A Bit Of Fry And Laurie was a sketch comedy starring Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, broadcast on BBC2 between January 13, 1989 and April 2, 1995. Before Hugh Laurie became a big name in USA with his hit TV series House MD, he was already famous in Bertie and Wooster, Black Adder and Bit of Fry and Laurie TV series!
If you have not seen these funny comedy routine between brilliant Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, do check it out, you will get to see younger and funny side of Hugh Laurie and Fry.
Funny quotes from the “Bit of Fry and Laurie”:
Stephen Fry: Well next week I shall be examining the claims of a man who says that in a previous existence he was Education Secretary Kenneth Baker and I shall be talking to a woman who claims she can make flowers grow just by planting seeds in soil and watering them. Until then, wait very quietly in your seats please. Goodnight.
Hugh Laurie: : So let’s talk instead about flexibility of language – um, linguistic elasticity, if you’d like.
Hugh Laurie: Can I just interrupt you here?
Stephen Fry: Certainly, Peter.
Hugh Laurie: Thanks.
Stephen Fry: Pleasure.
Stephen Fry: [voiceover] Good old Berent’s cocoa. Always there. Original or New Berent’s, specially prepared for the mature citizens in your life, with nature’s added store of powerful barbiturates and heroin
.Stephen Fry: Estate Agents you can’t live with them, you can’t live with them. If you try and kill them, you’re put in prison: if you try and talk to them, you vomit. There’s only one thing worse than an estate agent but at least that can be safely lanced, drained and surgically dressed. Estate agents. Love them or loathe them, you’d be mad not to loathe them.
Stephen Fry: It’s ludicrously easy to knock Mrs. Thatcher, isn’t it? It’s the simplest, easiest and most obvious thing in the world to remark that she’s a shameful, putrid scab, an embarrassing, ludicrous monstrosity that makes one frankly ashamed to be British and that her ideas and standards are a stain on our national history. That’s easy! Anyone can see that! Nothing difficult about that! But after tonight, no one will ever accuse us again with failing to come up with something to take her place. Hugh?[Hugh Laurie pulls out a coat hanger]
Stephen: Twenty-five years ago the doctors told your mother and me that it would be impossible for us ever to have children.
Hugh: Oh, why not?
Stephen: I can’t remember the exact reason; it was something to do with penises I think.
Hugh Laurie: [with an electronic organizer] Ask me anything, a telephone number, what time it is in Adelaide. Tell you what, I can tell you exactly what I’ll be doing on the third of August 1997, say. Hang on… [presses a few buttons]. Nothing. See, it says. Nothing.
Hugh Laurie: Our Venice is being taken away from us. It’s crawling with Germans.
Leslie: And Italians.
Hugh Laurie: A good wife, or a good business partner?
Stephen Fry: Is there a difference, Peter?
Hugh Laurie: I hope so, John.
Stephen Fry:: Yes, I think that I’ve said earlier that our language, English –
L: As spoken by us.
F: As we speak it, yes, certainly, defines us. We are defined by our language, if you will
L: [to screen] Hello. We’re talking about language.
F: Perhaps I can illustrate my point. Let me at least try. Here is a question: um…
L: What is it?<
F: Oh! Um… my question is this: is our language – English – capable… is English capable of sustaining demagoguery?
L: Demagoguery?
F: Demagoguery.
L: And by “demagoguery” you mean…
F: By “demagoguery” I mean demagoguery…
L: I thought so.
F: I mean highly-charged oratory, persuasive whipping-up rhetoric. Listen to me, listen to me. If Hitler had been British, would we, under similar circumstances, have been moved, charged up, fired up by his inflammatory speeches, or would we simply have laughed? Is English too ironic to sustain Hitlerian styles? Would his language simply have rung false in our ears?
L: [to screen] We’re talking about things ringing false in our ears.
F: May I compartmentalize – I hate to, but may I, may I: is our language a function of our British cynicism, tolerance, resistance to false emotion, humour, and so on, or do those qualities come extrinsically – extrinsically – from the language itself? It’s a chicken and egg problem.
