“Necessity is the mother of invention,” the saying goes. A corollary for iconic sketch performers might be “Divorce settlement is the mother of standup.”

So it is with comedy legend John Cleese, who brings his Why There Is No Hope tour to the Queen E. Theatre on Saturday (May 25).

“I became a sort of standup comic when my wife was awarded $20 million in the divorce, because it was the safest and most reliable way of earning money,” he says over the phone from Toronto, referring to his very public breakup from third spouse Alyce Cleese in 2008. (He’s now married to English jewellery designer and former model Jennifer Wade.) “I got to like it because there’s something very real about being out there on-stage, standing in front of lots and lots of people and making them laugh. If I can go out and make people fall about with laughter, I go back to have a glass of wine in a very happy mood.”

Cleese has 164 acting credits on his IMDb page, spanning a 56-year career, but you probably only remember Monty Python’s Flying Circus (and its movie offshoots), Fawlty Towers, and A Fish Called Wanda. That doesn’t displease the Brit; those are the projects he’s most proud of. If he tires of endless fanboy gushing, he doesn’t let on.

“If they just want to tell you how much they like you, then that’s very nice because it is genuinely a very good emotional feeling that you’ve made people laugh,” he says. “But what’s even better is when they ask specific questions, like ‘Why did you choose to do that in that sketch?’ or ‘Why did that sketch end that way?’ Specific questions lead to conversations, but otherwise, if people are just telling me how wonderful I am, I don’t know how to react.”

It helps if you’re of a certain vintage, but all three of those credits stand the test of time. Cleese claims Python has been forgotten by the younger generation in his home country and he’s got a pretty good conspiracy theory as to why that is. “The BBC haven’t put it out for 18 years and I’m very suspicious. I think it makes the current stuff not look very good,” he says. “I mean, the comedy in England was extraordinary and most of it was on the BBC from 1950 to maybe 1990. And then I don’t think we’ve had a lot of very funny stuff. We’ve had clever and interesting stuff, but people aren’t as funny as they used to be.”

His current Why There Is No Hope tour brings the funny to 13 Canadian cities (and Buffalo). Despite its rather fatalistic title, it sounds like it will serve up some comforting and optimistic life lessons. The subject is one he’d been working on for a long time when he realized he needed to try it out on audiences.

“It just hit a nerve,” he says. “The response was as good as I’ve had to anything. I think it’s perhaps because of the stage of the world, or at least North America, at the moment that people find it very reassuring to know that it’s always been like this. The world will never be well-organized and kind, because there’s so many assholes.”

He buttresses his presentation with facts, such as the one that the death rate actually went down during a doctors’ strike in New York 40 years ago.

“That strikes me as terribly funny,” he says with a laugh. “There’s a lot of that kind of stuff in it. What it actually says in the end is the world is never going to be a very nice or well-organized or kind place, but it doesn’t stop us from having rather enjoyable, and in fact joyous, lives.”

His 2013 tour to Vancouver was called Last Time to See Me Before I Die. So that was a lie, apparently. When we bring that up to him, though, the 79-year-old entertainer says, “Yes, well, we don’t know yet, do we? Give me another three weeks. I try to keep promises.”

John Cleese’s Why There Is No Hope tour plays the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on Saturday (May 25).