Last week, the United Kingdom’s Channel 4 announced that John Cleese,
Monty Python member, co-creator and co-star of Fawlty Towers, and all-around comedy legend,
will be hosting an upcoming documentary about cancel culture. Not exactly surprising, given
Cleese’s long-established reactionary disdain for what used to more commonly be called “political
correctness,” and also given the history of other Python members presenting documentaries.
Of course, the big difference there is that the travel shows hosted by Michael Palin,
and the history documentaries hosted by Terry Jones, were about things which,
unlike cancel culture, actually existed. Except for that show Terry Jones did about the history
of numbers, which are not “real” but rather abstract concepts, like cancel culture. Though
unlike cancel culture, the concept of numbers is at least useful.
Anyway, if you’re like me, your initial reaction to the news that John Cleese is going to host a
documentary about cancel culture was to roll your eyes and mutter something like, “Well, of course
he is.” That reaction is partially because Cleese himself has made no secret of how he feels about
cancel culture — namely that it’s a real thing that we should be worried about — and partially
because it seems like most celebrities who are telling us that cancel culture is a real thing
that we should be worried about are people like John Cleese — older white men. Or in some cases,
middle-aged white men pandering to an audience of mostly older white men.
I was thinking about this the other day and I wondered why it nearly always seems to be
people like this who are the angriest or the most panicked about cancel culture. All due respect to
John Cleese, but his best work is decades behind him at this point. Why is it so important to him
that you supposedly “can’t say anything any more” when, as far as the public’s concerned,
and, barring the development of some kind of immortality potion, proportionately speaking,
he’s already said most of what he’s gonna say? Is he just that invested in the creative freedom
of future comedians? Is he just that troubled by the prospect that someday people will no
longer get paid large sums of money to make fun of trans people or the neurodivergent?
Maybe. But I suspect there might be something else motivating the mostly older white men
propagating the ongoing moral panic about cancel culture: preoccupation with legacy.
Like I said, even if he has a very productive final few years, John Cleese’s best and most
significant work is almost certainly behind him. The same can be said for others who are among
the loudest voices sounding the alarm about caneel culture, or out of control wokeness,
or whatever terminology any given old white man chooses to use while yelling at the cloud. Ricky
Gervais is decades younger than Cleese. It’s been nearly twenty years since he made The Office, and
fifteen since he made Extras — is he ever going to make anything to equal or surpass either of
those projects in quality or cultural relevance? His more recent output suggests that he’s not.
And while Gervais remains fairly active and therefore might have more of a right than Cleese
to be concerned about no longer being able to sell tickets so people can hear him sarcastically claim
that he identifies as a chimpanzee — also known as the same joke every transphobic comedian makes — I
still think the backlash against cancel culture, wokeness, political correctness, whatever you call
it, is rooted in concern not about the present or the future, but about how we perceive the past.
And even though it was the announcement of this documentary to be hosted by John Cleese that
started me down this road in the first place, I think I can best illustrate my point by turning
away from the entertainment world and examining another facet of this issue for a few minutes.
So: now for something completely different.
Confederate statues! They’ve always been monuments to white supremacy and revisionist history,
but they had been allowed to stand more or less without comment for decades until relatively
recently. However, as more people, particularly young people, people of color, people involved in
social justice activism, have raised awareness of these statues and what they represent,
attitudes have shifted, and many of us have decided that it’s no longer appropriate — and,
actually, was never appropriate — to publicly
memorialize and glorify leaders of the slave-owning South in this way.
Those who oppose taking down the statues argue that to do so would erase history,
dishonor the memories of people who fought for a cause they believed in,
and deprive people of a proud heritage many of them cherish. The arguments in favor of keeping
the statues are nearly all backward-looking. Even some arguments that seem to be forward-looking
actually aren’t if you examine them a bit more closely. During the 2020 presidential campaign,
Donald Trump railed against removing Confederate statues and renaming military bases named for
Confederate heroes by asking, “Where does it stop? Who’s next? George Washington?” It’s all about the
past — fear of having to let go of the past — or, more specifically, fear of having to admit that
there are pieces of the past which we’re used to celebrating, that we shouldn’t be proud of.
Many of us get uncomfortable when we’re forced — or even just asked — to question our beliefs,
or reevaluate our heroes. We react defensively, we shift blame to those who are raising these
concerns, accuse them of rewriting history, or unfairly vilifying people, or being too sensitive.
The fault lies not in our heroes, or in ourselves, but in those who are telling us we need to change.
Those who want to keep Confederate statues, and who oppose teaching students about the
true extent of institutionalized racism in American history and
the harm it caused and continues to cause, often seem particularly attached to the notion that
the United States is a fundamentally moral and benevolent nation. Sure, we’ve made some mistakes,
but our heart has always been in the right place. We’re the good guys! Come on!
That reluctance to even entertain the suggestion that maybe we haven’t always been the good guys
is something that people like Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson have in common
with people like John Cleese and Ricky Gervais, even though they may have radically different
worldviews and political beliefs, generally speaking. Comedians like Cleese and Gervais,
or Bill Maher, or Jerry Seinfeld, or Adam Carolla — whose political beliefs definitely aren’t
radically different from Trump or Carlson — or any of the others who have lamented how
“cancel culture is killing comedy” have a body of work which, rightly or wrongly, they’re proud of,
and a concept of themselves as funny people, and I don’t think they’re too eager to reexamine that
work or their self-image from perspectives that might show them in a negative light.
Maybe John Cleese and others like him are worried about their legacy being redefined
by people who find some of their classic work ignorant, or insensitive, or misguided. And that’s
understandable. I imagine most if not all people who are fortunate enough to have a degree of fame
would like to be able to define their legacies for themselves, to be remembered on their own terms.
But that’s not an option. It never has been — not for anyone. You don’t get to
define your own legacy, because your legacy is the result not just of what you’ve done,
but of what other people think and feel about it. Once you say or do something and it’s out there as
a part of our shared cultural experience, it’s out of your hands. And if you are so
privileged — or cursed, I suppose, depending on your point of view — to have work that endures
across multiple generations of people, you need to be prepared to see opinions about that work,
and about you, evolve with the changing times. Because it’s inevitable. You can’t control it.
What you can control is how you respond to those evolving attitudes while you’re still here.
Because when you don’t get defensive, when you allow yourself a bit of perspective, you see
that it’s not that everybody’s too sensitive nowadays, or that you can’t say anything any more,
but that certain ideas, certain assumptions, certain jokes, that used to be acceptable to
most people, are no longer acceptable. And if your work is affected by this,
whether it’s something you did a few years ago or something you did decades ago, it seems to me that
the better way to handle it is to be thoughtful, to be open-minded, to be able to listen.
Afterall, if you show yourself to be someone who is capable of respecting changing attitudes,
acknowledging past mistakes when appropriate, and responding to evolving perceptions of you
and your work with grace and humility and a willingness to try and understand
where other people are coming from, that will become a part of your legacy, too.