Is it really appropriate to say they’re trying to “one up*” each other? Would something else work better?
TVTropes calls this phenomenon “Misery Poker”: the players call and raise on each others’ stories of woe.
This particular sketch is cited.
A bed? Luxury! We had to sleep on pile of rags!
Rags? Where did you ever get such wealth?
I had to make my own mud to sleep in.
We would have loved mud! We had to make do with dust!
Dust? At least it was soft! My family slept on large rocks!
They are taking the piss.
They could be winding each other up.
They are trying to one up each other.
It doesn’t need to be maximising the negative.
… and we had to make our own dust, by breaking rocks with our bare hands.
Rocks. You were lucky! All we had was jagged shards of broken glass! But we were happy.
In the original sketch they are wealthy people with brandy and cigars. To be handed all that wealth on a plate would seem “soft” to a Yorkshireman so it is indeed a form of one-upmanship to claim to have risen so far from the most humble beginnings.
I’m from that part of the world and, though stereotypical, such people are very familiar to me.
Silicon glass? Luxury.
We had to use shards of radioactive radium glass.
Ah, there are black catters everywhere.
Would “one down” work better? Is it more appropriate to say one man is “going down on” another?
[/innocuous look]
At least you only had to sleep on radium! That was breakfast for us! 'Alf a lump of radium washed down with heavy water before dad shoved us out door to work at mill fifteen hours a day for thruppence a week.
They are certainly competing with one another, consistent with oneupmanship. We can just think of it as upping the exaggeration, upping the hyperbole.
Per John Cleese, the sketch was inspired by a 1910 short story:
No one has linked to the original sketch yet:
I think it’s the best comedy sketch ever.
You got to sleep? We had to doze for 15 seconds 1440 times a day!
Oh, you had a heat source! We slept on endothermicly reactive substances.
Heat?? Luxury! We were cold and we were grateful for it!
You got water to drink? We had to wash down our radium breakfast with our own tears. And we never knew our dad, or mum for that matter. The orphanage sold us to a farm where we had to pull the plough for no wages, just meals. And the meals weren’t even pure radium. We had to go through the tailings from the uranium mine and extract our own radium.