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Veteran filmmaker and “Monty Python” alum Terry Gilliam believes that President Donald Trump’s re-election has allowed people to laugh again.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter published Tuesday, the 84-year-old director spoke about his career, the state of comedy and the future of his latest film project amid the changing cultural landscape. When asked if he still felt that humorless activists were stifling comedy, Gilliam declared that Trump had shaken up the environment.
“I think Trump has changed things considerably. He’s turned the world upside down,” Gilliam said. “I don’t know if people are going to be laughing more, but they’re probably less frightened to laugh.”
Gilliam blamed woke activists with a “narrow, self-righteous point of view” for instilling fear in comedians over the past several years.
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“That’s frightened so many people, and so many people have been very timid about telling jokes, making fun of things, because if you tell a joke, these people say you’re punching down at somebody. No, you’re finding humor in humanity!” he said.
Gilliam described how Trump’s return to power had the unintended consequence of derailing his upcoming comedy, “The Carnival at the End of Days,” a satire about Satan trying to stop God from wiping out humanity, which lampoons woke culture.
The film originally carried the subtitle: “Great fun for all of those who enjoy taking offense.”
“Well, he’s f— up the latest film I was working on. Because it was a satire about the last several years when things were going as they were. He’s turned it upside down. So he’s killed my movie,” Gilliam said.
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“That was how I approached it. I think Trump has destroyed satire. I mean, how can you be satirical about what’s going on in the way he’s doing the world?” he said.
He joked about including a disclaimer in the film that places it in the so-called “Trump lost years” between 2020 and 2024.
The film’s script mocking self-righteous woke activists feels outdated now, he elaborated to Deadline.
“And the other problem is that the script, in some ways, is out of date because it was a satire of the world two years ago, and Donald Trump has come along, and he is the carnival. He’s turned the world upside down — everything. We may have to rework some of the story because parts of it was very specific about the wonderful world of woke before The Donald took over again. That very narrow way of thinking of life. We’ll see where it goes. At the moment, I may be out of a job for another 10 years,” he told the outlet Tuesday.
Gilliam lamented the difficulties of getting the film off the ground in an increasingly cautious entertainment industry. We’ve been living in “a very nervous world,” he said. “You were not allowed to offend anyone, and all the executives were living in fear, so I started looking elsewhere.”
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Despite his recent comments about Trump, Gilliam is no fan of the president, calling him a “conman” and an “idiot” in a 2018 interview with Agence France-Presse.
Gilliam has long been outspoken against political correctness and cancel culture hurting comedy.
In a 2020 interview with The Independent, Gilliam said he was all for diversity but was tired of “White men being blamed for everything wrong in the world.”
“It’s been so simplified, is what I don’t like. When I announce that I’m a Black lesbian in transition, people take offense at that. Why?” he joked.
In 2023, he echoed these sentiments to Euronews, saying people were losing their sense of humor.
“(Activists) are very self-righteous, and if you don’t agree with them, you’re then a transphobe, a homophobe… No! I’m a phobe-phobe! I hate hate! That’s what I hate!” he said at the time.
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