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Psychological Experiments

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John Cleese on Lawyers

I just finished reading John Cleese’s Professor at Large, which reprises a number of talks he gave at Cornell University while he was a visiting Professor-at-Large there over a period of some eighteen years. I broke out laughing when I read the following:

CLEESE: I had to switch to law [at Cambridge University] because there was almost nothing else I could switch to:

INTERVIEWER: So, you’re saying law is easier?

CLEESE: Well, law was kind of easier for me because I am fairly precise with my use of words and I can think in terms of categories, which is all law is—until you start practicing, and then it’s about villainy and low cunning.

I’ll tell you my favorite joke about lawyers because it actually involves universities. The psychological departments of universities are using lawyers now, instead of rats, in their experiments. There are three reasons for this. One is that there are more lawyers than rats. Second, there are some things that rats just won’t do. And thev third is is that there was a bit of a problem because sometimes the experimenters got fond of the rats. And I want you to know that joke has nothing to do with the fact that I am going through an expensive divorce at the moment.

A Bulletin from the Ministry of Silly Walks

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John Cleese of Monty Python Shows You How

He’s not just one of the funniest men who have ever lived. He also has a brain, a very good one, in fact. For a number of years, he served as a Professor-at-Large at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. During that time, he showed up occasionally and delivered some fascinating talks, which were collected and published in a book entitled Professor at Large: The Cornell Years.

His first talk was about his reactions to a book by Guy Claxton about creativity. It was called Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind:

It’s a book that addresses a danger that has been developing in our society for several years. This danger is based on three separate wrong beliefs. The first is the belief that being decisive means taking decisions quickly. The second is the belief that fast is always better. The third is the belief that we should think of our minds as computers.

Now, of course, there are situations where you have to think fast, like how to avoid a car driving on the wrong side of the freeway. It seems, however, that many American businessmen have made something of a fetish out being articulate and quick on the draw.

Creativity just cannot be made to order:

The point is, we just don’t know where we get our ideas from, but it certainly isn’t from our laptops. They just pop into our heads. The greatest poets and scientists freely admit that they have no control over the creative process. They all know that they cannot create to order. They can only put themselves in favorable—usually quiet—circumstances, bear the problem in mind, and … wait. Indeed, the whole creative process is so mysterious that academic psychologists who studied creativity in depth in the ’60s and ’70s eventually just gave up because they couldn’t get any further—they literally couldn’t explain it.

Seeing as how John Cleese and his five Monty Python associates are among the most creative comics of the last half century, I can only assume that the man knows what he is talking about. Even if he walks silly.