There’s a molten intensity to the roles that built John Cleese’s reputation as one of the funniest and most influential comedians to use the English language in the last century or so. His devotion to the absurd as a writer and performer, most famously with Monty Python’s Flying Circus and the sitcom Fawlty Towers, has meant creating and playing characters of all sorts. But many of them have a kind of furious persistence in common, a boiling sense of grievance, no matter whether they’re a disappointed fascist dictator running in a small-town by-election, or the pedantic patron of a cheese shop that stocks no cheese, or a self-harassed hotel owner who tries to fix his stalled car by beating it with a stick.

So it’s something of a surprise to find out that his early years were mostly serene and his schooling quietly dutiful and free of ambition. That’s how Cleese himself describes things in his engaging and funny new memoir So, Anyway…, which tells his story from infancy to his late 20s, when he helped launch the Python troupe that would make him a household name.

“It was a clear case of not really knowing what I wanted to do, and not really experiencing any—what do marketing people call it?—passion,” a relaxed and genial Cleese explains to the Georgia Straight in an interview at a downtown Vancouver hotel. “So I just went along the path of least resistance.”

That path led him from what he calls a “middle-lower-middle-class” childhood in tranquil Somerset, England, to a scholarship at Cambridge University, where his attention flickered from math to biology to physics.

“But then I realized quite early,” he confesses, “that I couldn’t do science, because I just wasn’t interested. Then I said, ‘What else can I do?’ And they said, ‘You can do economics or law,’ so I came out of Cambridge with a law degree. None of it was ‘Oh, I want to do this’ or ‘I’m passionate to be that.’ It was always luck.”

Luck also brought him to join Footlights, the amateur drama club at Cambridge that was, in the early ’60s, emerging as a source of anarchic new forms of English satire. But it was Cleese’s angular talent that set him apart and derailed his plans for a tidy life as a barrister, gaining him an offer to write comedy for the BBC and soon afterward landing him a spot in the cast of groundbreaking TV shows run by host, journalist, and fellow Cambridge alumnus David Frost.

So, Anyway… is full of seasoned observations on the mechanics of comedy and the elusive reasons why we laugh. As the book recounts, one turning point in Cleese’s young career, as he hammered out sketches with writing partner Graham Chapman, was his decision to throw aside attempts to be charming or whimsically refined in favour of doing whatever was required for the biggest audience reaction possible.

“There was a particular show that was done by some Cambridge people,” Cleese recalls, “and I realized how clever it was, and it also suddenly struck me that it wasn’t very funny. And then I realized I don’t want to be clever—I don’t want people to say, ‘Wasn’t that really clever?’ I want them to say, ‘Wasn’t that really funny?’ Which is riskier, because the more you go for it, the more embarrassing it is when you fail.”

This, he says, is why his “first love” in comedy is farce, the natural habitat of the ever-flailing Basil Fawlty. And the love affair continues today: among Cleese’s current projects is a new English translation of a play by Georges Feydeau, the 19th-century French master of the form.

“I love it when you laugh helplessly,” he notes. “Not to say that I can’t read or watch something that’s witty and enjoy it, of course, but what I really love is to laugh helplessly, almost to the point where it hurts. If I think back in my life, all of those moments involve humour that was more farcical. And that’s because in a farce the protagonist, who’s usually male, gets more and more anxious about covering up a mistake, and so he makes worse and worse decisions. So you get a very high degree of energy, which is funnier than people in a Wilde comedy exchanging witticisms. It can be very pleasant, but you’re never going to get falling-about laughter.”

Regardless of the form, however, Cleese makes a strong case in So, Anyway… that comedy, truly good, memorable comedy, is excruciatingly hard to write. Which once again raises the old question as to why the achievement is so rarely recognized by the culture’s grand award-bestowing bodies. It’s as though laughter is troubling to the minds of many festival juries and Academy voters.

“I think I understand it,” he remarks. “If a film is about something ultimately that’s important, like Life of Brian or Dr. Strangelove, it has a better chance of making it in there. But there’s a separate thing, and that is that people who are very conventional are impressed by solemnity. And the point about humour is that you can be entirely serious and humorous at the same time. You can’t be humorous and solemn. So the contrast is between humour and solemnity, and people think that there’s something about comedy that’s essentially slightly trivial.”

But no matter, Cleese points out. “There’s always plenty of rewards, even if there aren’t many awards.”