Four Yorkshiremen
sketch associated with Monty Python
The "Four Yorkshiremen" is a comedy sketch that parodies nostalgic conversations about humble beginnings or difficult childhoods. It features four men from Yorkshire who reminisce about their upbringing. As the conversation progresses they try to outdo one another, and their accounts of deprived childhoods become increasingly absurd. For example: "We had to live in a cardboard box?" ... "A cardboard box? You were lucky! We lived for three months in a rolled-up newspaper in a septic tank."
The sketch was written by Tim Brooke-Taylor, John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Marty Feldman, and originally performed in 1967 on their TV series At Last the 1948 Show. It later became associated with the comedy group Monty Python (which included Cleese and Chapman), who performed it in their live shows, including Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl.
Performances
At Last the 1948 Show
The sketch was written as "Good Old Days" and performed for the 1967 British television comedy series At Last the 1948 Show by the show's four writer-performers: Brooke-Taylor, Cleese, Chapman, and Feldman. Barry Cryer is the wine waiter in the original performance and may have contributed to the writing.
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This entry incorporates text from “Four Yorkshiremen” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.