L: [to screen] We’re talking about chickens, we’re talking about eggs.
F: Um… let me start a leveret here: there’s language and there’s speech. Um, there’s chess and there’s a game of chess. Mark the difference for me. Mark it please.
L: [to screen] We’ve moved on to chess.
F: Imagine a piano keyboard, eh, 88 keys, only 88 and yet, and yet, hundreds of new melodies, new tunes, new harmonies are being composed upon hundreds of different keyboards every day in Dorset alone. Our language, tiger, our language: hundreds of thousands of available words, frillions of legitimate new ideas, so that I can say the following sentence and be utterly sure that nobody has ever said it before in the history of human communication: “Hold the newsreader’s nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers.” Perfectly ordinary words, but never before put in that precise order. A unique child delivered of a unique mother.
L: [to screen] …
F: And yet, oh, and yet, we, all of us, spend all our days saying to each other the same things time after weary time: “I love you,” “Don’t go in there,” “Get out,” “You have no right to say that,” “Stop it,” “Why should I,” “That hurt,” “Help,” “Marjorie is dead.” Hmm? Surely, it’s a thought to take out for cream tea on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
L: So, to you, language is more than just a means of communication?
F: Oh, of course it is, of course it is, of course it is, of course it is. Language is my mother, my father, my husband, my brother, my sister, my whore, my mistress, my check-out girl… language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God. Language is the dew on a fresh apple, it’s the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning light as you pluck from a old bookshelf a half-forgotten book of erotic memoirs. Language is the creak on a stair, it’s a spluttering match held to a frosted pane, it’s a half-remembered childhood birthday party, it’s the warm, wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred Panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl. It’s cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot
.L: [to screen] Night-night.
Hugh: Well we had our first child on the NHS and had to wait nine months, can you believe it.
Stephen Fry: How may we serve?
Hugh Laurie: Well, I was after a pair of shoes.
Stephen Fry: Very well. I shall serve them first.
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A Bit of Fry and Laurie: The Complete Collection… Every Bit!
Hugh Laurie: You ever been trapped in a loveless marriage with a woman you despise?
Stephen Fry: Ooh, not since I was nine! Do you like it straight up?
Laurie: What?
Fry: [holding up his drink] Or with ice?
Laurie: Ice.
Fry: Right-ho. [adds ice] Cocktail onion?
Laurie: No thanks.
Hugh Laurie: She takes no interest in my friends, you know. She laughs at my…
Stephen Fry: Peanuts?
Hugh Laurie: Hobbies. She doesn’t even value my…
Stephen Fry: Crinkle-cut cheesy Wotsit?
Hugh Laurie: Career. You know, it’s just so depressing. Alright, so other men have got larger…
Stephen Fry: Plums?
Hugh Laurie: Salaries. And better prospects. And other men can boast a healthier-looking…
Stephen Fry: Stool?
Hugh Laurie: [sitting on stool] Lifestyle.
Hugh Laurie: The trouble with that woman is that she’s just a…
Stephen Fry: Rather disgusting-looking tart that should’ve been disposed of ages ago?
Hugh Laurie: I tell you what it is: she’s a complainer, that’s what she is.
Hugh Laurie: Alright, so, so I haven’t got loads of cash hanging around. You know, but why complain? Other people are worse off. I’ve got a job. I’ve got two sweet, rosy…
Stephen Fry: Nibbles?
Hugh Laurie: Children. She goes on and on about my appearance. I mean, it’s not as if she’s an oil painting, you know. I mean, frankly she’s…
Stephen Fry: [points] Plain and prawn-flavoured.
Hugh Laurie: She’s not as young as she used to be herself
Hugh Laurie: I’ve always been a Daily Mail reader. I prefer it to a newspaper.
Source: IMDB, Wikiquote
Image source: Bit of Fry and Laurie DVD