John Cleese belongs to a tradition of university humor that has supplied a recognizable strand of comedy to British television and radio from Beyond the Fringe in the late 1950s to Blackadder and beyond. The brilliance of his writing, the dominant nature of his performances (due largely to his extraordinary height), and the variety of his successes have made him undoubtedly the most influential figure of this group. He has always shown an unerring instinct for how far to go with any one project or idea, with the result that there is little in his large body of work that could be counted as failure, although he is also highly critical, in hindsight, of anything he regards as not having worked precisely as he might have wanted it to.

Following the success of Cambridge Circus, the Cambridge University Footlights Club revue to which he contributed and which toured Britain and the world between 1963 and 1965, Cleese made his first big impact on television by writing and performing sketches on David Frost’s The Frost Report, airing on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). (Cleese had already written material for That Was the Week That Was, the seminal BBC satire show that had launched Frost’s career.) Fellow performers included Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett, with whom Cleese created the classic “class” sketch, and the show won the Golden Rose of Montreux in 1966. Cleese’s written contributions were created in collaboration with his writing partner Graham Chapman, then still a medical student at Cambridge. At the same time, Cleese was also writing and performing in the cult BBC radio series I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again, together with such Cambridge Circus colleagues as Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie. There were a total of eight series of this show between 1964 and 1973, probably the only thing Cleese ever overdid.

Cleese was now much in demand, and his next major project, produced by David Frost for Rediffusion, was At Last the 1948 Show, a sketch-comedy series written and performed in collaboration with Chapman, Brooke-Taylor, and Marty Feldman, two series of which were transmitted in 1967. Although not seen throughout the country, the show gained a cult following for the brilliance and unpredictability of its comedy and the innovative nature of its structure, in which the show was linked by a dumb blonde called the Lovely Aimi MacDonald. Cleese was now developing a full range of comic personae, including manic bullies, unreliable authority figures (especially lawyers and government ministers), and repressed Englishmen, all of which were later to gel in the character of Basil Fawlty. The quality of invention in At Last the 1948 Show was consistently high, and it gave the world of television comedy one of its most enduring pieces— the “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch. It was also the recognized precursor to the series that remains, in spite of all his own retrospective criticism, Cleese’s most significant contribution to television comedy, Monty Python’s Flying Circus (BBC).

Beginning in 1969, Monty Python’s Flying Circus teamed Cleese and Chapman with three other university comedians, Michael Palin and Terry Jones, who wrote together and had also contributed to The Frost Report, and Eric Idle. The team was completed by American animator Terry Gilliam. Four series were made between 1969 and 1974, though Cleese did not appear in the fourth, contributing only as a writer. This was probably the main reason for the comparative failure of the final series, because Cleese was clearly the dominant figure in the Python team and appeared in the sketches that made the greatest impact, thus becoming the figure most associated with the series in the public mind.

Two sketches in particular stand out in this regard: the “Dead Parrot” sketch, in which Cleese returns a defective pet bird to the shop where he bought it; and the “Ministry of Silly Walks” sketch, in which Cleese used his angular figure to startling effect. He was to be constantly exasperated in future years by people asking him to “do the silly walk.” In At Last the 1948 Show, Cleese’s appearances with Marty Feldman have a particular resonance. In Monty Python’s Flying Circus, his work with Michael Palin was similarly memorable.

The overall impact and influence of Monty Python’s Flying Circus is difficult to overestimate. The intricate flow of each show, the abandonment of the traditional “punch line” to a sketch, the knowing experimentation with the medium, and the general air of silliness combined with obscure intellectualism set a standard—one that comedians thereafter found hard to get away from Producers such as John Lloyd and writer-performers such as Ben Elton acknowledge the enormous influence of Monty Python’s Flying Circus on their own work. The word “pythonesque” entered the language, being used to describe any kind of bizarre juxtaposition.

Although there were no more series of Monty Python on television after 1974, largely because Cleese had had enough, the team continued to come together occasionally to make feature films, of which Monty Python’s Life of Brian is the best and most controversial, given its religious theme. Cleese’s discussion of the film with religious leaders on the chat show Friday Night . . . Saturday Morning in 1979 remains a television moment to cherish. The untimely death of Graham Chapman from cancer in 1989 put an end to the team for good.

By then, Cleese, having altered the world of sketch comedy forever, had done the same for the sitcom. He was no stranger to sitcoms, having written episodes of Doctor in Charge together with Chapman. For Fawlty Towers, he teamed up with his American wife Connie Booth to create a comedy of character and incident that is almost faultless in its construction. The “situation” is a small hotel in the genteel English resort of Torquay, run by Basil Fawlty (Cleese), his wife Sybil (Prunella Scales), the maid Polly (Booth), and the incompetent Spanish waiter Manuel (Andrew Sachs). Each episode is so packed with comic situations and complex plot developments, often bordering on farce, that it is no surprise that there were, in all, only 12 episodes ever made, in two series of six each from 1975 and 1979. Basil Fawlty is the ultimate Cleese creation—a manic, snobbish, repressed English stereotype with a talent for disaster, whether it be trying to dispose of the dead body of a guest or coping with a party of German visitors. In 2000 a poll of the British television industry, organized by the British Film Institute, voted Fawlty Towers the best British TV program of all time.

Cleese’s television work after Fawlty Towers was sporadic and included the role of Petruchio in Jonathan Miller’s production of The Taming of the Shrew for the BBC Television Shakespeare series and a guest appearance on the U.S. sitcom Cheers, as well as the two funniest Party Political Broadcasts (for the Social Democratic Party) ever made. He concentrated more on esoteric projects such as the comic training films he made through his own company, Video Arts, and books on psychotherapy written in collaboration with Dr. Robin Skynner. He also pursued his work in feature films, enjoying great success with A Fish Called Wanda, in which he returned to one of his favorite subjects—the differences between English and American characters—already explored in one memorable episode of Fawlty Towers. The film also saw him play the role of a lawyer, the profession he had lampooned throughout his career and that he had originally studied to join. In 2001 Cleese returned to British TV screens as the presenter of the documentary series The Human Face, which he also wrote. In 2002 he became a costar in a new U.S. sitcom, Wednesdays 9:30 (8:30 Central), a satirical look at work life at a television network with Cleese playing the owner of the fictional network. ABC canceled the comedy after only two episodes. In 2003 and 2004, he had a recurring guest role on the U.S. sitcom Will & Grace.