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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

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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
Needs
Ones
Comedy
Bits
Audience
Whether
Funny
Fixed
Tell
Fronts
Need
Front

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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.
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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.
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Bureaucrats shouldn't be in charge of comedy.
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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.
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What is absurd is not the teachings of the founders of religion, it's what followers subsequently make of it.
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We all die at the end, but does that nullify everything? Would most people rather say, I wish I hadn't been born? Once you're born you'll have to die, now is that funny or sad?
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The most creative people have learned to tolerate the slight discomfort of indecision for much longer and so, just because they put in more pondering time, their solutions are more creative.
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Sense of humor is so much more subjective than anyone believes.
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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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By watching the great, old comedians I picked up a few tricks about how to do physical comedy. And whenever I could learn something, I sort of added that to my repertoire.
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There's nothing good on the television let's burn a witch. It must have been terribly exciting to live in those times.
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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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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.
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I'm very odd 'cause I think there's more than just a materialist planet, a materialist, reductionist planet.
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I would like to do my own eulogy, and then shoot myself and then get in the coffin.
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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.
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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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Life is a terminal disease, and it is sexually transmitted.
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If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play.
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years ago we would have been burned for this. Now what I am suggesting is that we've advanced.
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