John Cleese has spent most of his adult life making people laugh at things they were not necessarily supposed to laugh at. Religion, class, nationalism, bureaucracy, sex, race, Germans, the British, foreigners, politicians and human stupidity have all passed through the Monty Python machine. Now, at the age of 86, Cleese has encountered something even Basil Fawlty might have struggled to parody: activists demanding that a comedian's performance be cancelled because they object to things he has said about a religion.
A Birmingham Muslim activist group calling itself Deenified released a video ahead of Cleese's appearance at Birmingham Town Hall accusing him of attacking Islam, spreading dangerous misinformation and creating hostility towards Muslims. They called him a "hate preacher," told him he was not welcome in Birmingham and asked the venue to cancel his performance. The show nevertheless went ahead without incident, which is good news, but the episode is nothing to laugh about.
The first distinction that needs to be made is between Muslims and Islam. Muslims are human beings and entitled to exactly the same legal protection from violence, discrimination and harassment as everyone else. Islam is a religion: a collection of doctrines, scriptures, traditions and historical claims. Like Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, atheism, Marxism or liberalism, it can be discussed, criticised, mocked and rejected.
Confusing those two categories is one of the most effective ways of restricting religious criticism. Criticise a person because he is Muslim and one enters the territory of religious prejudice. Criticise an idea contained in Islamic theology and one is participating in an argument. The distinction should be elementary.
Cleese's critics argue that he has crossed the line. They point to statements in which he has characterised the Quran as being about killing infidels and has associated Islam with practices including child marriage, female genital mutilation, wife-beating and hostility towards non-Muslims, things Cleese has said, as the critics rightly point out.
Those are sweeping claims and they are perfectly open to challenge. Muslims, Islamic scholars and anybody else should be free to argue that Cleese has misrepresented Islamic texts, confused cultural practices with religious doctrine, ignored contrary passages, exaggerated extremist interpretations, or simply got his facts wrong. That would be debate. "Cancel his show" is something else: it is an attempt to make the speaker disappear.
This distinction matters particularly because Cleese is a comedian whose career was built upon irreverence. Monty Python's Life of Brian subjected Christianity to ferocious satire. Bishops and Christian organisations objected, some local councils banned screenings, and Christians were perfectly entitled to condemn the film. What they were not entitled to possess was a permanent veto over everybody else's ability to watch it.
The same principle must apply to Islam. A multicultural society cannot function on the principle that every religion receives protection against offence. That system quickly becomes impossible because religions make incompatible truth claims. Christianity says things Islam denies, Islam says things Christianity denies, and atheism denies fundamental propositions asserted by both. Someone is inevitably going to be offended.
The alternative is not a society without offence. It is a society in which whichever group can generate the greatest political pressure acquires the strongest informal blasphemy law. That is where the Cleese affair becomes serious.
The activists did not merely say that Cleese was wrong. They did not announce a public debate and invite him to defend his interpretation of Islam. They asked the venue not to allow him to perform. That is the cancellation impulse in its purest form: this person holds views we regard as offensive, therefore other people should not be permitted to hear him.
The argument becomes stranger still because the Birmingham event was based around Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Cleese introduced the film and later answered audience questions. Holy Grail is hardly Islamic polemic. The Pythons spend the film making fun of medieval Christianity, kings, peasants, knights, historians, Frenchmen and practically everything else they encounter. Islam is not its subject.
Cleese was therefore not being targeted because his Birmingham performance constituted some organised attack upon Muslims. He was being targeted because of opinions he had expressed elsewhere. That establishes an alarming principle: once somebody has expressed an unacceptable opinion, unrelated public appearances can become legitimate targets.
Today the comedy show, tomorrow the bookshop and next week the university lecture. Eventually the argument is no longer about answering what someone says. It is about preventing the person from having a platform from which to say anything.
Britain should know better. It abolished its common-law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel in 2008. That reform reflected an important liberal principle: religious ideas do not require the criminal law to protect them from ridicule or contempt.
