For a man whose career has spent half a century dissecting absurdity, John Cleese has now turned that same scalpel on himself. In his new documentary John Cleese Packs It In, the Monty Python legend speaks with disarming candour about his mental collapse following his third divorce, an experience he now calls both painful and clarifying.
“I had two and a half, three months of a nervous breakdown with suicidal thoughts,” Cleese admits. “It was very unpleasant waking up in the morning, because you feel very, very depressed for the first couple of hours. But once they got me on a mild dose of an antidepressant, then I got rid of it fairly quickly and was performing again within about three or four months.”
Then comes the kicker: “I think I’m glad it happened to me,” he says. “Because it gave me a much more realistic grasp of what was important in life, because we can certainly get distracted.”
That balance, humour and heartbreak in the same breath, is precisely what has defined Cleese for decades. The film follows him on a European tour through Gothenburg, Ghent, and Rotterdam, indulging in quiet pleasures like cheese tasting between performances. At 86, he is still performing partly out of necessity, his 2008 divorce from psychotherapist Alyce Faye Eichelberger left a financial dent, but mostly because, as he puts it, “the people have bought tickets because they like me.”
The Basil Fawlty actor, long associated with the art of exasperation, now seems to relish the simplicity of audience warmth. “In the old days, I used to have a lot of stage fright,” he says. “But when I go out now… there’s a lovely reception because they like the kind of humour that I do.”
Cleese also uses the documentary to reflect on the shifting tone of comedy itself. The “woke” debate, he argues, has been oversimplified. “It’s a whole spectrum,” he says, “totally sensible and admirable at one end, and the opposite at the other.” The greater risk, he suggests, is misunderstanding comedy’s purpose: “All comedy is critical. We laugh at people who are torn apart by ridiculous, egotistical emotions… that’s what we laugh at. But just because we’re laughing at people doesn’t mean it’s unkind.”
It’s a thoughtful stance from a man who once weaponised silliness into cultural critique. Now, at the end of a storied career, Cleese seems more philosopher than performer, a survivor who’s found humour in humility, and grace in the wreckage.
John Cleese Packs It In arrives in cinemas on November 13, offering a final act not of satire, but of sincerity, a master of comedy reminding us that even laughter has to begin with pain.
