Graham Norton Rails on John Cleese for Having a Hard Time With Cancel Culture: ‘Suddenly, There’s Some Accountability’ (Video)
sit-down interview with Radio Times posted Wednesday, the late night host and television fixture railed on “Monty Python” icon John Cleese for not getting with the times and deriding so-called “cancel culture.” “John Cleese has been very public recently about complaining about what you can’t say, and I just think it must be very hard to be a man of a certain age who’s been able to say whatever he liked for years, and now, suddenly, there’s some accountability,” Norton told Mariella Frostrup at the Cheltenham Literature Festival.” It’s free speech but not consequence-free.”Cleese has been very vocal, particularly in the last year, about his qualms with being held accountable for his words and opinions, telling Fox News this summer that wokeness has had a “disastrous” impact on comedy and that “if you’re worried about offending people and constantly thinking about that, you’re not going to be very creative.”Cleese now has a series headed to the U.K.’s conservative, anti-cancel culture GB News station in 2023, in which he’s said he’ll be collaborating with satirist Andrew Doyle and encouraging “proper argument.”“You read a lot of articles in papers by people complaining about ‘cancel culture,’ and you think: In what world are you cancelled?” Norton said of the hot-button phenomenon. “I’m reading your article in a newspaper, or you’re doing interviews about how terrible it is to be cancelled.”The fix is to change the way we talk about “cancel culture” in the first place, he added.