#The Four Yorkshiremen Sketch

[chernobog13]

Excerpt from The Four Yorkshiremen Sketch. Everybody knows at least one person like these buffoons.

BTW this sketch pre-dates Monty Python's Flying Circus. It originated on At Last the 1948 Show (1967), a British comedy sketch series that starred Python members John Cleese and Graham Chapman, Tim Brooke-Taylor (The Goodies), and Marty Feldman (Young Frankenstein).

This is the original version of the sketch from At Last The 1948 Show:

And here's the Python version from Monty Python Live At the Hollywood Bowl (1982):

[jernostrapig]

You haven't lived...until you've had one of these, full blast in the face, on a cold, wet winters day. ''Bloody luxury.''

======

======

fockenfuture.tumblr.com

[jdsquared]

Bava Metzia 116b

[uhhhhmanda]

If we sent gahan and jwds on a double date I wonder how they'd all get along. Kang Yohan and Han Juwon trying to outspend each other? Yohan and Dongsik humiliating their boys by telling them how pretty they are? A huge argument erupts over the superiority of cops or judges? Whose old man is more unexpectedly cut? Everyone in unison shouting "No one wants to go fishing, Dongsik!"? "This is Yohan, he didn't kill his brother." "Pleased to meet you, I didn't kill my sister." Trauma competition in the style of the Monty Python Four Yorkshiremen sketch? "My lake house is bigger than your lake house."

Who hits who first? Who kisses who first? Is it WWIII or do they all end up in one of Yohan's carnival ground-sized beds?

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

I've been watching videos of these old charity benefit shows, The Secret Policeman's Ball. I think there are a whole bunch of them that go all the way up to relatively recent years, but I've just got the first four, from 1979, 1982, 1987, and 1989. I downloaded them because I remembered my dad used to have those on VHS when I was a kid and I liked them, decided to rewatch as an adult.

I've just finished the fourth one and they were a lot of fun. There were some major sketches that I remembered loving as a kid, mainly ones with the Pythons and Rowan Atkinson, and some Beyond the Fringe. The Four Yorkshiremen, obviously I've seen done lots, but I'm pretty sure the Secret Policeman's Ball is the first version of it I ever saw. And Rowan Atkinson was just as good as I remembered in the End of the World sketch. And there was the interviewer one where John Cleese shoots a guy. And a fun version of the argument sketch, and the Beyond the Fringe Tarzan sketch - definitely not the first version of either of those that I saw, but I remember seeing those in these videos as a kid.

It was really interesting to watch all four videos in chronological order. You can see comedy evolving over time. The comedians change - in the early ones it was a lot of Pythons and a quite young Rowan Atkinson. Then by the late 80s you have French and Saunders, Fry and Laurie. You can see what new people had worked their way up to becoming a sufficiently successful comedian to draw in ticket buyers to support Amnesty International.

Watching that stuff change was the main reason why I found this bit so interesting:

It's funny to think of that point in comedy history, when John Cleese was just ten years past Fawlty Towers, rather than his current age of 207. I'm always interested in how legends of pop culture history (or any type of history, for that matter) were treated in their own time.

It was even interesting to watch those four videos in a row, spread across the 80s, because you can watch things like the fashion trends change. The audience get slightly less dressed up over time, with the fading of the expectation that you should dress fancy in the theatre. You can watch the rise of the massive hair and massive clothes that we now only see in parody of the 80s aesthetic.

I was quite enjoying the amount of gender non-conformity in those fashion trends, and the fact that they had some quite edgily left-wing music playing, and it was reminding me that for all our social progress, I sometimes mistakenly think of pop culture from "the past" as being far more conservative than today, when in fact there was cool progressive stuff here (like a version of John Cleese who's not awful, the 80s were better than today in that way), like... oh, never mind, there's a running joke about how funny it would be if Robbie Coltrane raped Ruby Wax. Not that comedians don't tell rape jokes today too, but overt ones would be probably at least be avoided at a major charity benefit being filmed for a mainstream TV station.

