John Cleese and Britain’s new cultural taboos

For generations of American comedy fans, John Cleese has represented a familiar version of the Englishman: tall, angular, formal and a little pompous, with a talent for becoming exasperated by everyone else’s foolishness.

That persona helped make him famous. He was part of Monty Python, whose surreal sketches found a devoted American audience through public television in the 1970s. The troupe went on to make films including “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” and “Life of Brian.” Cleese later found a wider Hollywood audience in “A Fish Called Wanda,” and in Britain he became well known as Basil Fawlty, the perpetually irritated hotel owner in “Fawlty Towers.”

These days, Cleese has become a symbol of a different Britain: one where the cultural boundaries he spent his career testing seem to have shifted, and where his remarks about Islam have led someone to report him to the government’s counter-extremism program, Prevent.

For much of his career, Cleese made comedy out of a Britain that was insular, socially conservative and protective of its customs. Its stiff manners, strict hierarchies and deference to authority gave Monty Python plenty to work with.

A very British blasphemy

Monty Python’s first original feature film, “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” poked fun at Arthurian legend, medieval superstition and religious ritual. When the group turned more directly to Christianity in “Life of Brian,” though, it found that Jesus himself was not an obvious target for comedy. The Pythons had considered making a film about Christ, but their research left them with little to mock in his life, Michael Palin said in 1979.

Instead, they created Brian, an ordinary man in Roman-occupied Judea who is mistaken for the Messiah. The film takes aim at credulity, religious fervor and political infighting. Cleese plays Reg, a revolutionary whose insistence on factional distinctions makes the movement look ridiculous. Asked whether he belongs to the Judean People’s Front, Reg angrily insists that his group is the People’s Front of Judea.

Some Christian critics saw the film as an attack on Christ. In a much-discussed BBC debate in 1979, Cleese and Palin defended it against journalist Malcolm Muggeridge and Mervyn Stockwood, then Bishop of Southwark. The Pythons argued that their target was people who misunderstood religious teaching, not Jesus.

The uproar helped the film find an audience. “Life of Brian” was banned in Ireland and Norway, and some British councils blocked screenings. The protests, however, only seemed to make people more curious. It became Britain’s fourth-highest-grossing film of 1979, and Cleese later joked that the objectors had made him rich.

Almost half a century later, the consequences of a cultural dispute can seem more serious. Arguments that once played out in cinemas, newspapers and television studios may now draw the attention of government programs. The people policing public morality have changed, and so have their tools.

Just grumbling about change?

Critics often portray Cleese’s increasingly outspoken views as the predictable complaints of an older man moving to the right. In a 2019 column, Caspar Salmon argued that the comedian who once mocked English pomposity had himself become reactionary. Comedy, Salmon suggested, challenges the status quo, but successful comedians can eventually become part of it.

It is a familiar criticism. Still, it can miss the extent to which the status quo has changed.

Christianity remains an acceptable target for British comedy. In the second season of the BBC series “Fleabag,” for instance, the lead character falls for and eventually seduces a Catholic priest. Islam, by contrast, can be a more contentious subject when it comes to satire.

Those changing sensitivities have unfolded alongside major demographic shifts. White British residents made up 59.8% of London’s population in 2001, compared with 36.8% in the 2021 census. Over the same period, the city’s Muslim population more than doubled, from about 607,000 to 1.32 million, increasing from 8.5% to 15% of Londoners.

Cleese has commented on those changes for years. In 2019, he repeated a remark he had first made in 2011, saying London was no longer an English city. Mayor Sadiq Khan compared him to Basil Fawlty, while comedian Dom Joly described the comment as racist.

Objecting to “Anglophobia”

Cleese rejects accusations of Islamophobia. He says his objections concern culture, not race, and has questioned whether practices such as stoning, halal slaughter, wife-beating and Sharia courts might themselves be described as hostile to English culture.

