Nov. 13--Prior to his appearance at the Mission Theater (at iO) Wednesday afternoon in front of sold-out crowd of improv students and performers, John Cleese turned to me and said, "Don't be alarmed!" and then engulfed me in a bear hug and planted several kisses on my neck. Well. Hello.
He was clearly in his element, and once he took the stage (with daughter Camilla as moderator) he dispensed with formalities before the conversation even began: "Every time I come out at one of these things they give me a bottle of water and they never take the (expletive) cap off. And now I have to try to open it up with my two feeble hands."
He handed his bottle to Camilla to twist open and their banter was immediate. She mentioned confiscating a necklace he used to wear that was made of his own teeth. "I don't have a single tooth of my own in my head," he said. And then: "So, have you read my book, daughter?"
That would be "So, Anyway...," his new memoir about his childhood and pre-Monty Python days. His stop at iO was part of a heavily scheduled book tour that included an appearance at the Tivoli Theatre in Downers Grove the previous night.
"What surprised you?" Cleese asked Camilla of the book, and she mentioned the stories of her grandmother, who was apparently a bit dotty. "People say don't speak ill of the dead," Cleese replied with a straight face, "but it seems to be an ideal opportunity."
Camilla, who is nearly as tall as her father, is a standup comedian in her own right (she was slated to perform that night at the Laugh Factory) and Cleese suggested she do some of her material while he leafed through the book looking for a particular section.
She blanched and then joked, "Should I do the bit that's about you? I don't want to be disowned."
"Well, you can't get disinherited," he said without looking up, his significant alimony payments clearly on the mind, "because I don't have anything." (Camilla was born in 1984 during his second marriage to "Rollerball" actress Barbara Trentham, who moved with Camilla to the Chicago-area in the '90s after divorcing Cleese and remarrying; Trentham died of complications from leukemia in a local hospital last year.)
The book, he noted, had been reviewed in the Daily Mail by a professor of criminology -- "If you're going to find someone to do a hatchet job, can't you find someone more impressive?" -- who apparently complained that the memoir was self-absorbed. "It's a (expletive) autobiography!" Camilla said, to which Cleese responded: "When I work on my next autobiography I ought to make it about somebody else."
Cleese recalled some of his early performances that went awry, including one in which the audience comprised older women drinking tea. Nothing they did on stage got a laugh, which was actually OK. "When you get that sort of forced laughter, you want to kill yourself," Cleese said. "But when you get nothing, it becomes really funny."
Camilla didn't steer the conversation so much as let it ease from tangent to tangent, including a story about the initial feedback Cleese received from the BBC for "Fawlty Towers."
"The script was sent out to a guy whose job it was assess and analyze these things and he said it was a tired, humorless 'Hamlet,' full of stereotypes and cliched situations and he couldn't see it being anything but a disaster. It was considered this awful series at the hotel. And what that shows you is that very few people know what they're doing."
He started another thought when someone's cell phone went off, the ring tone the sound of a rooster crowing. "Oh, I thought it was a baby," Cleese said. And then: "What was I saying?" "I stopped listening," Camilla joked.
Backstage after the show I asked Cleese about why he chose to do a daytime event for performers. "I love talking to young people because they care, you know?" In other words, they don't just want to hear the old stories. They want concrete advice on matters such as: How do you end a sketch when there's no obvious funny way out? His answer: "Sometimes sketches don't have a natural ending." Camilla's answer: "Sometimes you just say, 'And now for something completely different...'"
Camilla, who lived in Chicago from 5th grade through 8th grade (and attended the Francis W. Parker School and Lake Forest Academy) was in Chicago all of last year. She inherited her mother's apartment here in town and said she comes back not infrequently. "I love the comedy scene, it's so much more fun than performing in LA. The audiences aren't as judgy, and they get references to current events, which is a very foreign thing in LA."
As for having Cleese for a dad: "I got pretty lucky to have a personal tutor in comedy. I'm glad he never did standup because that's the one thing that people can't compare me to. He would have been better at it than I am, anyway. And whenever I do sketch, I sometimes call him and ask him to write a better ending."
And then, with a kiss on his daughter's cheek, Cleese was off to catch his flight to the next destination on his book tour.
nmetz@tribune.com
@NinaMetzNews
