So, Anyway... in 100+ Books in 2025

Nov 11, 2014 Dolly rated it liked it

Shelves: 2015, biography-autobiography-memoir, germany-german, art, france-french, england-english, read-but-not-finished-reviewing, humor, nonfiction, military

This book offers an insightful look into the life of John Cleese. The narrative is humorous (or should I say humourous?), in a delightfully British way. And I love his ability to be starkly honest about his own human foibles as well as others.

While I find Mr. Cleese's thoughts to be sincere and quite revealing of his character and interactions with his fellow comedians, I also found myself stuck at times trying to slog through a few slow parts.

I was really hoping to listen to him narrate the b This book offers an insightful look into the life of John Cleese. The narrative is humorous (or should I say humourous?), in a delightfully British way. And I love his ability to be starkly honest about his own human foibles as well as others.

While I find Mr. Cleese's thoughts to be sincere and quite revealing of his character and interactions with his fellow comedians, I also found myself stuck at times trying to slog through a few slow parts.

I was really hoping to listen to him narrate the book aloud on audio CD, but my local library did not have the book on CD yet. I think I would've appreciated the humor and even the candid parts much more if I'd heard it in his own voice.

Still, I enjoyed reading this book and look forward to seeing some of his funnier comedic sketches again. Come to think of it, I haven't seen A Fish Called Wanda in a long time and our girls have never seen it. Perhaps it's time to see it again.

interesting quotes:

"Only an obsessional procrastinator would cry, 'Let's run for our lives, but not till Wednesday afternoon.'" (p. 4)

"But while I was undeniably a gutless little weed there was an upside: at least I didn't display the habitual mindless aggression of some young males. Better a wuss than a psycho, I say, and I am proud that I have never been able to force myself to watch cage fighting." (p. 6) [he has some fixation on cage fighting - he mentions it again on p. 91, and 211)

"In fact, I now realise how glad I am that I grewup in small West Country villages, surrounded by verdant foliage and emerald hues. I associate all this with a kind of quiet contentment, of effortless, calm, mindfulness that I can seldom recapture in cities. Reading years ago what the psychologist [author:Abraham Maslow|4570807] had to say about 'peak experiences,' I recognised that these moments nearly always occur in repose, and in my case are never connected with work." (p. 18)

"Such folk assume actors must be extroverts, but a lot aren't; many performers are big presences on stage, but quite shy off. There is, after all, a huge difference between pretending you're somebody else and being yourself." (p. 32)

"Eysenck (Hans Eysenck) also said that introverts have a naturally high level of mental activity, so they are seldom bored and in need of stimulation, because they have enough going on in their heads already. Extroverts, on the other hand, have a lower level of psychic activity: they are prone to boredom, and so need a lot of external stimulation to keep them alert." (pp. 32-33)

"...when we work at acquiring some skill, we do not improve gradually, like some ascending straight line on a graph; the improvements take place suddenly. After a period of not appearing to get better at all, if we just keep patiently practising, there will be an unexpected jump up to the next level. Plateau...jump! Plateau...jump! Plateau...jump! It's a bit like saltation in evolutionary theory." (pp. 52-53)

"In my view, ordinary everyday sanity is harder for 'only children' to achieve: they have nothing to moderate or dilute a parent's influence. It must be very liberating to be able to share your parents' attention, and indeed to have fellow offspring with whom you can actually discuss parental behavior. I'm sure I could have dramatically cut the hours I spent in therapy if I had had a brother (or, better still, a sister) to whom I could have turned and asked, 'What the hell has got into her today?'" (pp.59-60)

'What gets my goat is that 'Religion' should be the most exciting topic of all. Is there an afterlife? Can we have a real purpose to our lives? How can we love our enemy, when it seems about as easy as levitating? To what extent is self-interest moral? Is there an experience of the divine that we can achieve? All the vital questions have been dumped in favor of half-baked, po-faced rituals which are basically a form of middle-class rain dance." (p. 66)

