Say no more. Actually, I’ll say that this is a pleasantly wide-ranging interview that dips into some unexpected areas.

Christoph Scheuermann and Barbara Supp, for Der Spiegel:

Cleese: When I was young, I felt that if you made fun of a certain kind of behavior, people would realize it was ridiculous. And then it would slowly disappear. It didn’t. Of course not. The comedian Peter Cook made that funny joke about these wonderful Berlin cabarets in the 1930s that did so much to hold back Adolf Hitler. Well, you know what happened.

SPIEGEL: Do you have to be left-wing as a comedian?

Cleese: The good ones are on the left, yes. There are some decent right-wing ones, but they’re few and far between. Anyone who is rather fundamentally critical of society and the way it works is much more likely to be on the left.