Monty Python star John Cleese reveals he 'killed a man' while working on the 1988 film A Fish Called Wanda

John Cleese has made a startling admission. The Fawlty Towers and Monty Python star says a fan died while laughing so much during one of his performances.

‘We killed a man,’ Cleese says, referring to the 1988 film A Fish Called Wanda, in which he starred opposite Kevin Kline and Jamie Lee Curtis.

‘Kevin Kline and I killed a man in Denmark. He was a dentist, he had a huge laugh. A famous laugh. Very popular. It was in Aarhus, not a big town, but everybody knew him.

‘And he went to see Wanda and he started laughing about two minutes in and never stopped.

‘They carried him out dead, he’d had a heart attack.’

The 84-year-old made the comment in the latest episode of his GB News series, The Dinosaur Hour, to be screened tomorrow evening. 

He says many fans had shared touching stories with him over the years about the comfort that humour can bring.

‘I realised about ten years ago that making people laugh is kind of doing more than just making them laugh,’ he says. ‘When you do a Comicon [fan event] or something like that and people come up and say, “Thanks for making me laugh all these years,” it leaves a tear in the eye. 

‘Women say something different, they say, “Thanks for helping to form my sense of humour”.

‘It is lovely, beautiful. Some others say thank you for helping me through some of the difficult periods. And you suddenly realise that if people laugh, it helps, it’s not just entertainment.’

Cleese (left) adds: ‘Tom Stoppard, the great playwright, once said a beautiful thing, “The shortest distance between two people is a laugh”. And he’s right.’