The cinetrix hates to be late to any party, but she was busy gnoshing like Ganesh and drinking Tecate in a former sweatshop when this item first appeared in the Times: John Cleese is starting a blog, thejohncleese.com. Not a whole lot of content up there as yet, but Cleese is ambitious.
I get lots and lots of funny ideas. And I think to myself: what am I going to do? I don't have a show. So it seems to me the best thing I can do is to buy a little camera, write funny things, and then perform them very, very simply in front of this camera, and put it on the Web site the next day. Apparently, there are people who will pay 50 cents a week to download bits of funny material.
That's all well and good--welcome aboard, old man--but here's the insight that really tickled my fancy:
Is it also harder to age gracefully in comedy?CLEESE Oh, I don't think so. I think if people know who you are . . . like if Michael Caine walks on screen, everybody knows it's Michael Caine, and they don't realize that he's 130 or whatever. Because it's Michael Caine, and we've loved Michael Caine for as long as we can remember, so we just see Michael Caine. We don't think, "Who is that extraordinarily ancient man?"
The 'Fesser does a one-word impersonation of Caine that's quite something.