Meanwhile, John Cleese is doing great on Twitter

By Dan Neilan  |  July 11, 2018 | 4:26pm
Aux Features John Cleese

Twitter is a fairly unpleasant place to be these days. What was once a scrollable feed of weird jokes and self-promotion has become a near-constant IV drip of anxiety and feelings of helplessness. Even our favorite writers and directors can’t help but get pulled down into the muck and mire where they go toe-to-toe with anonymous trolls over willful misreadings of their art. Needless to say, it’s a bad website. On the other hand, John Cleese seems to be having a pretty good time on there.

A casual scroll through Cleese’s feed will show that the 78-year-old Python is actually, inexplicably, enjoying his time online. Most of his tweets are responses to fans or critics, taking the form of compliments or gentle jabs respectively. He never gets baited into the more vitriolic flame wars that pollute the website, even when discussing Brexit or the Trump administration. The most aggressive posts on his timeline have been his recent tirades against the Belgian national soccer team as they attempted to fight their way through the World Cup, and even that was all in good fun.

Of course, a number of Cleese’s tweets border on being non-PC, something he probably wouldn’t see as a problem. He also appears to have some issues with the British press, particularly The Daily Mail. But, again, none of this ever gets close to the type of “mad online” presence we see from so many others or the truly horrific bad takes we’ve seen from some fellow ex-Pythons. As Cleese puts it, he’s just enjoying his irrelevance. And so are we.

Send Great Job, Internet tips to [email protected]

 
Join the discussion...