Yorkshire Humour , livre ebook

Country Publications Ltd - Ian Mcmillan

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96 pages

English

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Yorkshire folk have always been renowned for their wry, warm and homely outlook on life. Here is a collection of the very best of Yorkshire humour, jokes, funny stories and amusing anecdotes, compiled by Ian McMillan from seventy years of Dalesman magazine and illustrated by award-winning cartoonist Tony Husband.

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Publié par	Country Publications Ltd
Date de parution	01 septembre 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781855683266
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0350€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Yorkshire Humour
Yorkshire folk are funny: it s a fact. If you need proof, go and stand in a bus queue or sit in a caf with a bunch of them, take a walk along the high street or in the countryside, or go to a football match or the barber s shop. Funny things will be said - guaranteed.
If you need any more proof, delve into this delightful collection compiled by Ian McMillan from seventy years of Dalesman magazine and illustrated by award-winning cartoonist Tony Husband.
In these pages you will discover how Yorkshire s little tykes are always ready with an insightful comment or impossible-to-answer question. Jokes and stories have always brightened the working day, and Yorkshire folk at rest and play can find humour on days out, in the pub and even the church and chapel, not to mention the eternal battle of the sexes and Yorkshire s opinion of the rest of the world (and Lancashire). And then there is the Yorkshire dialect, which seems purpose-built to express all those humorous observations.
Yorkshire folk have always been renowned for their wry, warm and homely outlook on life. Here in this ebook is the very best of Yorkshire humour, funny stories and amusing anecdotes.
www.dalesman.co.uk
First published in ebook format in 2013 by Dalesman an imprint of Country Publications Ltd, The Water Mill, Broughton Hall, Skipton, North Yorkshire BD23 3AG, UK www.dalesman.co.uk
Introductory texts Ian McMillan 2013 Extracts Dalesman 2013 Illustrations Tony Husband 2013
ISBN 978-1-85568-326-6
All rights reserved. This book must not be circulated in any form other than that in which it is published and without similar condition of this being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored on a retrieval system or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without either prior permission in writing from the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying. In the United Kingdom such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London, W1P 9HE. The right of Ian McMillan to be identified as editor of this work and the right of Tony Husband to be identified as illustrator of this work has been asserted in accordance with Copyright Designs and Patents Acts 1988.
CONTENTS
Introduction
Out of the Mouths of Babes and Infants
Work
Rest and Play
The Battle of the Sexes
Off-Cumed Uns
Talking Tyke
The Last Word
Acknowledgements
About the Author and Illustrator
Introduction by Ian McMillan
This sounds like a made up story but I swear on Fred Trueman s best pipe that it s true. Years ago our doctor s surgery used to be in an old house near the Cross Keys pub. The ill and the snuffling and those grimacing in pain and those wanting a sicknote so they could go fishing in the pit ponds would gather in the front room, sitting awkwardly on settees and kitchen chairs in a tight space that was stuffed with ornaments and family photos. I once turned up with a chest infection, wheezing like a pair of bellows, and I discovered that there were at least twelve people in front of me looking like some kind of Bamforth postcard version of the Last Supper. I slumped on an ancient easy chair and waited.
A man at the other end of the room with a face like a child s drawing of a bloodhound sat rubbing his long face as though it was giving him some cosh. He reached over and rifled through the pile of magazines on the table in the middle of the room, looking for something to distract him. He discarded the Exchange and Mart and picked up a copy of the Dalesman . He flicked through it. He furrowed his brow as he read a little piece and he stopped rubbing his face. He looked up at the ceiling and I could see that he wanted to laugh, but somehow he thought it inappropriate in a room full of sadness and wincing and noses running like overflow pipes. He gazed deep into space and deep within himself. He fought to stop a smile playing round his lips. He failed. He lost the fight, floored and dazed in the first round. The smile played happily round his lips.