[emaya-chan-the-potato-headed]

I would so LOVE to see Pat Butcher reacting to the Monty Python sketch "The Four Yorkshiremen"! 😁

[valarhalla]

An incomplete list of pieces of comedy pieces I think people thousands of years ago would find sidesplittingly funny (language translated where necessary but minus other context):

All of One Froggy Evening (the one where the guy finds the frog that sings and dances until he tries to show anyone, then just acts like a normal frog).

The Four Yorkshiremen sketch. (A hole in the ground? We were evicted from our hole in the ground and had to go live in a lake!)

The bit in History of the World Part One about music being invented by guys hitting each other with rocks:

Dinner for One:

The Finding Nemo seagulls:

[robmchops]

The Four Yorkshiremen sketch but they complain about sexy video game characters.

In my day we had to slide cancel up hill to see one pixel of panties.

[commonguttersnipe]

Hot Take (I think?): The "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch somewhat predicted trauma dumping.

It's giving condescending parents...

[the-empress-7]

get high on the Shrooms and attack their brothers and fathers

About the Spares team up, they need just one more member and they can do a Royal version of the old Monty Python Four Yorkshiremen sketch.

[megpie71]

With regards to "flea" behaviour: if you're starting to sound as though you belong in this sketch - https://www.songlyrics.com/monty-python/four-yorkshiremen-lyrics/ - it is probably time to knock things off.

I'm turning 30 this month, and for some reason have become suddenly interested in material possessions. like what if,,,,,,,,my couch was nice. what if my sheets were nice. is this what happens to you??

[fractallion]

Did you know that the 🔗 Four Yorkshiremen sketch was not a Python original?

[ammg-old2]

When we talk about the past, we always reveal something about the present. It is hard to imagine a more intriguing or overlooked body of evidence for assessing recent British social history than these Facebook groups: they have given us something like a more chaotic, 21st-century version of Mass Observation. They may not be “representative” in any quantifiable way, but the sample size is vast, and these memes are a canvas for a whole range of contemporary insecurities and collective memories. History is written by the winners, but anyone can share a post on Facebook.

Read through the thousands of comments beneath the numerous proper binmen posts and you will find a striking consensus. Back then, in an unspecified period between 1950 and 1980, the binmen were stronger, more hardworking and more polite. Not just that – back then, the binmen were happy. Everyone remembers them the same way: always cheerful, always smiling, frequently whistling. They always had a kind word for you, never complained, and always closed the gate. They took pride in their job, which was hard work, but honest work. These judgments are delivered with absolute certainty. Back then, “They were always a really friendly crowd who you could have a good laugh with,” writes one commenter. “Not like the bin men of today, you are very lucky if they respond to a ‘good morning’.”

The historic shift in bin collection is taken to mark a wider crisis in masculinity. “That is when men were men, not the wimps we have today,” writes one Facebook commenter. “All be off work with PTSD nowadays,” chimes in another. Proper binmen “didn’t care about Health & Safety Shite”, writes another. The plastic wheelie bins we have today – with their emasculating pastels, often colour-coded for recycling, and their humiliating, labour-saving wheels – are just further markers of our moral, social and spiritual decline.

The proper binmen memes are a potent distillation of a sentiment common to contemporary British politics and culture, where politicians have all but given up offering a positive vision of the future, and where the idea of what constitutes progress is bitterly contested. Fond nostalgia for hard times is, of course, not new. In the Monty Python sketch known as the Four Yorkshiremen (classic British comedy), the eponymous characters, clad in bowties and white dinner jackets, reflect on how far they’ve come.

“Who’d a thought 30 years ago we’d all be sittin’ here drinking Chateau de Chassilier wine?”

“Aye. In them days, we’d a’ been glad to have the price of a cup o’ tea.”

“A cup o’ cold tea.”

“Without milk or sugar.

“Or tea!”

“In a filthy, cracked cup.”

“We never used to have a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled-up newspaper.”

As the sketch continues, the men summon up increasingly absurd scenarios to one-up each other: “We used to have to get out of the lake at three o’clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, go to work at t’mill every day for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!”

