[alerta spoiler: este texto tem informação sobre os espectáculos que continuam no Coliseu dos Recreios, em Lisboa, até dia 8 de junho]
Yeah, it was one of the funniest pre-funerals I’ve ever been to. Even because it is very rare to be able to honor the living dead. but as a show per seLet’s just say “Last Time to See Me Before I Die” isn’t exactly to die for.
EITHER setting It was incredible; EITHER pay off not so much. A brilliant title, years of waiting, a pandemic that delayed the show again and again and tested the limits of the previous joke: would we still see John Cleese before he died? Before he died, I mean, because he looks great. And the calendar falls from 2020 to 2021, from 2021 to 2022, and a person measuring blood pressure and sugars and milking the last of the gel alcohol in the dispensers outside the stores, once persecuted like the grail and now abandoned like phone booths lost in evolution.
Finally, the meeting. More extra dates announced. In the original plan, there were two (unless I’m wrong); turned out to be six. It’s said that right next door in Spain you can’t fill the room (and one of the show’s first jokes seems to point to that); here, half a dozen coliseums are almost all full. “Well, I didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition!” Right. Maybe that’s all. If they had pulled the prank on the Portuguese, we probably would have sold out even sooner.
“Last Time to See me Before I Die” has two parts: one that is funny, but we have already seen it; another that we had never seen, but that is not very funny.
Monty Python’s John Cleese: It’s Best to Laugh Until the End, Ours and Theirs
In the first, John Cleese makes some jokes reading the largest teleprompter ever seen in history: a giant screen the size of the presidential box, whose luminosity on the back of the audience is impossible to ignore. We know very well that the whole show is an illusion, but it is important, I would say, that at least an effort is made to deceive the public. We know it’s a lie, but we like to think that person really had that joke, at that moment, in front of that audience. Being able to read, seconds before, everything that will come out of the artist’s mouth, just by turning your neck slightly, is not, let’s face it, the most propitious context to crack your head open with laughter.
Did we say it was a fun funeral? Correction: it was a will, an inheritance. “Last Time to See me Before I Die” is probably the piggy bank Cleese leaves behind for her children, grandchildren, her wife and ex-wives, and her dream house in Mallorca. There is no source material. The jokes in the first part basically serve to drop excerpts from “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” sketches, or “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”, or “A Fish Called Vanda” that the promoter of the show didn’t even take. the hassle of translating and subtitling (from 2019 onwards, they must not have had the time). Who knows, knows; If you don’t know, don’t know, because the audio quality of the BBC recordings from the 70s doesn’t come out exactly clear from the Coliseu dos Recreios sound system.
The second part is not very funny, but, curiously, it is the one that saves the night. Mr. Cleese, with the help of an assistant, effectively answers the questions that, during the first part, he asked the public to send to the email address that hovers almost all the time over meter ninety-six, in a stage scene. solution that also leaves much to be desired. This is, suddenly, here we are for an hour chatting with one of the most mythical figures in the history of comedy. And she answers seriously and without worrying about pleasing. About Brexit, about the English, the French, the Germans, the Jews, the only joke you know about the Portuguese, which may be about the Brazilians, about Cascais, about women and ex-wives, about humor.
In short, it is impossible to say that it was not good. It wasn’t amazing, it wasn’t unforgettable, not even close. But not every Monday you can spend two hours chatting with one of our heroes. And he respects his intelligence and ours enough not to patronize us.
The virtue of “Last Time to See me Before I Die” is that it reminds us that humor serves, above all, to help us deal with the absurd. The absurdity of death, life, illness, loss, tragedy, the ephemeral, war, violence, inhumanity. We laugh because we need to free ourselves from the tension of fear. That’s why there are no forbidden topics. That’s why the supposedly forbidden topics are the ones that make you laugh the most.
“Mr. Cleese, in your opinion, would Monty Python be possible today? Would they have a space on British public television, a group of comedians made up of six white men?” Was the question we sent to [email protected] It hasn’t been read. Maybe someone else will read it again soon.
Source: Observadora
