John Cleese Explains Why Stupid Can’t Realize How Stupid They Are

John Cleese, he is a comic genius, I love his show Fawlty Towers, It was a marvel and a superb show and if you haven’t seen in then you haven’t seen what comedy is. Now, he explains in a video excerpt the idea that truly stupid people lack the ability to realize just how stupid they are. Cleese’s rant is based on research by David Dunning and Justin Kruger of Cornell University into the so-called Dunning-Kruger effect.

The excerpt was pulled from the 2012 video “John Cleese Considers Your Futile Comments” where Cleese responds to a series of YouTube comments left on Monty Python videos. The answer was in response to comments that mention Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and Christine O’Donnell left on the Monty Python sketch “Upperclass Twit of the Year.”

In order to know how good you are at something requires exactly the same skills as it does to be good at that thing in the first place. Which means, and this is terribly funny, that if you are absolutely no good at something at all, then you lack exactly the skills you need to know that you are absolutely no good at it.