Free Republic

Comedy legend John Cleese had his microphone confiscated at the South by Southwest festival during a comedic discussion in which he suggested Italy and France owed historic reparations for enslaving Brits. The Monty Python icon, 82, was riffing with other comics in front of the crowd in Texas when he talked about the 'competition' between cultures over who has been more oppressed by colonisations throughout history. Pointing to world history being 'a history of crime', he added: 'It's a history of people who were stronger beating up people who were weaker and it's always been that. It's deeply, deeply distasteful....

Ya gotta feel bad for the South by Southwest folks. Just once a year, they want to get together to publicly examine their virtues, hold their shining intellects up for consideration and propose ways they can drag the rest of us mouth breathers up onto their enlightened plane. They want to talk about wind farms and vegan bologna and the “Latina Power Pipeline.” Most years, it goes off without a hitch and they all jet home to fight for sustainable microbrews or more pansexual Nickelodeon characters. But this year, some knucklehead went and invited John Cleese to be on a...