John Cleese names the most overrated member of The Beatles: “A bit over-lionised”
John Cleese has never shied away from speaking his mind. The former Monty Python member-turned Fawlty Towers creator has grown increasingly frank in recent years, often stoking controversy by needling both the right and the left on social media. Having built a career on irreverence, it’s no surprise that he would find so much glee in lambasting political correctness from all angles, even if his views have become increasingly outdated.
Of the many lines he’s willing to cross, however, perhaps none are quite as egregious as his assertion that one of The Beatles is “over-lionized”. It all came about during a discussion in which he was asked to compare himself and his fellow Pythons to the members of the Fab Four.
It certainly wasn’t the first time the topic had come up. Monty Python was formed in 1969 with members Michael Palin, Eric Idle, Graham Chapman, Terry Jones, Cleese, and Terry Gilliam as the rogue American animator who occasionally dropped into sketches to look a bit dazed and uncomfortable before co-directing Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Their television show, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, aired on the BBC between 1969 and 1973 and became a touchstone for countless comedians thereafter.
Their rise coincided with the tail-end of the Beatles, a group they are often compared to, given their respective incalculable influences on comedy and music. The crossover occurred in real life as well. George Harrison was such a fan of Python that he personally financed their second film, 1979’s Monty Python’s Life of Bryan, calling it the most expensive movie ticket ever purchased. Harrison formed a production company, HandMade Films, specifically for the movie, and went on to finance many others throughout his life.
Cleese and Chapman had also appeared in an earlier Beatle-related endeavour, the black comedy The Magic Christian, in which Ringo Starr played an adult orphan taken in by a billionaire played by Peter Sellers.
In a 2020 interview in The New Yorker, Cleese was asked which Beatle he resembled in the Python group dynamic, with the context that Idle had previously identified himself as the George Harrison of the group. Not only did Cleese take the opportunity to speak unflatteringly about his fellow Pythons – calling Jones “very difficult,” saying that Chapman never paid attention, dismissing Gilliam for never being around, and saying that Palin always agreed with everyone because he hated conflict – but he also slipped in a devastating comment about the most revered Beatle just for good measure.
“I rather sympathise with Paul McCartney,” he said, “Because I thought that John Lennon was a bit over-lionized, and some people rather took it out on McCartney, who seemed to be a very nice member of the group.”
Assuming that you can stomach the contention that Lennon is overrated, the question then turns to whether or not Cleese was accurate in casting himself as the Paul McCartney of the Pythons. There has been plenty of public in-fighting between the members since the group began, and it’s continued with even more heat on X (Twitter) in recent years, with Idle accusing Cleese of bullying Jones throughout their time in Python and Cleese responding, with a fair amount of humour, no doubt, that he and Idle had “always loathed and despised each other.”
Given the singular personalities in both The Beatles and Monty Python, the only connection that can accurately be drawn between them and their dynamics is that there was an overabundance of passionate creativity that gave them unprecedented chemistry as a group and ultimately tore them apart.
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