"The Butcher Who Is Alternately Rude and Polite"
Michael Palin plays a customer at a butcher's attempting to buy a chicken and some stuffing, but is confused by the butcher (Eric Idle) who is alternately rude ("Don't give me that posh talk you nasty stuck-up twit") and polite ("That's all right sir, call again.") Palin's character attempts to ignore the rude comments at first, but later confronts the proprietor about his behavior. The sketch ends after Idle's characters' last rude comment by going back to Cleese's narrator character at the eponymous Grill-O-Mat, who has appeared between most of the sketches as a method of linking the sketches.
The sketch is preceded by an animation of two identical United States Civil War generals, one of whom expresses his desire to "hunt piggy banks". The figures are actually photographs of U.S. military figure and Massachusetts governor Benjamin Franklin Butler.
Read more about this topic: Live From The Grill-O-Mat
Famous quotes containing the words alternately, rude and/or polite:
“It was a comfort in those succeeding days to sit up and contemplate the majestic panorama of mountains and valleys spread out below us and eat ham and hard boiled eggs while our spiritual natures reveled alternately in rainbows, thunderstorms, and peerless sunsets. Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“... life is moral responsibility. Life is several other things, we do not deny. It is beauty, it is joy, it is tragedy, it is comedy, it is psychical and physical pleasure, it is the interplay of a thousand rude or delicate motions and emotions, it is the grimmest and the merriest motley of phantasmagoria that could appeal to the gravest or the maddest brush ever put to palette; but it is steadily and sturdily and always moral responsibility.”
—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)
“And anyone is free to condemn me to death
If he leaves it to nature to carry out the sentence.
I shall will to the common stock of air my breath
And pay a death tax of fairly polite repentance.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)