John Cleese knows what “Cancel Culture” is.

Because the co-founder of the legendary comedian group Monty Python's Flying Circus has already been canceled.

Michael Hanfeld

responsible editor for features online and "media".

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An episode of the series "Fawlty Towers", which he and his then-wife Connie Booth conceived in the 1970s and has since repeated countless times and which is number one on the list of the most popular British television programs published by the British Film Institute, went to the last year The streaming service UKTV, which belongs to the public broadcaster BBC, was temporarily put in the poison cabinet because of alleged racism.

That was the episode in which Cleese as Basil Fawlty, the rather crazy boss of the Hotel Fawlty Towers, offended his German guests with remarks about the Second World War (“Don't mention the War!” Became a household word) and finally in Going with a goose step through the breakfast room.

However, it was not because of this that “Fawlty Towers” ​​was suspended, but because of a comment by Major Gowen, a permanent guest at the hotel, about the West Indies cricket team.

The whole thing is the finest British comedy, but apparently not everyone understands it anymore.

What is “canceling” and where does it lead to?

As reported by the British media, John Cleese now wants to find out what the cancellation is all about in a series for the ITV broadcaster.

In “Cancel Me” Cleese goes, as it is said, the question “why a new 'woke' generation is trying to rewrite the rules of what can and cannot be said publicly”.

He will speak to people who have been canceled and those who have fueled cancel actions.

“I'm delighted,” says the now 81-year-old Cleese, “that I have the chance to explore all aspects of so-called political correctness in front of the camera. There is so much that I don't understand, such as why the unsurpassed idea of ​​'let's be kind to people' has in some cases been taken ad absurdum. "

By the time the Fawlty Towers episode “The Germans” was cashed in (it finally returned with a warning in front of it), Cleese, as a humorist on the subject in the Australian press, had actually already said what to say: “One of the things that I've learned over the past 180 years is that people have very different understandings of humor. Some understand that if you let characters utter nonsense, you don't spread their views, but make fun of them. The major was a fossil from a bygone era. We didn't support his views, we made fun of them. If they don't see it - if people are too stupid to understand it - what can you say? ”In“ Cancel Me ”, John Cleese will surely come up with something.