The Four Yorkshiremen Reprise

Like millions of Americans, I’m downwardly mobile. The great platonic shift of the economy and the soaring cost of junk food have been the catalyst for a whole new trend. In the old days (okay, two years ago) it was “remember how poor we used to be?”  Today, it’s remember how rich we used to be?”

So as an homage to the good old days,(Okay two years ago) I bring you Monty Python’s “The Four Yorkshiremen.” It’s a sketch first saw on the Secret Policeman’s Ball. It is in my top five funniest bits of all time.

It begins with four dapper men dressed in white tuxedos comparing stories on  how poor they used to be. 

JONES: 

Very passable indeed, eh?

ALL: 

Aye.

ATKINSON: 

You can’t beat a good glass of Chateau de Chasselas, eh Josiah?

JONES:

You’re right there, Obediah.

CLEESE:

Who’d have thought that 40 years ago, we be sitting here drinking Chateau de Chasselas?

ALL:

Aye.

JONES:

In them days, we’d be glad to have the price of a cup of tea.

ATKINSON:

Aye, a cup of cold tea.

ALL:

Aye.

CLEESE:

Without milk-

PALIN:

Or sugar-

ATKINSON:

Or tea.

PALIN:

Aye, in a cracked cup and all.

CLEESE:

We never had a cup. We used to drink out of a rolled up newspaper.

ATKINSON:

Best we could do is suck on piece of damp cloth.

JONES:

But, you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.

PALIN:

Because we were poor.  My old dad used to say to me, “money doesn’t buy you happiness, son.”

CLEESE:

And he was right.

JONES:

Right, he was.

CLEESE:

I was happier then.  We had nothing.  We used to live in a tiny old tumbledown house with great holes in the roof.

ATKINSON:

A house? You were lucky to have a house. We used to live in one room, 26 of us, no furniture and half the floor was missing. Huddled in one corner for fear of falling.

JONES:

Well, you were lucky to have a room.  We used to have to live in a corridor.

PALIN:

Oh, we used to dream of living in a corridor. It would’ve have been a palace to us.  We used to live in old water tank at a rubbish tip.  Got woken up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us. House? Hah.

CLEESE:

Well, when I say house, it was only a hole in the ground covered by couple of feet of torn canvas, but it was a house to us.

ATKINSON:

We were evicted from our hole in the ground. We had to go live in a lake.

JONES:

You were lucky to have a lake.  There were 150 of us living in a shoebox in the middle of motorway.

PALIN:

Cardboard box?

JONES:

Aye.

PALIN:

You were lucky. We lived for three months in rolled up newspaper in a septic tank.  We used to have to get up at six every morning, clean the newspaper, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill, 14 hours a day, week in, week out for sixpence a month, and when we got home, our dad would thrash us to sleep with a belt.

ATKINSON:

Luxury.  We used to have to get our of the lake at 3 am, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, work 20 hours a day at the mill for tuppence a month, come home, and dad would beat us about the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were lucky.

JONES:

Well, of course, we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox in the middle of the night and lick the road clean with our tongues. We had half a handful of cold gravel, worked 24 hours at day at the mill for four pence every six years and when we got home our dad would slice us in two with a bread knife.

CLEESE:

Right. I used to get up in the morning at half past ten at night half an hour before I went to bed…eat a lump of freezing cold, work 28 hours a day at the mill and pay mill owner to let us work there and when I got home, our dad used to murder us in cold blood each night and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah-

PALIN:

Now you try and tell young people of that today and they won’t believe you.

ALL:

No, they won’t believe you.

Here it 'tis in concert.