"...if you catch a whiff of impending insurrection, use sarcasm. They just can't handle it. It's wonderful. It's like shooting fish in a barrel or making fun of Donald Trump. It's so easy, it's embarrassing. But don't overuse it: keep it for...that special occasion." (p. 86)

"He was the epitome of the Oxonian code of 'effortless superiority,' whereby to be seen trying really hard to achieve something was in many ways worse than actually failing at it." (p. 98)

"When James Thurber described humour (or humor) as 'emotional chaos remembered in tranquility' he was only pointing out that things that seem very important at the time usually aren't, and that it's not unkind to laugh at temporary upsets, especially when they're our own. In fact, it's rightly considered healthy to be able to laugh at oneself, and we all much prefer people who do not take themselves 'too seriously.' A good sense of humour is the sign of a healthy perspective, which is why people who are uncomfortable around humour are either pompous (inflated) or neurotic (oversensitive)." (pp. 102-103)

"As my daughter Camilla once said, 'Being a comedian has a lot in common with being a matador. The feedback is so instant you can't argue about it.'" (p. 132)

"...always put the key funny word in a sentence at the end of it, as this will give it maximum impact; any words that follow it will soften its effect, causing the audience momentarily to hold back their laughter so that they do not miss what is still to be said." (p. 173)

"I rehearsed my steps for hours, with the help of an assistant choreographer, but I could never enact this strange Slavic routine with any kind of confidence. I would sometimes find myself polkaing away for a few seconds quite fluently, but then the thought 'My God, I'm doing it!' would flash into my brain, creating a neurological interference pattern which immediately transformed my prancing into an imitation of a man in battle trying to avoid one of those chariots with nasty sharp knives sticking out of their wheels. The real trained dancers, fine athletes to a man and woman, were extraordinarily kind and patient and encouraging, even though I sometimes caught them watching me with the same fascination people display the first time they see a duck-billed platypus." (p. 200)

"I also discovered that I couldn't abide paintings with plump angels with spindly trumpets serendaing even plumper ladies with wispy underwear, and that most of the more schematic modern art left me unaffected and puzzled, in a dissatisfying way. But now and again I would find something I could hardly tear myself away from, that made me tingle and even shiver with delight: probably a Bosch, or a Brueghel, or a Caravaggio, or a Vermeer, or a Rembrandt, or a Courbet, or a Manet, or an Impressionist, or a Cézanne, or a Fauvist. Best of all, I noticed that whenever I walked home from an exhibition I felt calmer and saner than when I'd gone in." (p. 215)

"Now I had to accept that everything I did was going to be a bit under-rehearsed, that perfection was way out of my reach, and that I should just go with the flow and not get uptight about the boo-boos. And I learned that when you stop concentrating on avoiding mistakes, you relax a bit, and consequently...you actually make fewer." (p. 275)

"It's OK to portray Germans as militaristic, the French as snotty, the Italians as histrionic, the English as uptight and asexual, the Swedes as depressed or the Swiss as money-grubbing, but political correctness deems some nations too vulnerable to tease, an attitude which strikes me as rather condescending. Perhaps when there are a few more Asian billionaires, Indians too will be regarded as permissible comedy fodder." (p. 330)

"But if Michael and Terry sometimes certainly felt that Graham and I adhered too strongly to our demand that every sketch should have a tight internal logic, that didn't matter, because disagreement within a team, and te expression of diverse opinions, is creatively invaluable. All the research shows that teams whose members share the same attitudes will enjoy the experience of working together, will have good opinions of the others in the team, and be keen to repeat the experience; but creatively they will produce bugger-all." (p. 369)

"But while attitudes to swearing and vulgarity have shifted in one direction in the past forty years, another set of values seems to be threatening comedy by moving in the opposite direction. I refer to the life-denying force called political correctness. This may have started as a kind intention, but was soon hijacked and taken ad absurdum by a few individuals without any sense of proportion - which means, by definition, that they are without any sense of humour either." (p. 373)

new word: saltation, oleaginous, enuresis, iatrogenic ...more

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