Politics & Power Quote by John Cleese

Cleese is doing that very British thing where a complaint about standards is smuggled in as a practical note about craft. He frames it as an industry problem ("target audience") rather than a moral failing, but the subtext is obvious: when executives chase the tastes they imagine American teens have, the work gets flatter, louder, and more disposable. The barb isn’t aimed at kids so much as at the system that treats them as a lowest-common-denominator algorithm.

There’s also a carefully staged bit of generational self-mythmaking. "My generation prized really fine acting and writing" is nostalgia with a job to do: it elevates performance and script over trend and packaging, and it quietly positions Cleese as a custodian of seriousness inside comedy. Coming from a Monty Python figure, that’s the joke and the point. Python’s silliness was engineered; the absurdity landed because the structure underneath was precise.

"Basic principles" is the tell. Cleese isn’t calling for a return to old jokes; he’s arguing for the mechanics that make visual comedy timeless: clarity of action, rhythm, escalation, physical commitment, and the kind of writing that sets up images rather than merely talking about them. In an era of quick-cut editing and irony-as-default, he’s defending comedy that risks sincerity: bodies in space, a camera that trusts the gag, performers who don’t wink at the audience. The line reads like advice, but it’s also a warning about what happens when you confuse market demographics with comedic intelligence.