The overriding sense from hours of scrolling Facebook nostalgia groups is of a generation who didn’t see that sketch entirely as a joke, so much as a broadly accurate account of their own hard-won triumph over adversity. There are plenty of grim references to old-school bin-collection work being “back-breaking”, and some apparently firsthand binman testimonies specifically refer to having “paid for [the job] with bad backs in later life”. Yet there is a powerful anti-health and safety component to all of the Memory Lane UK reminiscing – against coddling, against rules and red tape, against the easy ride of modern youth. “Remember when your mum would let you lick the egg beaters without anyone freaking out about salmonella?” asks one post. “Remember when we used to play in the dirt?” “Who remembers getting beaten with a cane at school?” We had it tough. We kept calm and carried on. We didn’t complain. We muddled through. We made do. We mended. It never did us any harm. It made us who we are.

Binmenism, as this worldview could be called, is distinct from the common type of nostalgia we are all prone to as we get older – that things were “better in my day”. In fact, the memory lane memes and comment threads make clear that in terms of physical comfort, convenience, domestic labour, work, consumer goods and leisure choice, things used to be worse. But that is not the endpoint of the philosophy. If Binmenism had a motto to stitch on to its itchy old Boy Scout uniform, it would be: things were worse, therefore they were better.

And once you see this, you can’t stop seeing it everywhere.

[buffskeleton]

i think its healthy to watch the four yorkshiremen sketch on a regular basis to suppress the 'back in my day' urge but also the metal playground contraptions Were fun

[morlock-holmes]

This is my own personal "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch.

Like, my family used to be really into Mystery Science Theater 3000, and that's a show that ran for 10 seasons and had a theatrical release movie.

It ran on Comedy Central before it ran on Scifi, but we didn't know about it until the Scifi years.

We used to watch it as a family every 10AM on Saturday. And if we wanted to watch an episode a second time we had to have a VHS ready to record when it came on. If we didn't program the VCR right or forgot to buy a tape? Well, we just had to hope Scifi would choose to rerun it.

Now, Scifi didn't do reruns of the Comedy Central episodes, so if you wanted to rewatch those you either rented one of the ten or so that had been released on home video cassette, or found another fan that had taped it, that's why every episode had the message "Keep Circulating The Tapes" in the end credits.

Imagine how excited I was when peer to peer file sharing got big in the early aughts: finally, I could spend days downloading a single episode over my 56k modem onto my 12 gig hard drive and watch a compressed version of a degraded VHS!

I remember using freeware programs to rip the audio of episodes to CD so I could listen to them while doing yardwork.

And of course, back in the day if my Mom missed an episode of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, someone just had to, like, explain what happened to her.

Some people miss those days, they like the sense of adventure of seeking out some lost holy grail in the back of fan magazines and conventions, and while I understand it I really don't miss those days; too often for me the chaos and confusion of my life made it too difficult to hook into those networks, to focus so singlemindedly on finding a bootleg tape.

I much prefer the modern day when if I want to watch one of the MST3K episodes that were broadcast once on a local Minnesota UHF station all I have to do is fire up YouTube.

If you want to find a rip of this Crater movie it probably would take you about half an hour.

The sad truth is that often the cult classics never made money in the good old days either. They got word of mouth. Famous comedians or musicians evangelized for them. People sought out brief theater showings or pirate tapes but that doesn't mean that money was flowing back to the creators.

I know this seems like a nostalgic post but it's really counter-nostalgic. The tools of media piracy have gotten so much easier to use. It's much harder for studios to keep you from seeing something than it used to be. The industry changes that screw creators and result in these short runs are awful, I'm not saying they aren't, but the catastrophizing in the OP rubs me the wrong way.

Keep circulating the tapes, everybody. It's never been easier.

i fucking hate everything.

[chattering-magpie-uk]

The Original Four Yorkshiremen Sketch from ~ At Last the 1948 Show.

The Original Four Yorkshiremen Sketch from ~ At Last the 1948 Show.