The Onion A.V. Club has an interview with John Cleese where he reminisces about his career, Monty Python, and the current state of comedy filmmaking. He comes off as warm, perceptive, and genuinely funny.
The Life of Brian inspires a detour into theology, which is where Cleese drops a nice quote:
Here’s what I think in a single sentence: I think that the real religion is about the understanding that if we can only still our egos for a few seconds, we might have a chance of experiencing something that is divine in nature. But in order to do that, we have to slice away at our egos and try to get them down to a manageable size, and then still work some practiced light meditation. So real religion is about reducing our egos, whereas all the churches are interested in is egotistical activities, like getting as many members and raising as much money and becoming as important and high-profile and influential as possible. All of which are egotistical attitudes. So how can you have an egotistical organization trying to teach a non-egotistical ideal? It makes no sense, unless you regard religion as crowd control. What I think most organized religion—simply crowd control.
That’s a bumper sticker waiting to be made. I can see the steeple graphic already.