3 Takeaways Podcast Transcript Lynn Thoman (https://www.3takeaways.com/) Ep 16: John Cleese of Monty Python: On Creativity and How Everyone Can Be More Creative 00:00 Male voice INTRO: Welcome to the 3 Takeaways podcast, which features short memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, scientists, and other news-makers. Each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers. And now your host, and board member of schools at Harvard, Princeton and Columbia, Lynn Thoman. 00:23 Lynn Thoman: Hi, everyone, it's Lynn Thoman, welcome to another episode. I'm delighted to be here with John Cleese. John is an actor, comedian, screenwriter and producer. He co-founded Monty Python, also co-wrote and performed in Fawlty Towers, and wrote and starred in A Fish Called Wanda. He's won too many awards to list, and he has also turned down a life peerage. His latest book is Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide. It is both short, a one-hour read, and cheerful because he believes that everyone can be creative. John, thank you for making us all laugh, for teaching us how we can be more creative, and for being here today. 01:01 John Cleese: Oh, thank you. How long did it take you to read the book? 01:06 LT: It really took just under an hour. 01:10 JC: Exactly. Now, I love that. You see, that was my aim. And I know it sounds slightly odd, but you know that, I think it was Mark Twain who said, "I'm sorry this is such a long letter, but I didn't have time to write a shorter one." I think that's very profound, because if you really think about something, and really examine it and kind of chew it over, you start boiling it down to a smaller number of simple principles. And that's what I did with the book; I had the time to write a short book. I didn't put anything into it that was not key to learning how to be more creative. And that's why you could read it in an hour, and I'm proud of that. 01:54 LT: It's a great read. What does creativity mean to you? 02:00 JC: I think it means the ability to have ideas about how you could do anything better. I mean, just as much to do with business as the arts. I mean, the arts is a creative people... Well, some of them are creative. I think there's a lot of visual artists who aren't creative at all; people who make unmade beds and all that kind of thing. Doesn't seem to me like a very interesting idea. But I think creative artists are obviously creative. People in business are hugely creative, scientists are hugely creative, teachers, everyone's creative, if they're trying to learn how to do their job better. Because people don't understand somehow that just doing the same thing time after time after time doesn't teach you anything unless you're trying to learn. And the moment you're trying to learn, the moment you're thinking, why am I not so good at that? 02:54 JC: Think of a professional tennis player who realizes he's got a weakness on his backhand, and the moment he starts practicing very specifically on his backhand, he becomes a better tennis Page 1 player. Well, people tend not to do that in their lives. Very few people really want to get better at what they're doing. And I have a speech called Why There Is No Hope, that is based on the basic idea that only 10% of people really know what they're talking about. 03:22 LT: What is your favorite of all your work, your comedies, and why? 03:27 JC: I think I look back on Life of Brian, was a very happy event. God smiled on that one. There were no terrible problems, everybody got on well, and we were confident we'd written a very good script. It was, later, it was voted Best British Comedy Ever. So we were right about the script, but also we made it in Morocco, or rather Tunisia, and in Tunisia the sun was out when you got up in the morning instead of it being dark and rainy, so there was something wonderful about sitting on the hotel balcony sipping fresh orange juice and then shaving and going off to work about 300 yards away. [chuckle] It was a very happy experience, that. 04:14 JC: Then A Fish Called Wanda was... God smiled on that one too. Everything went well, the team was very, very strong, they liked each other, we all helped each other with it, and we had a great director pointing the cameras, Charlie Crichton, who was 77 years of age when he directed the film. And both of those were joyful. But of course, making movies is very difficult, and a lot of them... There was no great unpleasantness on any of the movies I was with, but people get anxious and they tighten up, and sometimes you're working with a director who doesn't really know what he's doing, [chuckle] and sometimes you're working with a script that isn't really that good, and you're sort of saving the script rather than savoring it. So the experience can be very, very different. 05:04 LT: How do you think about comedy and humor, and what are the different kinds of comedy and humor? 05:10 JC: I suppose if you arrange them on a spectrum, at one end you have very, very verbal comedy, and at the end you have largely visual, physical comedy. And then comedy can be anywhere on that spectrum. I mean, Fawlty Towers has got a lot of physical comedy in it. But Fawlty Towers isn't really silly. The character is silly, Basil is silly, but if you talk about silliness, then that's another more of a Python thing; absurd ideas, a sketch where a couple walk in to buy a mattress for a bed, and when they say the word mattress the salesman puts a brown paper bag over his head, and the man who is manager of that floor explains that he'll have to sing a verse of Jerusalem before he'll take it off again. [chuckle] That's nothing like Fawlty Towers. That's what we call, technical term is, silly. 06:06 JC: So, there's many, many different types, and I kind of enjoy them all. I like elegance. I think Joe Orton was a great English playwright, and he wrote an odd combination, quite physical farcical comedy but with everybody spouting epigrams. It was very odd and it didn't quite work sometimes because there were two different styles that didn't necessarily come together. But there's all kinds of humor. In America, the main difference is that in the Midwest and the South, there's no real understanding of irony. I think a lot of the people there are literal-minded, which is why they interpret the Bible literally. Which seems to me an odd thing to do because Jesus Christ talked in parables, which were not stories of actual historical incident. They were stories that he made up in order to illustrate a certain point, so how could you possibly interpret those literally? 07:04 JC: I don't understand it, but there are literal-minded people, and they tend not to be awfully funny, or terribly good company, in my opinion. Very earnest, and probably very, very good Page 2 people, but sort of missing out of a lot of mental life that I think gives people pleasure. 07:23 LT: How do you think about the left and right brain, what you call the hare and the tortoise brain? 07:29 JC: Yes, well, I've been thinking about it for years. First of all, I used to talk about open mode, which is when you're looking for feedback and seeing whether you're getting it right, and the closed mode, which you have to go into if you're attacking a machine gun post. If you're attacking a machine gun this is not the moment to admire the scenery, or to see the funny side of what you're doing. You just do it. You want to get into closed mode, and if you've come to an open mode, you've come to a plan that you like, then you've got to try it out and not immediately think, "Well, should we be doing this?" You've got to give it a good shot to see if it works or not. 08:08 JC: So that I started out, then I read a book, which is superb, by Guy Claxton, Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind, which is just about fast, ordinary, purposive, logical thinking, very verbal, and tortoise mind, which is much more thoughtful, and meditative, and playful. We need them both, but they solve different kinds of problems. If you've got a mathematical problem you don't need to be creative to solve it, logic will do that. But if you're trying to figure out how a scene in a play should continue, or how you should manage a difficult group of people, then being more meditative about it allows the unconscious with all its observation of people's behavior to come up, and help you come to a conclusion about how to try and solve this problem instead of giving you a little written instruction, like "speak louder." 09:07 JC: Then I have been carrying this idea of the two halves of the brain for a long time.