John Cleese says it's all right to make mistakes. More than that, he argued, it is necessary to make them.

Such was the message the self-confessed "British comedian", 63, delivered to a packed lunch-time audience at the Mid-Ocean Amphitheatre of the Fairmont Southampton Princess at yesterday's MAR Hedge Fund conference.

Mr. Cleese is much more than a comedian. Between the early 1970s and 1991, he ran Video Arts, a company that made training films for industry, and he has lately set up Videos for Patients, a new company that produces, well, videos for medical patients. Mr. Cleese is now Q, the electronic mastermind in the James Bond films, and has starred in many other movies, including The Life of Brian and A Fish Called Wanda. He is also something of an amateur psychiatrist, the co-author of books with Robin Skinner, a real psychiatrist. S

ir Arthur Conan Doyle is only ever remembered for Sherlock Holmes, whom he considered a minor character; his more serious work is routinely ignored. Similarly, Mr. Cleese is probably doomed to be remembered as an employee of the Ministry of Silly Walks in the Monty Python TV series, of which he was the tallest member, or Basil Fawlty, the easily enraged hotelier for whom nothing would ever go quite right.

Mr. Cleese drew on Fawlty to explain the central tenet of farce, which he said he considers the funniest of the comedic forms. One lie begets another, and yet others as cover-up calls for greater subterfuge, and, in the end, when all is revealed, what had started as a simple half-truth becomes catastrophe. "Donald Rumsfeld, the US Secretary of State, has never played table tennis," Mr. Cleese said very early in his comments, apropos of nothing, but as a means of warming the audience to him. He did not need to; his mere presence had most of them in hysterics.

He is, as he was introduced, "one of the funniest men of our time", but great humour takes a great deal of hard work. Mr. Cleese's speech was, apparently, an old one, onto which he seamlessly grafted any number of hedge fund references, to enable him to deliver a very clever fusillade of inside jokes in which he craftily and heftily slandered hedge fund managers and investors, the two groups represented at the conference.

A largely American audience best appreciated the slapstick elements of his comments, and the broader humour, and his most incisive joke drew not a single snicker. It was, perhaps, too clever for an audience accustomed to custard pies in the face. Bemoaning investors to the hedge fund managers in the audience, he said: "It is not true that the average investor wants to double his money with no risk; he wants to double his money with very, very, very, very, very little risk."

Much more warmly appreciated was a series of tales about poor hotel service around the world, which featured chambermaids visiting him while he sat naked on the toilet, 9.00 a.m. wake-up calls that came six hours early, and one lengthy story about having his room searched for a missing chauffeur. "When the police knocked on the door at three in the morning, I had no idea where I was," he said. "Then, when I realised that the bedside light was too dim to read by, I realised I was in Los Angeles." With 80 percent of his audience drawn from the New York area, that line went down particularly well.

Among the merriment and this was a genuinely funny speech, delivered dead-pan and with exquisite timing was a serious message. It was best explained with a casual reference to Thomas Edison, who invented some 200 light bulbs that failed before he came up with one that worked. Interviewed by a journalist, Mr. Cleese said, Mr. Edison was asked why he had failed 200 times. "Taking the journalist warmly by the throat, Edison explained that each "failure" was a necessary step on the road to progress that led to the discovery of a light bulb that worked."

We need a less damning word than failure, he remarked, for a "responsible shot that misses its mark". Among the targets of his humour were the English middle classes, of course, Americans, those of many other nationalities, hotel staff, drivers, bankers Morgan Stanley, and even his audience, whom he referred to en masse by a highly derogatory and unprintable word, which amused them to no end, since clearly the lovable Mr. Cleese was joking. One wondered. "You cannot minimise risk by inaction, because that leads to rigidity," the comedian concluded, advising managers to seek out glorious failures as necessary precursors to success. "Mistakes are a part of life," he added. Despite staying in Bermuda for several days, Mr. Cleese refused to spare The Royal Gazette even a few minutes for an interview, proving, at least, that mistakes are a part of his life.