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John Cleese issues mock apology for Monty Python after Hank Azaria apologises for voicing Apu in The Simpsons
John Cleese issued a mock apology for Monty Python after Hank Azaria apologised for voicing Apu on The Simpsons.
Azaria, 56, stood down from voicing Apu Nahasapeemapetilon on the long-running animated series following years of backlash against a white man portraying the Indian character.
Speaking on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast, he said: ‘I really do apologise. It’s important. I apologise for my part in creating that and participating in that.
‘Part of me feels like I need to go to every single Indian person in this country and personally apologise. And sometimes I do.’
While many have commended Azaria for apologising, Cleese, 81, called the apology ‘posturing idiocy’ and shared a mocking apology for Monty Python sketches ‘making fun of white English people’.
The comedian tweeted: ‘Not wishing to be left behind by Hank Azaria, I would like to apologise on behalf on Monty Python for all the many sketches we did making fun of white English people.
‘We’re sorry for any distress we may have caused.’
To a response reading: ‘No apologising to the Romans then, after all what have the Romans ever done for us!’, Cleese added: ‘They enslaved us for for over three centuries and they owe us reparations.’
He also joked that any white English people who found the sketches funny were ‘oppressors’.
Many fans praised Cleese for his tweet, calling him a legend’, but others called him out, including writer Soraya McDonald, who wrote: ‘No understanding of power dynamics. None. Just false equivalencies and vibes.’
Cleese continued to blast ‘wokeism’ on Twitter, after a follower tweeted: ‘Man, that #wokeism is going too far imo acting like the ministry of good taste and censorship and lacking a decent sense of humour.’
He wrote: ‘Started out as a good idea – Let’s be nice to people’ – and finished up as a humorless, censorious, literal-minded, posturing idiocy.’
AP|Fox TV)
The star also mocked a follower who said that it was ‘pretty painful to look back at stuff like Eric Idle in blackface on the show, or Bonzo Dog Doodah band’s similar antics on ‘Do Not Adjust Your Set’.
Cleese quote-tweeted him and wrote: ‘I expect you’ll recover eventually.’
The A Fish Called Wanda star previously hit out at the decision from UKTV to remove the Fawlty Towers episode The Germans due to outdated racial references in the episode.
He told the Sydney Morning Herald: ‘The Major was an old fossil left over from decades before,
‘We were not supporting his views, we were making fun of them. If they can’t see that, if people are too stupid to see that, what can one say?
‘Fawlty Towers has given a large number of people a great deal of happiness, why would you want to stop that. It reminds me of the definition of a Scottish Presbyterian as someone who has a nasty, sneaking feeling that someone, somewhere, is having a good time.
‘A lot of the people in charge now at the BBC just want to hang onto their jobs. If a few people get excited they pacify them rather than standing their ground as they would have done 30 or 40 years ago.’
Despite his fury, he had previously supported the BBC editing out slurs in the episode in 2013.
The Germans was reinstated on UKTV after extra guidance and warnings highlighting potentially offensive content and language was added.
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