I was flipping through the cable guide some weeks back and found something on PBS called “John Cleese on The Human Face.” I figured it was a documentary special, so I had the DVR record it, and I finally had the time to watch it tonight. I was a little disappointed to discover that it was actually part of a series, and I probably missed the other parts. There wasn’t much humor, but Cleese did a very nice job of weaving some individual stories together to give a general picture of how the brain works with facial information. Cleese himself seemed very comfortable talking to scientists and people who had suffered unfortunate brain accidents – not the kind of personality you’d expect from many of his more famous roles. It was another striking reminder of one of the things that I associate with the British humorists I like – folks like Douglas Adams or the Monty Python troupe or Neil Gaiman. There’s an intellectual or academic flavor to what they do – not that it’s necessarily smarter than other people, but that it seems interested in using the kinds of things we study in school as fodder for material more than the everyday observational stuff that I associate with American humor. Dave Barry, for example, is a heck of a smart guy and a fine writer who graduated from Haverford College, an elite liberal arts school right outside Philly – but most of his stuff covers exploding whales, booger jokes, and terrible song lyrics. So I somehow find it easier to think of Cleese as a documentarian than Barry.
On the other hand, I wish my latest copy of Dave Barry’s Bad Habits hadn’t disintegrated so I could dig up what he had to say about philosophy. But now I digress.