Despite what his (latest) ex-wife might say, John Cleese is nothing if not attentive. He pays attention to the theater – design, distance of the audience from the stage, knows acoustical or sightline problems – and to the city in which he'll perform.

Noting that he kicked off a 15-date tour – much of it sold out – last week at the Gallo Center in Modesto and comes Saturday to the Mondavi Center at the University of California, Davis, he says there will be plenty of talk about wine.

"And an enormous number of agriculture jokes," he said in a recent telephone interview from New York. He was in Manhattan – on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the legendary BBC comedy "Monty Python's Flying Circus" – to receive an award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts for the show's "outstanding contribution" to entertainment, and to celebrate that 40th anniversary with a Python reunion at the screening of a new documentary, "Monty Python: Almost the Truth (the Lawyer's Cut)."

Cleese, 70, and the other four surviving Pythons – Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Terry Jones and the sole American among them, Terry Gilliam – were joined onstage by a cardboard cutout of fellow Python Graham Chapman, who died Oct. 4, 1989, on the eve of the show's 20th anniversary.

"I suspect we'll have a 50th anniversary, and a 60th, and so on, each with a growing number of cutouts until there's no one left," Cleese said.

He expects to "have to" make such appearances because – and he's blunt about it – of his recent divorce from his third wife, psychotherapist Alyce Faye Eichelberger. She was awarded $20 million in the dissolution of their nine-year marriage ($8 million now, and $1 million a year afterward).

"I think a great deal of American law is absurd. The only thing that it accomplishes is in making money for lawyers," Cleese said.

They had no children together, a fact Cleese said seemed not to have been considered in the divorce.

"All the common-sensical aspects of how much money people should get … isn't a factor somehow," he said. "It favors the passenger against the breadwinner. The less you do in a marriage, the more you get."

OK. So he needs the money.

But Cleese, the infuriating bureaucrat in "The Argument Sketch," the minister of "Silly Walks" and the man with the dead parrot in those "Monty Python" sketches – not to mention the harried hotelier Basil Fawlty in "Fawlty Towers" – also has a wealth of good stories to tell.

Appropriate to this area, Cleese has a great interest in California wine and winemaking, and hosted the documentary "Wine for the Confused," a lighthearted introduction to wine for novices.

"Food and wine were the pleasures of my life," Cleese said. "Now, I can't digest anything with dairy or gluten. I can go into a coffeeshop and survey it all and there's nothing I can eat but a single espresso.

"That leaves wine. Thank God for wine."

When he did the documentary, Cleese said, "I learned a lot about the grammar of wine, which I didn't know up to that time. Talking to winemakers, I gained a great appreciation for the work done at the university there and the extraordinary options they gave winemakers.

"You really can't underestimate the importance of UC Davis to the wine industry.

"There. Do you think that will persuade some of the good citizens of Davis to turn up?"

Cleese doesn't only want to sell tickets. He genuinely enjoys talking about his life and work.

His performance, generically described as "a behind-the-scenes look at the zany and hilarious world of comedy" will be more like a freewheeling oral history, he said.

"There will be a bit at the beginning about why I'm doing this stuff, which is the alimony. Then there will be some biography, some talk about why I became a comedian, my relationship with my mother, what it was like in England at the time of 'Python' and why/how I rebelled against it."

Cleese will share stories about "working with very interesting people (such as) Marty Engles and Ringo Starr, leading up to the formation of 'Monty Python's Flying Circus.' "

"If you want to understand what that process was like, you must consider that we were writers, not performers," he said. "We had no idea what to do onstage and whether anyone would watch – in fact, we were pretty sure they wouldn't."

Call The Bee's Jim Carnes, (916) 321-1130.