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The main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else.
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
Open
Quicker
Else
Evolutionary
Anything
Mode
Closed
Significance
Main
Gets
Humor
More quotes by John Cleese
If you are leaping a ravine, the moment of takeoff is a bad time for considering alternative strategies... Do it in the 'closed' mode. But the moment the action is over, try to return to the 'open' mode... because in that mode we are the most aware, most receptive, most creative, and therefore at our most intelligent.
John Cleese
Comedy always works best when it is mean-spirited.
John Cleese
When you do comedy in front of an audience, they are the ones who tell you whether it's funny or not and which bits are funny and which bits need to be fixed.
John Cleese
Filming takes a lot out of you. It really does. It's immensely demanding, and you have to put the rest of your life in the icebox until you do your final shot.
John Cleese
The one thing I remember about Christmas was that my father used to take me out in a boat about ten miles offshore on Christmas Day, and I used to have to swim back. Extraordinary. It was a ritual. Mind you, that wasn't the hard part. The difficult bit was getting out of the sack.
John Cleese
It's a plastic surgeon you need, not a doctor
John Cleese
My hovercraft is full of eels.
John Cleese
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.
John Cleese
I tend to have an odd split in my mind: I tend to look at it as a writer and when the writing thing is OK and I'm happy with it, then I put on my actor's hat.
John Cleese
You have to create boundaries of space and then you have to create boundaries of time.
John Cleese
Filming is like a long air journey: there's so much hanging around and boredom that they keep giving you food.
John Cleese
I think it takes a long time, as you get older, to realize just how crazy the world is, just how ridiculous it all is.
John Cleese
I learned a lot of things about literature talking to people at the publishing company. Did you know that about 90 percent of celebrity autobiographies are ghostwritten?
John Cleese
When you're being stalked by an angry mob with raspberries, the first thing to do is to release a tiger.
John Cleese
When the target audience is American teenage kids, you can have problems. My generation prized really fine acting and writing. Sometimes you have to go back to the basic principles which underpin great visual comedy.
John Cleese
Bureaucrats shouldn't be in charge of comedy.
John Cleese
My views are heretical to people who believe in political correctness.
John Cleese
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.
John Cleese
I find it rather easy to portray a businessman. Being bland, rather cruel and incompetent comes naturally to me.
John Cleese
Sense of humor is so much more subjective than anyone believes.
John Cleese
