I’ll bet you had proper tools.
We had to use our bare hands as crucibles to extract the radium.
Hands? Oh, I remember hands! That’s the stuff I had to sell to buy some air to breathe…
At least you have lungs…
I came to post about that story - let’s just say that the sketch and the story have… remarkable similarities; but if I understand your post, Cleese had admitted that the story was the source? Can you expand on that?
j
“British comedian John Cleese credits Leacock for the Monty Python ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch, in which several old geezers try to outdo one another with stories about their childhood poverty.”
Thanks for that!
j
Leacock’s story only had two men, and their conversation started out pretty over-the-top. Cleese expanded it to four characters, and gave it a slower build-up.
Cleese, among the others others of his troupes, always had an amazing sense for comic timing and pace.
Happy to oblige!
I’ll also throw in a plug for Leacock’s “The Life of John Smith” - sort of a proto-“The Adventures of Ralph Mellish.”
A link to the original sketch? Luxury! In my day when we wanted to share a sketch on a message board we had to type out the dialogue from memory!
You had writing! We had to use pictograms scrawled on cave wall with ochre!
Wall pictures? Luxury! We had to make up our own dialogue.
Y’all should’ve sold the radium and eaten caviar.
Hell, I never had a cave, let alone a wall!
Four characters and a slower build-up? What luxury! We were happy to have half a 3x5 card for a script written with the lead broken off a pencil.
Most people heard this first on the ‘Monty Python Live At Drury Lane’ album.
We used to DREAM of having a broken off pencil! Best we could manage was to smear our own phlegm on a scrap of tin. Couldn’t even use our blood because mum sold it to pay the rent.
Count your blessings that she only sold your blood! Every time rent came due, mum would make us draw straws. Whoever got the short one got marched right down to the butcher shop and turned into meat pies, which we had to sell on street corner two for a ha’penny, just so we could afford a single-room cottage with leaky roof that we shared with six other families!
At least you were made into meat pies. I was only good for chitlins.
I first heard it on an American television program called Dean Martin Presents the Golddiggers in London. From 1965 to 1974 there was a variety program called The Dean Martin Show. It was very popular. During the summer it were no episodes of it. Instead, there were replacement shows. The summers of 1968 and 1969 the replacement show was called Dean Martin Presents the Golddiggers. The Golddiggers were a group of women on The Dean Martin Show who sang, danced, and did comedy sketches (I think, although I don’t remember them well). In 1970, the people who ran the show decided it would be nice to do something a little different, so that summer the show was filmed in London. Apparently the idea was that some British performers would appear on the show. Among them was Marty Feldman, who was one of the four stars of At Last the 1948 Show who was in the original version of the sketch in 1967. Another star of the show in the summer of 1970 was the American actor Charles Nelson Reilly, who I don’t think did anything else half as good as the sketches I’m about to describe. Feldman and Reilly did some comedy sketches on the 1970 summer show. There were four sketches which I found screamingly funny when I saw them that summer. I could for years afterwards describe them very well, but unfortunately I forgotten a lot about all of them except for one. That one was a variant of The Four Yorkshiremen sketch which had to be adapted so it could be done by two people (Feldman and Reilly). Remember, at that point Monty Python’s Flying Circus hadn’t shown in the U.S. Nothing on American television was as bizarre a comedy program as that. In comparison, Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-in wasn’t nearly as strange. It was only years later that I learned that the sketch wasn’t original but a version of a sketch from a British television show. For some reason, not many people remember Dean Martin Presents the Golddiggers in London.