In a post on X in March, he argued that Britain had long been shaped by Christian values, even when churches had made serious mistakes. If those values were replaced by Islamic ones, he wrote, Britain would no longer be the same country. In another post, he said he preferred a culture that did not accept female genital mutilation, child marriage or the killing of nonbelievers.

That distinction has not protected him from criticism. Some of those posts were cited in the complaint that led to his referral to Prevent. Publicized by the Muslim news site 5Pillars, the complaint accused Cleese of a sustained pattern of anti-Muslim rhetoric. It alleged that his posts portrayed Muslims as violent and criminal as a group, with the potential to fuel radicalization and tension between communities.

Prevent was initially set up to address Islamist radicalization, though its remit has since broadened to include other forms of extremism. A program created to counter Islamist terrorism has now received a complaint about a comedian criticizing aspects of Islam. There is an obvious irony there.

Cleese responded in characteristically dry fashion, calling the episode one of the proudest moments of his life and thanking those involved.

The case comes as the British government tries to define and address hostility toward Muslims. In March, it adopted a new, non-statutory definition. The guidance says criticism and even ridicule of Islam are protected, but critics worry that institutions could still use the definition to discourage legitimate debate. In practice, they argue, it could create a new taboo resembling a blasphemy rule, without formally creating one.

Don’t mention the war

The changes Cleese objects to go beyond immigration and religion. Some of his own comedy has also run into modern concerns about offensive material.

In 2020, UKTV, which is owned by the BBC, temporarily removed “The Germans,” a well-known “Fawlty Towers” episode, from its streaming service because of language it considered offensive. Cleese condemned the decision-makers as cowardly and contemptible. The episode was later restored with a content warning.

Cleese’s point was that the audience was meant to laugh at the characters’ prejudices, not endorse them. Basil Fawlty is an idiot, after all. Having to explain that distinction to television executives seemed to him like material for a Monty Python sketch in its own right.

He has increasingly presented himself as a holdout against what he sees as the BBC’s efforts to act as the country’s comedy censor. In September 2026, the corporation removed 11 sketches from “That Mitchell and Webb Look” before making the show available on iPlayer, including sketches satirizing racism. That same month, it emerged that an episode of the children’s series “Horrible Histories” had also been removed. The episode covered slavery in ancient Rome and the exploitation of Victorian child workers. The BBC said those changes had actually been made seven years earlier to meet its guidelines for children’s programming.

Romanes eunt domus

This anxiety about causing offense reaches beyond television. A 2021 survey found that more than half of Britons under 30 had stopped speaking to someone because of their political views. BBC research published in 2026 found that 37% of people aged 16 to 24 said they could not be friends with someone whose views differed from theirs.

Against that backdrop, Cleese’s shift from describing himself as a slightly left-of-centre Liberal Democrat to publicly supporting Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain party may look less like ordinary grumbling about age and more like a reaction to a country that has moved on around him.

He has not, to his credit, simply retired into the role of national treasure. In 2023, he hosted “The Dinosaur Hour,” a GB News talk show filmed in a 12th-century castle. The set included wandering cats and actors dressed as nuns, among other touches that felt recognizably Python-esque.

The title was a joke at his own expense. Cleese described the show as being for people considered unfashionable and out of touch, a group he cheerfully included himself in. With creative freedom, he spent the hour discussing politics, the media, creativity and religion with guests such as Stephen Fry, Trevor McDonald and Lionel Shriver.

“The Dinosaur Hour” lasted 10 episodes, but Cleese has hardly disappeared from public life. In 2026, he returned to British theaters for a tour marking the 50th anniversary of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” introducing screenings and taking questions from audiences. He has announced more dates for 2027 under the title “Still Not Dead (Yet).”

British police made more than 12,000 arrests in 2023 under laws concerning offensive and malicious communications. In that climate, there is something refreshing about a comedian in his late eighties still willing to challenge the establishment—even if he is doing it with two replacement hips and an artificial knee. Those of us born after Monty Python’s heyday might have something to learn from that.