Tonight Show - John Cleese

The weird thing that happened during this segment is it briefly made me nostalgic for daytime talk shows. Surprising but true.



I wonder where Jenny Jones is these days.

John Cleese Interview

Even though I wasn't old enough to see Late Night with David Letterman, I miss it. There's no show on the air anywhere like it. Not even the Late Show with David Letterman is like it.

There are a million talk shows these days (there are too many talk shows these days) and every single one of them has the same look and feel. They all have a "rocking" (or otherwise upbeat) intro theme, a loud band, a booming announcement "AND NOW HERE'S YOUR HOST...", a raucous crowd, etc.

But while the goal of every current talk show is to be perceived as a cool party every night, Late Night with David Letterman was the cool afterparty every night. The band was four members, the intro theme was subdued, the crowd was small... in general, it had a quietness about it as if we can have fun but we need to be careful not to wake anyone. Basically, it had a "late night" feel in the true sense of the phrase. It's the middle of the night, lots of people are asleep but we're going to have fun.

Unnecessarily long intro aside, John Cleese came on the show July 6, 1988 to promote his new film "A Fish Called Wanda". A wonderful interview, Cleese talks about the British character, fish, cricket, British holidays, etc. This clip doesn't exactly prove my point but it's close. Who can blame the crowd for being excited when they're making toast. Yes, toast!

My favorite part is the toast.

And Now For Something Completely Different

Yesterday night when Jimmy Fallon mentioned who would be on the show tomorrow, I did an audio double-take. "I think he just said... what did he just say?" Rewinding and watching it again confirmed that he just said that tomorrow night he would have "the guys" from "Monty Python". "What does that mean?", I thought. "Ooh, probably from the musical on Broadway."

The reality of the situation is what I dismissed in my mind automatically. He was going to have - in one show - John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones and Eric Idle (all living members of Monty Python except Michael Palin).

The show was amazing. A particular highlight was "Wheel Of Carpet Samples" where the usual Pythonesque silliness was joined with an appearance by John Cleese himself. Then Fallon and Cleese were unable to keep it together and giggled like school children midway through.

Other highlights: The Roots performing "I'm a Lumberjack" and backing Eric Idle on a live performance "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life". And the first 5 minutes of the "interview" is about the zaniest 5 minutes you'll see in any interview ever. They even started the show with the old man climbing out of the sea routine ("It's...").

Wheel Of Carpet Samples 1 + 2:

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"Interview": Parts 1-4. Note: The members were introduced and came out one at a time. John Cleese, being introduced first, quickly hid one of the chairs before the others came out. The last one out, Terry Gilliam found that he didn't have a chair. That's the situation we find ourselves at the beginning of the clip..... Let's watch..... 

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"Always Look on the Bright Side of Life"