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Comedy always works best when it is mean-spirited.

John Cleese

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John Cleese
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: October 27
Actor
Autobiographer
Comedian
Film Actor
Film Director
Film Producer
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Television Actor
Voice Actor
Writer
Weston-super-Mare
Somerset
John Marwood Cleese
Best
Mean
Always
Spirited
Works
Comedy

More quotes by John Cleese

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If I can get you to laugh with me, you like me better, which makes you more open to my ideas. And if I can persuade you to laugh at the particular point I make, by laughing at it you acknowledge its truth.
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When I was in school, I was beaten every 30 minutes. It never did me any harm except for some psychological mal-adjustments and blurred vision.
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The Americans all love 'The Holy Grail', and the English all love 'Life Of Brian', and I'm afraid on this one, I side with the English.
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When you've been doing comedy for forty years, you really do know most of the jokes. And even if you don't know a specific joke, you can pretty much guess what it's going to be.
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There's something about watching an animal that puts you in contact with where we came from and what we're still a part of.
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It’s only on the brink that people find the will to change. Only at the precipice do we evolve.
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I get bored easily. I've been bored most of my life.
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I find it rather easy to portray a businessman. Being bland, rather cruel and incompetent comes naturally to me.
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What's the bleedin' point?
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Muslims, who have a completely different value system, come to the West, then they should accept that there are certain basic values in the West intrinsic to our culture. Just as I wouldn't suggest that any Westerner walk down the streets of Saudi Arabia in a bikini.
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When you're being stalked by an angry mob with raspberries, the first thing to do is to release a tiger.
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This is the extraordinary thing about creativity: If just you keep your mind resting against the subject in a friendly but persistent way, sooner or later you will get a reward from your unconscious.
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I have a tendency sometimes to get too logical with what I'm writing, just because I want it to be kind of perfect.
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Loving your neighbour as much as yourself is practically bloody impossible? You might as well have a commandment that states,'Thou shalt fly'.
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If God did not intend for us to eat animals, then why did he make them out of meat?
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The Americans are so much more positive. They are much more in love with success. In Britain, they're a fairly envious bunch, and they love it if you fail.
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Political correctness is a bit like a granny, a maiden aunt arriving at a party when everyone's having a good time. And she comes in, they all start sort of buttoning up and becoming self-conscious and behaving properly and then when she leaves, you can have fun again.
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Although I had good hand-eye coordination, I was so tall and skinny and muscularly weak that I just was not well coordinated. But what I started to do quite early on was watch some of the great old silent comedians, like Laurel and Hardy and Chaplin, and then later on Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton.
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Students who laugh more- learn more. Students who laugh more earn more.
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It's a plastic surgeon you need, not a doctor
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