“The idea that the world can become a sensible place is ridiculous,” said John Cleese during a 90-minute conversation onstage at The Midland Theatre on Wednesday evening.

Coming from Cleese, a founding member of British sketch comedy troupe Monty Python, this statement could be taken as a formal creed of sorts. That is, if Cleese believed in such a thing. Python’s best work (from its influential “Flying Circus” TV series to movies like “Monty Python’s Life of Brian”) gnashes its teeth at doctrine, exposing the hypocrisy and absurdity of life wherever it lies.

“Life of Brian” is about a guy in Biblical times who was trying to get laid and ends up getting mistaken for the Messiah. According to Cleese, it isn’t making fun of religion, it’s making fun of how people follow religion — an important distinction that was lost on many a protesting religious leader upon the controversial film’s release in 1979.

Nothing much has changed since then, he said, with some people still misunderstanding and twisting some of the fundamentals of Christianity.

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“I’m pretty sure God didn’t say ‘blessed be the rich’,” said Cleese, adding: “If you want to see what God thinks of money just look at who he gives it to.”

The 75-year-old Cleese was in Kansas City to promote his new autobiography “So, Anyway …,” a recounting of his first 30 years, leading right up to the formation of Python. Although he took questions from the audience, Cleese spent most of the night telling stories from his youth and reading passages from the book, some which were explosively funny.

Cleese’s father was born Reginald Cheese, but he changed his surname during his service in World War I to put an end to the teasing he would get. It didn’t help his son much, it turns out, as John was bullied in school anyway.

To stop the bullying, he decided it was easier to make people laugh. Teachers weren’t real fond of this, however, and one even issued a stern statement that went home to his parents: “Cleese indulges in subversive activities in the back of the room.”

Cleese touched on some of his best-loved work outside of Python as well. “Fawlty Towers” has been hailed by some as the funniest TV sitcom ever created, and tend to I agree.

Centered around apoplectic hotelier Basil Fawlty, who was always hiding something from his sensible wife, Sybil, the show’s humor mainly derived from the two things that Cleese said inspire the most laughter: People behaving inappropriately and something going wrong.

Basil’s fear of discovery always makes up the funniest, most-squirm-inducing parts of each episode, and when he is finally revealed, his indignant reaction is always the hilarious climax. Although Cleese has admitted previously that Basil was at least partially based on an English hotel owner he met in 1971, he now traces the inspiration back to when he was 9 years old, noting what he termed the “icy rage” of a young schoolmate.

Delving into the classic 1988 comedy “A Fish Called Wanda,” which Cleese wrote and starred in, he talked mostly about how proud he was that the film was a comeback of sorts for its 77-year-old director. Charles Crichton is known for helming the post-WWII Ealing comedies in England, such as “The Lavender Hill Mob,” and had been out of the film industry in the U.K. for a full 21 years before “Wanda” came along.

“It was a great thrill that he was nominated by the Americans that year for the best director Academy Award,” Cleese said.

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The event was a rare night to see Cleese in public on American soil, although the members of Monty Python themselves have had a busy year. The five-man troupe (without Graham Chapman, who died in 1989) performed their last reunion shows in July of this year during five sold-out nights in London. The tagline for the event displayed kind of dark humor we’ve come to expect from Python: “One down, five to go.”

Cleese said that two more autobiographies, covering his Python years and beyond, will follow this one, so, who knows, maybe we’ll see him again on another book tour. I could see him pulling a David Sedaris-like act together, especially since his conversation with Vivien Jennings, founder and president of Rainy Day Books, mostly consisted of her teeing him up for stories he already planned on telling. If there’s one thing we can know for sure, though, it’s that Cleese won’t be taking any of it seriously.

Because if there’s one thing he’s learned about life, it’s this: “Very few people actually know what they are doing,” he said, “And even fewer people know that they don’t know what they’re doing.”

The Found Footage Festival

On Sunday at Liberty Hall, The Found Footage Festival returns to Lawrence to celebrate 10 years of bizarre and wonderful VHS finds. Hosts Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett are on tour with a new lineup of videotaped oddities found in garage sales, thrift stores and warehouses all over North America, and it is a reliably funny show every year.

Way before “Tosh.0” started highlighting the biggest idiots on the Web on Comedy Central, The FFF has been resurrecting and celebrating lost treasures of the VHS era. There’s something more funny and less-mean-spirited about their videos, at least partially because they are from a bygone era when not everybody had access to instant Internet distribution. There’s a certain authenticity and innocence to many of their clips that the YouTubers today don’t have.

Even thought the Internet is an easy way to check the legitimacy of pretty much anything, local morning news programs don’t seem to use it that often. A new bit for this year’s FFF involves Prueher himself, who posed as the incompetent Chef Keith on five local news programs here in the Midwest as a prank. Clips from those five disastrous appearances are also part of this year’s show.

‘Pulp: a Film about Life, Death and Supermarkets’

After 25 years, British rock band Pulp called it quits, but not before one final gig in their hometown of Sheffield. Playing one night only at Liberty Hall on Nov. 19, “Pulp: a Film about Life, Death and Supermarkets” is the documentary about that show, but it goes beyond the boundaries of the traditional concert film.

Director Florian Habricht includes interviews with Pulp’s superfans, family and friends, and the people of Sheffield — young and old — to give a more well-rounded picture of where the band came from. For fans of the band, the live performances were called “electrifying” by The Guardian, so seeing this nice and loud on the big screen is probably the way to go.