He grinned like a death mask. His shoulders began to shake. Tears began to stream down his cheeks. He waved his Dalesman like he was waving a flag of surrender. He tried to bury his face in it. He kept trying to control the laughter but the laughter defeated him. And then, in a room full of infections, the laughter became the greatest and most infectious infection. The woman next to him, in a headscarf emblazoned with the Great Little Trains of Wales, began to snigger. She didn t know why she was laughing but she was laughing and the Great Little Trains of Wales rattled on their Great Little tracks around her shellac perm. An enormous bloke with his arm in a sling began to laugh in a fat monotone like a ship s siren, his mouth opening in a big sloppy O. A little girl who had been weeping and clutching her doll gazed in wonderment at her mother as she crumbled into a howling mass of hilarity, like a female version of the Laughing Policeman made of school custard. The waiting room was transformed from a room that wanted to weep into a room that couldn t stop chuckling. Mrs Harley came in to tell the next invalid it was their turn to see Dr Galvin and she came into a space that was like the concert room of the Bottom Club when they had a good turn on. She looked aghast, her arms folded over her vast bust.
The man with the long face controlled his almost uncontrollable laughter and pointed at the copy of the Dalesman , now fallen on the floor like a shot bird. Ah, said Mrs Harley, in the voice of a sage, everybody laughs at the Dalesman, and she tried a little laugh herself, sounding like somebody grating cheese; oddly that stopped all the other laughter dead like a light being switched off in an empty room.
That story illustrates one of the Dalesman s main functions: to make you laugh. Of course, it s also full of interest and language and a kind of Yorkshire anthropology, but ever since that day in the doctor s waiting room I ve thought of it as a magazine that makes you laugh. And if not laugh, snigger. And if not snigger, grin. And if not grin, then make that small and almost imperceptible sideways movement of the head that, in a person from Yorkshire, can signify all kinds of things from How are you this fine day my good man? to Yes, I thought they played well on Saturday although that second goal was most certainly offside and By, that s the funniest thing I ve heard since my Uncle Charlie told me about Jack Briggs * falling down that hole at the top of our street.
This book is a collection of all the kinds of humour the Dalesman is famous for, a range of humour that, although it s strictly Yorkshire humour, is actually quite hard to define. It s a fact, though, that Yorkshire people are funny. If you need proof, go and stand in a bus queue with a bunch of them, or go to a football match with a carful. Sit with some in the barber s shop. I guarantee funny things will be said or seen.
I m not saying that there isn t such a thing as Essex humour or Northamptonshire humour, of course. There obviously is, and dozens of examples of comedy from the two counties will be springing to your lips as you read this, won t they?
What s the essence of Yorkshire humour, though? What s the Unique Selling Point? Well, I think there are a few, if you can have such a thing as a few Unique Selling Points. One of the USP s is the language. Somehow Yorkshire Language is in itself funny: ejaculations like EEE (as in EEE she were thin in the old gag) and By and Now Then and Flippin Ummer make you smile. It s a rough-hewn language, a language of opposition to the status quo and a language that the boss couldn t really understand so you could use it to take the mickey out of him and he d never get what you were on about. What people from outside Yorkshire know as the Yorkshire dialect is of course thousands of dialects, one for every village and two for every street in the county, and this gives us the possibility of tiny jokes that only work in certain backyards in Guiseley. Or, as the old Muker joke goes: A farmhand was gonging his kikes when a young marrer leaned out of his darrywack and said Ho maisster: yer toll-bill s showing! I don t get it either, but the people of Muker laugh so much when they hear that one that oxygen tanks have to be on standby. They have to have the special standby adhesive ready, too. That s Standby Gum.
Also, Yorkshire is full of funny place names. Wetwang. Idle. Friendly. Shelf. Booze. The Land of Green Ginger. Jump. The names lend themselves to comedy, whether intentional or not. I m just off to the Idle Working-Men s Club. Friendly Skins Rule If It s Okay With You. Is this bus going to Jump? Well hold it down while I get on. Somehow I don t think you can get that level of ribaldry from Bexleyheath or Farnham or Solihull.
There s also the weather and the hills; those two phenomena lend themselves to humour, I m sure you ll agree. Hills can make you gasp and if you re fat they can make you sweat and if you ve worked down the pit they ll make you heave for breath, making inappropriate mating elk noises, and if you drop your change it ll roll to the bottom and if you slip you ll tumble all the way down, possibly through crowds of sheep droppings like Colin Cushworth ** did that time up in North Yorkshire, ending up with dozens of squashed full stops on the back of his cardy.
And Yorkshire weather is just funny, or perhaps our reaction to it is. When it s sunny people of a certain age will still go out in a cap and a muffler and a heavy woollen coat and after a few minutes they ll say: I ll tell yer what: it s not just red hot, it s white hot. Their umbrellas will whip inside out in the wind, and their caps will blow off like Yorkshire Frisbees. They ll slip in the ice, landing like bouncing bombs on the slippery pavement, and the