There are two major problems with So, Anyway . . . that it's difficult to get over as a fan of John Cleese. First, for a book that purports to be the autobiography of one of the funniest popular entertainers of the 20th century, it is oddly lacking in humour.
That is not to say there aren’t some hilarious set pieces in it, because there are. And there are some one-liners that are so funny and so perfectly executed that, like watching reruns of the man’s staggeringly brilliant television work, it’s difficult to resist the urge to go back and enjoy them again.
It's just that the overall tone of the book is cross and churlish, the story of his life rendered in the voice of an ornery old man who never made it in showbusiness rather than the fully realised genius behind comedies of such towering brilliance as Fawlty Towers, Monty Python's Flying Circus and The Life of Brian.
The second problem occurs to you as you progress towards the midpoint of the book’s 404 pages and young John is still at Cambridge. An inner voice urges, “Can we move quickly along here? We’ve a lot to get through,” but, as it happens, we don’t.
It is the fashion for celebrity autobiographies to be served up in two or three parts. Nowhere on the jacket of this one does it say that So, Anyway . . . is the first instalment of Cleese's story, taking the reader up to the late 1960s, but that's what it is.
So there's nothing in it about his second, third and fourth marriages. There's nothing about Fawlty Towers or A Fish Called Wanda or Monty Python, even though a photograph of the iconic parrot sketch dominates the back cover and there are pulled feathers on the front.
No dead parrot, then, but there is a dead mother, Muriel Cleese, who looms over her son's story like some Kathy-Bates-in-Misery figure.
Wartime childhood
Cleese grew up during the second World War in Weston-super-Mare, an English town the Germans bombed “to prove they had a sense of humour”. He was the only child of an overprotective father (“what sanity I have, I owe to his loving kindness”) and a neurotic mother, who lived life in “a constant state of high anxiety bordering on incipient panic”.
He relates one particularly upsetting story in which she beats up his father one night, quietly, so as not to wake their young son. There is no suggestion that this was a regular occurrence or that his childhood was marked by a fear of domestic violence. There were, he admits, “no shillelaghs or chainsaws” in the family home.
Muriel’s real cruelty as a mother, according to this account, was her failure to engage with her son emotionally or to offer him even a scintilla of praise for his achievements. When he returned from the US in the 1960s to inform her of his success on Broadway, she expressed neither interest nor pride in what he was doing. When he told her that he was about to graduate from Cambridge, she responded by asking him whatever happened to an old sweater he once owned.
There are many stories of this colour throughout the book and they don’t always relate to his mother. His leitmotif is that one must have a sense of humour to survive in life, yet he shows none of this breezy equanimity as he dredges up ancient slights and settles old scores.
A housemaster at school who failed to make him a prefect is dismissed as a “dour, grim little gnome, who could not understand that you can try to do your very best at something and at the same time have fun, or that you can have a perfectly serious discussion while making your points humorously”. He also tells the story of how a female friend once rebuked him for fluffing a line in a sketch and how he exacted a measure of revenge on her later by humiliating her at a dinner party.
He relates stories like these without any apparent awareness of how silly and trivial they seem in the context of an extraordinary life. And, as he crankily puts everyone in their place, from fans who bother him for autographs, to an immigration official who crossed him back in a distant day when The Beatles were all still talking to each other, it apparently never occurs to him that the cruelty he so despised in his mother – which he blames for most of his failed relationships with women – might be very much present in him.
Not every comedian can be as likable as Ronnie Corbett, of course, and Cleese’s neurotic peculiarity has always been the beating heart of his brilliance as a funnyman, much like Tony Hancock or Richard Pryor or most of the comedians regularly honoured with the term genius.
But veterans of therapy – and Cleese is that – can be guilty of seeing the world as being full of people who are either heroes or villains in their own personal histories. And that can make for autobiographies like this, in which the subject never made a mistake that wasn’t, in some way, someone else’s fault.
Ultimately, though, the biggest disappointment about So, Anyway . . ., even more than the irritable, curmudgeonly tone, is that it comes to an end just as it's on the cusp of becoming interesting. Cleese has lived a long and packed life, and his story is no doubt worthy of more than a single volume of memoir. The problem is that the first 30 years of his life are by far the least interesting, and, like the middle book in Stephen Fry's autobiographical trilogy, there are too many stories, especially relating to student life at Cambridge, that are of the you-had-to-be-there variety.
By the final quarter there is a sense that even Cleese has lost interest in the enterprise, as he reproduces, word for word, some of his pre-Monty Python, man-walks-into-a-shop sketches, which, stripped of their performance element, feel flat and tacked on.
The book ends in 1969, which is presumably where the second volume will begin. John Cleese fans would be best advised to save their money until then.
Paul Howard is an author and the creator of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly. His latest book, Keeping Up With the Kalashnikovs (Penguin Ireland) was published in September
