Author, playwright, and sketch comedy pioneer Alan Bennett was born May 9, 1934.

If your fandom of British humor starts with Monty Python, do yourself a huge favor and take a look at Beyond the Fringe, the sketch comedy revue starring Alan Bennett, Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, and Jonathan Miller. Its roots stretch back to 1960, when it was conceived for the Edinburgh Festival as a showcase for the best comic talent from Oxford and Cambridge. It was a fortuitous turn of events for satire fans that these four disparate voices would come together and create such a sharp show – erudite, political, and silly. It would play the West End in London in 1961 before making its Broadway debut in 1962.

In this particular bit, “Take A Pew,” Bennett plays an earnest minister, expertly meandering through an ultimately meaningless homily. It makes me laugh every time I hear it, especially the “mountain” story (I won’t ruin the punch for you there, it’s marvelous). Every so often, the intro of “But my brother Esau is an hairy man, but I am a smooth man,” gets stuck in my head and won’t leave for a couple of weeks. Bennett’s inflection, tone, and grammatical choices are perfection. It’s hard to hear this and not think of the gallery of pompous twits to which John Cleese would later give voice.

You can find video of Bennett doing this on YouTube, but none of it is shareable at this time. So head over there to search, or just soak in the audio here.