you never forget your first time…

John Cleese

john cleese, the myth, the man, the legend…my very first celebrity interview

“you remind me so much of donna.” john cleese to shannon hall april 2004

tti (that time i): i asked john cleese about monkeys in human clothing…

While chatting with a well dressed nervous producer covering her first Junket the well known funny man kept mentioning how much I reminded him of Donna.

“I sure hope he liked Donna and who in the hell is Donna?” was all I was thinking. I guess we will never know, but I was smiling from ear to ear beauce a very funny famous man who my parents adored was casually chatting …with me! Donna’s doppelganger!

I grew up watching Monty Python movies and sketches so my mind was blown. “The Dead Parrot Sketch” is why I did stand up and The Groundlings.

The junket was for the DVD release of “A Fish Called Wanda” starring the insanely talented Jamie Lee Curtis. I was working for G4TV’s “Attack of the Show” at the time, a nerdtastic live daily show that had me skip the Jamie interview- they only were interested in women if they were good at video games or scantily clad. Shout out to me and Olivia Munn for putting up with that crap for many years.

Yes, I am in this sketch twice, at the top doing “this tastes off” acting and getting attacked by the fridge cheetah at the end in a whole new outfit. Not a lot of girls work at G4TV in the aughts. Any who… I had 15 minutes with John and closed with a very important question: “What is funnier a monkey dressed as a police officer or a monkey in. a tux?” He looked me earnestly in the eye and said “Donna, I have forgotten your name so we will go with that. A monkey is always funnier in a police uniform. That’s how comedy works, the juxtaposition of a silly animal with a powerful job just makes me laugh.”

image created in AI by shannon hall

I bet Donna would have loved this monkey a whole lot.