British actor John Cleese says he has pulled out of a scheduled talk at Cambridge University over “woke rules” that saw another speaker blacklisted by the organization for doing an impersonation of Hitler.
Last week, Cambridge University paper Varsity reported that Andrew Graham-Dixon, a Union speaker, put on a German accent, impersonated the dictator, and used racial slurs during a meeting that was videoed. Later, Graham-Dixon stated the act was meant to be satirical and was not an endorsement of Hitler or antisemitism, claiming he had intended to “underline the utterly evil nature of Hitler and his regime”.
Cleese famously impersonated Hitler while in character as Basil Fawlty in the 1970s sitcom Fawlty Towers.
The actor was due to appear in Cambridge alongside the Channel 4 team behind his upcoming doc series Cancel Me, in which Cleese interviews people who claim to be the victims of ‘cancel culture’.
Today, the actor confirmed he would not be making the appearance in a pair of tweets:
I was looking forward to talking to students at the Cambridge Union this Friday, but I hear that someone there has been blacklisted for doing an
impersonation of Hitler
I regret that I did the same on a Monty Python show, so I am blacklisting myself before someone else does
— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) November 10, 2021
I apologise to anyone at Cambridge who was hoping to talk with me, but perhaps some of you can find a venue where woke rules do not apply
— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) November 10, 2021
