My Review of "So, Anyway ..."

John Cleese's So Anyway ... is meant to be a memoir of Cleese's life.  But there's only one problem.  The 375 pages barely make it past Cleese's time as a student at Cambridge.  There's no Monty Python.  No Fish Called Wanda.  None of his later comic genius.  No, So Anyway ... is a brief look at Cleese's life, served up short.  While that might not be a problem for most entertainers' memoirs -- it's not unheard of to have several installments for a full story -- we have no hint of that here.  Instead, So Anyway ... claims to be something it isn't.  It claims to be the story of Cleese's life, when in reality it's the story of part of Cleese's life.

I was particularly saddened to find that Fawlty Towers -- perhaps the second-greatest Britcom ever produced -- fails to make an appearance.  Though we do find hints of that time in pictures. 

But nothing about his four wives.  Nothing about Fawlty Towers.  Nothing about Monty Python.

Only his mother, Muriel Cleese, makes an appearance -- and then she reads more like Kathy Bates' character from Misery than a genuine maternal figure in someone's life.

What's more, while Cleese is one of the 20th century's comedic geniuses, there's almost no humor here.  Cleese himself comes across as an ornery old man who never made it in showbusiness, rather than one of the great minds behind Monty Python and the Holy Grail or Life of Brian.

This book, sadly, left me wanting so much more.  I hardly doubt I'll bother keeping it to read again.  It was too great a disappointment the first time around.

I received a free copy of this book as part of the Blogging for Books program in exchange for my honest review here.