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John Cleese rips into Fox News after it's duped by Monty Python quote

British comedians Eric Idle, John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Terry Jones and Michael Palin in a scene from 'Monthy Python and the Holy Grail', directed by Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, 1975 (Photo by Warner Bros./Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Eric Idle, John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Terry Jones and Michael Palin in a scene from Monthy Python and the Holy Grail (Credit: Warner Bros./Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

John Cleese has joined in the online pile-on of Fox News, after it unwittingly quoted a line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail in a news report.

The actor gleefully retweeted footage of the embarrassing moment, as the US news channel believed it was reporting on in-fighting among protest groups in the US.

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“BREAKING,” he wrote on Twitter. “No one @FoxNews has ever seen @montypython & The Holy Grail.”

He followed it with a crying laughing emoji, and the hashtags #runit #goodjournalism and #factchecking.

The unfortunate incident was part of a report from Fox on the Capital Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ, the protest group which is occupying part of Seattle, and is led by hip-hop artist Raz Simone.

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Hoping to highlight a fracture in the group, news anchor Martha MacCallum quoted from a Reddit post, which read: “I didn't vote for Raz. I thought we were an autonomous collective. An anarcho-syndicalist commune at the least. We should take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week.”

However, this was not dissent among the protestor's ranks, but a quote amusingly adapted from the 1975 movie, in which Graham Chapman's King Arthur encounters some local villagers.

You can check the original clip below: