John Cleese on How Wokeness Smothers Creativity

Woke content is a lot like Christian rock.

The music is generally considered terrible because the quality of the music is not important, the point is to sing about religious themes. Every song is about Jesus, the lord’s love, etc etc. people listen to it because it adheres to their ideology. Not because it’s objectively high quality music.

Woke media is about checking off the diversity boxes, using minorities and very real social issues as a marketing campaign. These producers start with their ideology and work backwards. The writing is an afterthought because in their worldview, people will simply watch X because they look like X.

This is why you end up with extremely low tier writing with properties such as Ghostbusters 2016, Ocean’s 8, Men in Black 4, Terminator: Dark Fate, Charlie’s angels 2019, and the endless list of gender-swapped / race swapped reboots. They do poorly at the box office and among fanbases, but do great on Twitter among folks looking for ideology-driven content.

Woke content, like Christian rock, will always have an audience. But an audience driven purely by ideology and not by writing quality is unlikely to succeed. Especially as audiences and the actors have taken notice. For example, Folks like Emily blunt are avoiding films explicitly prioritizing gender-based marketing:

https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/emily-blunt-rails-slams-str...

Part of this interview may have been inspired by the BBC not understanding that the offensive, bigoted, things said in some of Cleese's comedies were stated by bigoted, offensive characters; these words and statements were being mocked.

"Don't mention the war!"

I find it absolutely amazing that in the '70s, they took the then-current trends, and take them to the most absurd ends that they could possibly imagine, only to see fifty years later that their absurdities would actually become normalized and accepted by a disturbingly large segment of the world's population. Everyone has seen the scene in The Life of Brian where Eric Idle's male character thinks he's oppressed because biology prevents him from being pregnant. They also predicted the rise of furries in their TV show. I didn't know that reductio ad absurdum was a path that entire cultures could be built around, but there we are.

Seeing John Cleese of all people discarded as a stuffy reactionary is very much like watching a meta-sketch, except in Monty Python's Flying Circus the writing would be tighter.

Cleese fails to reckon with how "non-wokeness" smothers creativity, too.

John Cleese is a rich, straight, white man. He takes no risks when he offends others. The worst thing that can possibly happen to him is that somebody tells him to shut up -- and if they do, he dashes into the arms of the sympathetic rich straight white men at Reason to declare that you don't have the right to tell him to shut up.

He's at zero risk of actually being forced to shut up. If they disinvite him to something, there will be another venue happy to host him. Nobody is going to threaten to rape him or kill him -- and the police will take it seriously if somebody does.

When Twitter fills with Nazis, people leave because they don't feel safe, with good reason. And now all those non-woke people remaining on Twitter are missing out on those voices -- only unlike John Cleese, Reason isn't gushing to tell everybody how they've been silenced. Because they've actually been silenced.

If John Cleese has found that his creativity has been smothered, maybe he'll take a moment to consider all of the other people whose creativity is also smothered. He wants people to hear him but doesn't have an interest in everybody being listened to. That brings false belief that everybody has an equal chance of that, precisely because he isn't listening.