Four Yorkshiremen sketch
john cleese
['bret easton ellis', 'gaetano donizetti', 'samuel taylor coleridge', 'james rado', 'john fowles', 'edgar', 'annie proulx', 'jim butcher', 'ayn rand', 'fifa', 'giacomo casanova', 'kenneth oppel', 'charles darwin', 'dmitry glukhovsky', 'garth nix', 'sidney sheldon', 'robert galbraith', 'katherine roberts', 'pauline phillips', 'gottfried leibniz', 'pierre culliford', 'mayfair witches', 'bankim', 'hippocrates', 'trenton lee stewart', 'gotthold ephraim lessing', 'james ivory', 'kazuo koike', 'feist', 'george furth', 'michael praetorius', 'giorgio vasari', 'apuleius', 'kautilya', 'william aiton', 'mark halperin', 'premchand', 'husserl', 'thomas gray', 'schumann', 'sharon creech', 'aristotle', 'jean anouilh', 'rachel field', 'david brin', 'michel de montaigne', 'jan potocki', 'jean racine', 'shirley jackson', 'pablo picasso', 'sharadindu bandyopadhyay', 'aleksandr pushkin', 'miwa ueda', 'caroline lawrence', 'bram stoker', 'michael connelly', 'peyo', 'larry niven', 'hannu rajaniemi', 'esther forbes', 'mommsen', 'cotton mather', 'peter lombard', 'walter farley', 'edward bellamy', 'blindsighted', 'athenaeus', 'ikki kajiwara', 'louisa may alcott', 'augustus', 'amish tripathi', 'tove jansson', 'schneur zalman', 'jim carroll', 'moses', 'pope john xxiii', 'ivan turgenev', 'armijn pane', 'eisenhower', 'james agee', 'charlaine harris', 'john vanbrugh', 'patti smith', 'james harrington', 'fuyumi ono', 'bush administration', 'joe haldeman', 'carlo goldoni', 'douglas adams', 'pope boniface viii', 'franz kafka', 'william rowley', 'matthew reilly', 'jean tabary', 'helen mccarthy', 'lincoln child', 'adolf hitler', 'james fenimore cooper', 'hunter lovins']
Four Yorkshiremen sketch
The "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch is a parody of nostalgic conversations about humble beginnings or difficult childhoods. Four Yorkshiremen reminisce about their upbringing, and as the conversation progresses, they try to outdo one another, their accounts of deprived childhoods becoming increasingly absurd. The sketch was originally written and performed for the 1967 British television comedy series At Last the 1948 Show by the show's four writer-performers: Tim Brooke-Taylor, John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Marty Feldman. Barry Cryer is the wine waiter in the original performance and may have contributed to the writing. A near derivative of the sketch appears in the BBC Radio show I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again Series 7, Episode 5 on 9 February 1969, in which the cast, John Cleese, Graeme Garden, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Bill Oddie, David Hatch, in the guise of old buffers at a gentlemen's club, employ the same trope of out-doing each other for hardship, this time in the context of how far and how slowly they had to walk to get to various places in former days. It even ends with the same payoff line "...and if you tell that to the young people today, they won't believe you..." The original performance of the sketch by the four creators is one of the surviving sketches from the programme and can be seen on the At Last the 1948 Show DVD.