano because you'll be with someone who can play it for you. I'll address this when I become minister for education.

On the subject of xenophobia, there's something I feel I just have to say: I like Australians. There, I've said it. Don't get me wrong, I'd love little more than for England to reclaim the Ashes and was so glued to coverage of the first two Tests (which should, incidentally, be returned to terrestrial TV as a matter of national urgency) that it nearly ruined my holiday. Yet the vogue for anti-Australian feeling that occurs during every Ashes series is regrettable. I've got a number of Australian friends and I perform out there a lot. It's a great country: the landscape is spectacular; the cities are superbly designed, safe, fun and - despite the stereotype - full of culture; the food, sport and nightlife are world-class; and the people are energetic and free of a lot of the negativity that dogs the British.

It's a mistake to regard everyone with a positive world-view as naive, or stupid, or a loudmouth, the way we British often do with any nation that doesn't constantly moan. More importantly, it's a mistake to bait another country's sporting team when they're down, as sections of our press have been doing with the Australian captain, Ricky Ponting. After all, Kevin Pietersen was struck down with injury on the same day as John Cleese's sudden illness. Again, I'm not saying that we are definitely in the hands of a judgement system that metes out karmic punishments. But let's all just be careful until we're absolutely sure we're not.
http://markwatsonthecomedian.com

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