John Cleese: ‘Does it make you laugh?’ | Big Think

The trouble is that people have very subjective senses of humor. And when I'm onstage doing my one man show, I show clips from stuff I've done in the past. And because I don't have to speak or do anything while the clips are being played, I sit and watch the audience because I can see the first three or four rows in the light that's coming from the screen.

And the extraordinary thing is how varied their reactions are. He'll be roaring with laughter. She'll be roaring with laughter. He'll be looking pleasantly amused. Nothing there at all. Maybe they don't get it. Maybe they don't think it's funny. And someone, they're laughing a little bit here and there. Then there's a big laugh. But he doesn't laugh. And then a minute later, he roars with laughter at something that nobody else is laughing at.

So it's much more subjective than you think. But when you're in a large group of people, you don't notice it so much because laughter has an infectious effect on people. So the first thing is you can't say it's funny or it's not funny because it could be funny for one person and not funny for another.

What you can say is I think it's funny and then you extrapolate from that. I think enough people will find it funny for it to be worth us putting this show on. In my case, it was also true when we got together at the beginning of Monty Python, where we had no idea what we were going to do; what was funny was what made us laugh.

People brought material in that they'd written over the previous six or seven days. We sat around a big table at Terry Jones's place, and if people laughed, it was in the show, and if they didn't laugh, it wasn't. And if they laughed at bits of it, we say, well, can we use the funny bit and get rid of the rest, which is why we started cutting the ends of sketches and all that kind of thing.

So that was the best criteria: does it make you laugh...