It would be an extraordinary historical reversal if formal Christian blasphemy restrictions disappeared only to be replaced by informal restrictions surrounding another religion. Nobody needs to accept Cleese's claims about Islam to recognise the danger.
Indeed, free speech matters most when the speaker is arguably wrong. There is little need for a principle of free expression protecting statements everybody already considers reasonable. The test arrives when somebody says something provocative, offensive, exaggerated or foolish.
The answer is more speech. Tell Cleese where he is wrong, quote the Quran against him, produce Islamic scholars, write articles, make videos, mock him, buy a ticket to his show and ask an awkward question during the Q&A, or, better still, produce comedy funnier than his. All of those responses belong in a free society. Demanding that the hall cancel his performance does not.
There is another uncomfortable feature of the controversy. Deenified itself complained that free speech is applied selectively. Its activists argued that attacks upon other religions can produce condemnation while criticism of Islam is defended as satire. There is a legitimate issue buried inside that complaint because free speech should indeed be applied consistently.
Christians should not receive special protection, Muslims should not receive special protection and atheists should not receive special protection. Human beings receive protection; ideas receive argument.
That principle becomes especially important in an increasingly religiously diverse Britain. Multiculturalism cannot mean importing multiple communities and then giving each community the power to restrict criticism of its beliefs. That arrangement cannot possibly survive.
The more diverse a society becomes, the stronger its common commitment to free expression must become because there are more fundamental disagreements requiring peaceful resolution. The alternative is a society in which everyone walks around everybody else's sacred cows. That is not tolerance; it is mutual censorship.
Cleese himself responded in characteristically Cleesian fashion. He said that Islamic people were often good fun and possessed a sense of humour and irony, and that he looked forward to an evening of laughter. The evening apparently passed peacefully, which is exactly how the matter should have ended.
The activists spoke, Cleese spoke, people bought tickets and the performance occurred. Nobody was forced to attend and nobody was forced to laugh. That is pluralism.
But the demand for cancellation should not be forgotten merely because it failed. John Cleese is one of Britain's most famous comedians. He possesses money, public recognition and an enormous audience. A cancellation campaign against him attracts national publicity and defenders.
Imagine instead a young academic, a schoolteacher, a small-town councillor or an unknown comedian trying to obtain his first booking. Imagine someone without Cleese's resources being labelled a "hate preacher" and having activists contact his employer or venue demanding that he be removed. Would the institution stand firm?
That is where the chilling effect begins. Most censorship in a modern liberal democracy does not require policemen arriving at midnight to confiscate manuscripts. It can operate through fear.
The venue decides the controversy is not worth it. The employer decides the employee has become a reputational problem. The publisher decides another manuscript would be safer. The comedian quietly removes the joke. Eventually nobody needs to issue the censorship order because everybody has learned where the invisible boundaries lie.
That is why this apparently ridiculous little episode matters. Cleese has spent a lifetime mocking authority, pomposity and people who take themselves too seriously. Some of his jokes have aged wonderfully and others have not. Some of his political opinions are sensible and others are open to vigorous disagreement. None of that is the point.
The point is whether Britain remains sufficiently confident in its own liberal traditions to say that religions may be criticised and comedians may perform even when somebody is offended. There was a time when Monty Python's great contribution to British culture was demonstrating that almost everything could be laughed at.
Christianity survived Life of Brian, Germany survived Basil Fawlty, France survived the outrageous accents in Holy Grail, and Britain survived the Ministry of Silly Walks. Islam will survive John Cleese.
The more important question is whether Britain's culture of free expression will survive the growing belief that offence confers a right to silence the offender. The Birmingham show went ahead and this time the cancellers lost, which is worth a smile. The fact that the demand was made at all is nothing to laugh about.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2026/09/watch-muslim-activists-attempt-to-cancel-cleese/