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Cleese believes that “religion matters hugely”, and when pressed by Archbishop Welby as to why, expands, “because it is about the only thing that does matter which is why are we here.”

John Cleese

However, on God, Cleese confesses that he stands “completely unconvinced, but very deeply interested.”

“I think there is a higher force, and I think if we're in the right mood, perhaps after a spiritual exercise or perhaps just by luck, we have that for a moment or a few hours. And during that time, we're a better, more sensible person. But by and large, I think we're in the hands of automatic behaviours that we don't really, really think about.”

He never saw Jesus as a funny concept

Jesus was never a figure of fun for Cleese, despite what critics suggested. “You can't be funny about people who are perfect,” says Cleese, “and we realised in the first 5 minutes of writing Life of Brian that there’s nothing funny about Jesus. What's funny is our foibles and our weaknesses and our faults, and it's what we laugh at.”

He believes Jesus’s teachings were about reducing ego

Cleese describes Jesus’s teachings as “beautiful” and interprets them as saying “try to treat other people as human beings.” He also feels that they are about “reducing the power of the ego so that you can stop pretending that you're more important and more powerful than other people.”

He believes humour is about reducing ego too

“One of the great things, I think, about humour,” says Cleese, “is that it's very hard for people to be pompous and self-important in a humorous, spontaneous atmosphere, which is why they like solemnity. If everyone's relaxed and smiling and teasing each other with affection and love, then you can't play that I'm superior to you game.”

While Jesus himself might not be a direct target for humour, he was, according to Archbishop Welby, able to deliver a joke. The example the Archbishop gives is Jesus’s parable of the lost sheep, which describes a shepherd abandoning a flock of 99 sheep to look for one that is lost.

Some of the original members of Monty Python in 1999

People are all good or bad, and if they ever made one mistake, they've never ever been any good.

John Cleese on dichotomous thinking

“When he begins ‘there was this shepherd’ to the crowd, everyone has a little nervous giggle because shepherds in those days were held in some contempt.” The humour intensifies when Jesus tells the crowd that the shepherd leaves the 99 sheep in the wilderness. “When Jesus says: ‘Rejoice with me because I found the sheep that I was lost.’, they're all thinking, ‘Yes, you blithering idiot! You left 99 up in the hills!’, and then Jesus turns round, and the punchline is “God's like that.”

Archbishop Welby says a comedy scriptwriter friend once told him, “If I could write such a story with so much humour and drama and depth in the 240 words it took, I think I'd be the greatest script writer in history.”

Cleese is amused by people’s respect for him

The Archbishop reminds Cleese that, when talking about undergoing therapy, he once commented that he didn’t like what he saw of himself.

“I don't dislike myself,” counters Cleese, “but I’m quite amused at – this sounds so boastful - the extraordinary respect that people treat me with; they want photographs and selfies. I kind of think ‘ah, that's because they know me from the outside’. From the inside they’d see just as much of a mess as we all are, and that’s the bit that I'm interested in. We're all very, very silly and stupid and run by completely silly ideas.”

Dichotomous thinking is dividing everything

Springboarding from a discussion about forgiveness becoming almost a lost art, Cleese says he believes that this comes from a way of thinking “where people are all good or bad, and if they ever made one mistake, they've never ever been any good.” He adds: “It's black and white thinking. It's dichotomous thinking. It's dividing everything.”

Cleese believes this mode of thinking is doubled down on by “denial and projection”, referencing Carl Jung’s work. “They deny that [badness] in themselves and project it onto the enemy, and that justifies their hatred for the enemy. I think it’s incredibly important and I think it is the same story as when Christ was talking about The Mote and The Beam” [from which we get ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged’].

A combination of gut feeling and audience reaction dictates whether a joke has gone too far, Cleese says. He claims that not understanding context is one of the biggest issues when it comes to the current censorship climate.

To illustrate his point on context, he tells a story of a friend of his meeting his mother to attend a funeral. “She turned up in the brightest coloured dress and a very colourful hat, and he said to her, ‘mum, it’s a funeral’ and she said ‘yes, but I’m going to a wedding after.’ So, they took the very flowery hat off and hid it in the vestry. And the next time I saw it, it was on the coffin as it was being carried.”

“Well, in a situation like that,” says Cleese, “you could make a remark to a friend, but you don't want it on the front page of the Daily Mail because it's all about context.”

“My worry is that the literal minded have great problem with context, which is why they can't understand sarcasm or irony. The words say one thing, but the fact they are said ironically means they mean the opposite. And that's very difficult for literal minded people to take in. And I think that an awful lot of problems in religion is that all the literal minded people take stuff that was meant metaphorically, [literally].”