A Cock and Bull Story A Cock and Bull Story A Cock and Bull Story (marketed in Australia, New Zealand and the United States as Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story) is a 2005 British comedy film directed by Michael Winterbottom. It is a film-within-a-film, featuring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon playing themselves as egotistical actors during the making of a screen adaptation of Laurence Sterne's 18th century metafictional novel "Tristram Shandy". Gillian Anderson and Keeley Hawes also play themselves in addition to their "Tristram Shandy" roles. Since the book is about a man attempting but failing to write his autobiography, the film takes
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman Sterne incorporated into "Tristram Shandy" many passages taken almost word for word from Robert Burton's "The Anatomy of Melancholy", Francis Bacon's "Of Death", Rabelais and many more, and rearranged them to serve the new meaning intended in "Tristram Shandy". "Tristram Shandy" was highly praised for its originality, and nobody noticed these borrowings until years after Sterne's death. The first to note them was physician and poet John Ferriar, who did not see them negatively and commented: Victorian critics of the 19th century, who were hostile to Sterne for the alleged obscenity of his prose, used Ferriar's findings to defame Sterne,