From Witness Box to the Bench:
Meetings, Bloody Meetings, Video Arts,
and the Evolution of John Cleese
Paul N. Reinsch and N. Lamar Reinsch
In a 1987 speech to an American business audience, “The Importance of
Mistakes,” John Cleese opened by saying:
I’m afraid I am, despite that introduction, not well known to most of
you. But if any of you watch PBS, you may be relieved to know that
I am not today appearing in my capacity as one sixth of a celebrated
snake or as the worst hotelier in the free world, but as the founder
member of a British training-film company called Video Arts. Which we
now think is the largest training film company in the world outside the
United States.
1
While acknowledging his most famous work in comedy (as a member of
Monty Python and Basil Fawlty in Fawlty Towers [1975 and 1979]),
Cleese also explains why he was speaking at a business conference.
P.N. Reinsch (*)
Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, USA
N.L. Reinsch
Lubbock Christian University, Lubbock, TX, USA
© The Author(s) 2017
P.N. Reinsch et al. (eds.), Python beyond Python, Palgrave Studies
in Comedy, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51385-0_7
109