A Bit of Fry and Laurie, Beauty and Ideas

I just transcribed this sketch for use in one of my assignments. I had to do it myself as there seem to be very few already written transcripts of this fantastic show on the web. However there are ample videos on youtube, this particular sketch can be viewed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RQzRhH67Q0 and I highly recomend you watch it if you have never seen any 'Fry and Laurie' before. I hope my transcript might be of use to someone, if you want to use it it would be worth re-watching the sketch to check the intonations etc as this was a relitively rough-and-ready transcription, enjoy:

Sketch: ‘Beauty and Ideas’

Speakers: Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie

Series: ‘A bit of Fry and Laurie’

Air Date: 13^th April 1990, BBC

SF: so in a sense in a sense in a sense Duncan, err, we are left with those two, err two none other nary another not one other more err we have on one side of the gulf the chasm the dividing line if you please we have the beauty of ideas, and on the other we have the other term of the equation if that’s nicer we have the idea, of beauty, am I sensing thrill am I connecting?

HL: err we’re busy discussing the idea of beauty and the beauty of ideas

SF: hold the thought Jeffery, would you, I’m going to give you a thought and I’d like you to hold it for me, would you do that for me please

HL: I’m going to hold a though now

((audience laughter))

SF: if beauty is only an idea a form a pattern a template a paradigm and ideal an idea, if you like with an ‘l’, then what is the beautiful? Beauty is unattainable but the beautiful surrounds us err we return to language Phillip, we make a return to language, that’s the idea that I’d like you to hold for me if you’d be ever so splendid

HL: we’ve made a return to language

SF: listen to me, listen to me lovelet, language

((audience laughter))

SF: circumscribes beauty, err, confirms, confines, limbs and delineates it colours and contains, yet language is only a tool, a tool that we use to dig up the beauty that surrounds us and is we take, our only and absolute real

HL: I’m in trouble now

SF: umm, hush, tish, vibble, err, I’m streaking ahead let me explain expound expand and exposit

HL: would you ha ha ha

SF: I find you beautiful, but you are not beauty

HL: woops

SF: therefore you contain a property of beauty therefore the substance of which you exhibit a property must exist. Where is it?

((HL looks behind the sofa, audience laughter))

SF: that is language’s task, err, err, err who was it who said ‘my language is the universal whore that I must make into a virgin’, who was is?

HL: pfff, Kate Adey?

((loud audience laughter))

SF: I think it was Karl Krauss but it needn’t have been, it needn’t have been, now, tell me it’s time to ask you to give b-back to me the thought that I bade you hold

HL: umm, I was holding the thought that we’d made a return to language

SF: correctly correctington, language pursues beauty, harries it hounds it, courses across the rough-lands of inquiry and in so doing can itself BE beautiful ripple on ripple, image on image wheel on a wheel like the circles that we find in the windmills of our mind

((audience laughter))

HL: Noel Harrison

SF: Noel, as you so rightly, Harrison. Now, language can be beautiful and Madeline asleep in lap of legends old plenitude, dishes, her breast tumble, emolument, forage, smitten, plenum, vulva, words that have their own sonority and beauty which is extrinsic, extrinsic to their connotational or denotational referends

HL: I think he said vulva

((audience laughter))

SF: so, Timothy I’ll leave you with a thought a breath a fruit that drops from the bows of my imaginings, think beauty, but be beautiful, say beauty, but say it beautifully, beauty is duty and duty beauty so there, goodnight I don’t feel quite so well now

((audience laughter))

((HL makes worried face))