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John Cleese on Sarah Palin: "Monty Python Could Have Written This."

Xeni Jardin at 8:44 pm Mon, Oct 13, 2008

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Via seesmiccafe: "The former Monty Python star shares his unsparing thoughts and views about GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin." Video Link.

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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  • WhitScott

    The full length interview of John Cleese talking about the upcoming election can be found here http://seesmic.com/video/VSomeIE9D4

  • Maddy

    #20 — huh, I’ve seen other Pythons chide him about being pollitcally more conservative then them …

  • Talia

    Silly Party ’08!

    Michael Palin For President

    :P

  • Scary_UK

    #25 – I think you’re getting confused.

    He has made several travel programmes – Around The World in 80 days, Pole to Pole etc. Each was a series of about 8 episodes.

    They’ve never been ‘cancelled’ as such, each was a self contained journey. He’s still making them, Palin’s New Europe being the most recent which was shown last year

  • dainel

    History is about to repeat. Didn’t everyone say Bush was stupid. He was a moron. How come he won the election. Twice. Bush is not stupid. He’s only pretending.

    I doubt Palin is stupid. She got elected as governor. How many of us here can get ourselves elected to the town council? Who is more stupid, the one pretending to be, or the ones taken in? We’ll know when she sneaks into office.

    Everyone who thought there couldn’t possibly be anyone worse then Bush will regret saying “anyone but Bush”.

  • technogeek

    The American public likes to vote for candidates who represent them — who feed their sense of “If my life had gone a bit differently, I could do that.”

    Unfortunately, half the American public, by definition, is below average. Any candidate who truly represents the populace is going to be pretty darned mediocre. That isn’t what we need.

    And I’m not sure Palin meets even that standard.

    I used to respect McCain. As of this campaign, he’s scaring me. I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and postulate that he’s reluctantly going along with the advice of his handlers even though it goes against his own sense of what’s best for the country… but putting it kindly, that isn’t leadership.

  • Clayton Hove

    She does have that look in her eyes like she’s pining for the fjords…

  • minTphresh

    watching a video of bible spice last night, i was struck by cindy mccain’s response when sarah said how mccain ” was fighting corruption and greed in washington.” cindymac ’bout busted out laughing! it seemed it was all she could do to contain it. funny.

  • Stefan Jones

    She’s an Alaskan Red. Beautiful plumage!

  • Xeni “Hussein” Jardin

    The plumage don’t enter into it. It’s stone dead.

  • demidan

    She wouldn’t go Voom if you put a million volts in it!

  • Doctor Popular

    was that disclaimer at the end really necessary?

    • Xeni “Hussein” Jardin

      @Doctor Popular: agreed, teh lame.

  • Xeni “Hussein” Jardin

    ‘Ello, Missus Polly Palin Parrot! I’ve got a lovely fresh cuttle fish for you if you show…

  • Johnny Cat

    She’s pinin’ for the fjords, but she’s not quite dead, yet. She’s getting better. Oh! She’s died.

  • AGF

    My grandma’s parrot actually knew what she was saying. This comparison is kinda unfair to parrot I’d say ;)

  • Anonymous

    What a nasty thing to say about parrots! Actually, there was a parrot named Alex, trained by Dr. Irene Pepperberg, which clearly understood the content of human language. I think Alex’s brain was bigger than Sarah Palin’s, so the comparison may be unfair to her.

  • A New Challenger

    Awww, I thought we were going to get some dirt on Michael.

  • Apashiol

    Palin’s more lifelike than McCain’s wife but neither of them pass the Turing test.

  • miks2u

    What are the odds of this – I had my full 2200+ MP3 collection on shuffle play, and The Lumberjack Song came on just as this post popped up in my feed reader. It’s got to be cosmic coincidence…

  • Destin

    That’s funny. During the Couric and Gibson interviews, all I could think of was how much Palin reminded me of a John Cleese character, Anne Elk (Miss).
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOzVkSFnKxI

  • Elvis Gump

    I got a reply from the Seesmic guy who says the entire video will be posted at the end of the week for anyone else searching for the whole thing. More when I know more…

  • Leven

    #27 – The poster in #25 was referring to Ripping Yarns, not his travel shows. It started with “Tomkinson’s Schooldays”, which led into a series, in which each show was an independant story, with its own characters and setting.

  • BearsAssaultedByBasil

    @MIKS2U
    (Total number of post views)*(Portion of views where viewer was listening to music on shuffle)*(Average size of library)*(Portion of songs that can be construed as relevant to post) = The chances of a relevant song coming on for someone are probably not that low.

  • Rikki Simons

    (Total number of post views)*(Portion of views where viewer was listening to music on shuffle)*(Average size of library)*(Portion of songs that can be construed as relevant to post)

    If you feed that into the Improbability Drive you’ll be on Magrathea in minutes.

  • shutz

    This was a Party Political Broadcast on behalf of the Silly Party.

  • creesto

    Ahem. This is my theory, which I developed, which is to say that it is mine. The theory which I shall share which is mine is that ahem John McCain is a maverick.

    And so on and so forth.

    And now…its’

  • Metronicity

    “I took the liberty of examining that parrot when I got it home, and I discovered the only reason that it had been sitting on its perch in the first place was that it had been NAILED there.”

  • Maddy

    he’s generally conservative, so his observations are damning …

  • Kieran O’Neill

    Lol. And so eloquently and succinctly put.

    That’s about all any reasonable, thinking person needs to say about Palin.

  • Boba Fett Diop

    Sadly, the Palin nomination reminds me of a somewhat different Monty Python sketch:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVxM5IBLeU4

    (Yes, I know, Godwin. But watch until the rally near the end, and the part where “Ron Vibbentrop” sidles up next to the stereotypical yokel. The Pythons’ point was that the English middle class would be too polite to mention that the 3rd Reich was hiding out in a coastal B&B. Many Americans would likely say “Oh, he’s just like me…he’s a maverick.”)

    “I am not a racialist, but…und this is a big but…”

  • bloatedboy

    He’s probably wishing the last American woman he married was as dumb as Sarah Palin, she (also his shrink)made off with half of everything he owned.

  • ImFeelinLucky

    Todd Palin:
    “I’m a lumberjack and I’m OK. I stalk all night and I sleep all day.”

  • terenceeden

    @Maddy In fact, he’s a supporter of the Liberal Democrats in the UK. They’re a left-of-centre group.

    In the USA, they’d be called extreme left – but then, so would our Conservatives…

  • Scary_UK

    #20 yes it’s a bit difficult to compare such things, the US political spectrum is totally diffrent to what it is in Europe.

    It reminds me of an old Peter Cook sketch, ‘Introduction to American Politics’…

    ‘First you have the Republican Party, they are the equivalent to the British Conservative Party.
    Then you have the Democratic Party, they are the equivalent to the British Conservative Party’

    It’s always bemusing to hear a democrat being described at ‘liberal’

  • papamook

    dead parrot!

  • soupisgoodfood

    It’s like the Republicans know they’re going to lose this time so they just put out McCain and Palin as a formality.

  • Elvis Gump

    Is there a link to the entire interview? I can’t find one on the Seesmic site…

  • Nelson.C

    Particularly as the British political spectrum seems to have been folded back on itself, so that the Tories have to work hard to keep themselves to the right of NuLabour and the LibDems are hanging out on the left all by themselves.

  • eti

    Link to high quality version
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMyNk8J1c8g&fmt=18

  • hombrelobo

    Agree with nr.5 … what’s with the disclaimer ????

  • Tom Hale

    Michael Palin was always my favorite from Monty Python. He had his own show for a while, which I enjoyed. I hated when it was canceled. After wiki-ing, looks like it was a series of shows not an actual series. That doesn’t make sense does it. Look for yourself here, under Television documentaries.