CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Hello and welcome to QI,
where tonight we're asking who, what and, most importantly, why,
with a welter of W questions.
What do you say we meet our guests?
What a treat - it's Daliso Chaponda.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
What a joy - it's Cariad Lloyd.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
What a pleasure - it's Susan Calman.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
And what the blazes - it's Alan Davies.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Why don't we hear their questionable buzzers?
Cariad goes...
Why by Annie Lennox
Daliso goes...
Why Why Why by Shawn Mendes
We should just have a disco. Yeah!
Susan goes...
Why Oh Why Oh Why by Gilbert O'Sullivan
And Alan goes...
Because, because, because, because, because I say so!
Right. What questions do toddlers ask the most?
Hmm. Are we nearly there yet?
KLAXON Oh, that's a good one.
This is the issue. What is the issue?
Don't like them.
Questions or children?
Children. Right, OK.
Because they are unrelentingly honest.
Yes. Yes.
They are taller than me.
LAUGHTER
And I have previously been swept up at a museum in a coach party...
..when they said, "Back to the bus, everyone,"
I went, "I'm not... OK, fine." And I got on a bus. Ah.
So, I don't like children but, for some reason, they really like me.
They see you as one of their own, that's why. Yeah.
Alan, stop pressing that!
Are you my real dad?
Isn't it just, they say, "Why?", and then you answer.
Then they say, "Why?"
And then they keep saying, "Why?", until you collapse
and scream, "Why?"
Yeah, so, we think that is the question
but, in fact, the question that they ask most is, "What?"
What? Yeah. What?
So, that's how they learn about the world.
Most of the time, it's, "What?"
The number of why-style questions,
which is when you want an explanation rather than a fact,
it does increase as you get older.
So, it's just about 3% if you're under two
and 43% when you approach four years old
but, even at their peak, they are in the minority,
and parents think that why questions are more common
because, frankly, it's more difficult to answer.
They did a study, the Society for Research in Child Development,
in 2017. The average child between two and five asks 107 questions...
That's why... 107 questions per hour! Yes.
Yeah. Instead of contraception, they just need to put that fact...
..on little boxes. It's one in every 33 seconds.
Would it be possible to get them to submit the questions in advance?
But the study that they did, there was a child called Adam.
He asked an average of 198 questions per hour.
And his parents are divorced and doing their best.
It's almost 30% more questions than you get
on a standard episode of University Challenge.
They're harder.
But the numbers plummet the minute they enter the education system.
So, there was a psychologist called Susan Engel,
and she looked at kids in elementary school in America.
They found they asked two to five questions in a two-hour period.
And, as they get older, it seems to get worse.
One child put their hand up and asked in class
if there were any places in the world where no-one made art,
which I think is a really good question.
And the teacher replied, "No questions now, please.
"It's a time for learning."
LAUGHTER
But we thought we'd try a few interesting questions for you.
You can try and answer, if you like,
or you can tell me what you think about the questions.
So, my first question is, have you ever been decapitated?
Yes, yes. I mean, like, not in the Anne Boleyn sense,
but like, you know, metaphor... I've lost my head frequently.
Do you get cross?
I get cross. I think shorter people get cross quicker.
I get very cross very quickly,
because people ignore you and they don't see you...
I don't think I've ever been decapitated. Yes.
Do you see what I did there?
"Dear diary, today, Alan ignored me again."
But is there another meaning of decapitated,
apart from having your head cut off?
They did this question on a US quiz show
called the Power Of 10 in 2007,
so the contestants predict what answer the public are going to give
to a particular question and, to this question,
"Have you ever been decapitated?", 4% said yes.
It's part of something called the Lizardman's Constant. OK.
There's a psychologist called Scott Alexander Siskind,
and he came up with this idea,
and it's the approximate percentage of responses to a survey
when a person clearly isn't taking it seriously. Oh!
The name came from a 2013 survey
that found that 4% of Americans believe
that lizard men are running the earth. Right.
They might also not know the meaning of "decapitated"
and think it means "drunk" or something.
Oh, yeah, incapacitated. Incapacitated.
Yeah. Yeah. Here's another question.
Are you a narcissist?
Oh, of course. We're comedians.
So, you say yes. What would you say?
And of all the narcissists here,
I am the best narcissist.
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
There is a certain something about parading yourself
and hoping that people like you
and laugh at your jokes and think that you're fabulous,
so I think probably yes.
They both say yes. Over here?
Um, let's talk about me a little bit more.
Sometimes I am, sometimes I'm not. It's difficult.
What do you think about me?
So typically, when they were testing a person for narcissism,
it was a 40-question questionnaire, right?
And it was things like,
"Does the thought of ruling the world frighten you,
"or do you think it would be a better place if you were in charge?"
Yes. Yes. Next question.
But then what happened was, in 2014,
there was a team from Ohio State University
and they realised you could get just the same accuracy of results
by asking a single question,
and the question is, "Are you a narcissist?"
And, actually, narcissists say yes. Oh!
They believe that they are superior and they don't mind saying so.
So, they saved 39 questions that they didn't have to answer.
Two points for anybody
who can name the two people in this famous painting.
Narcissus. Narcissus is...
The guy looking at...
Looking in the mirror, yeah. He falls into the water.
Who's the person that...?
That's "Narcissususus's" very free friend.
I'm going to call her Alison. Alison.
She's like, "You're not going to upstage me by falling in that pond.
"I'm going to get one tit out."
Everyone is going to look at me now.
Look at me!
It's good, though. She's got just the one out,
and probably the good one. Yeah.
What do you mean, the good one? There's always...
LAUGHTER
There's one...
Sandi's not a narcissist apart from her boobs, which she's like,
"They're both great." My breasts are perfect.
There's one that's a bit perkier.
That you go, all right. And then there's the one you go, buck up.
Yeah. It's Echo.
Oh, of course! Falls in love with Narcissus.
She was a chatterbox. And she got cursed to always repeat
the end of somebody else's sentence
rather than making her own sentences.
And that's why we get the...
That's where we get the... Concept of the... Concept of the...
It's so lovely to see... It's so lovely to see...
Are you going to do that the whole show? "The whole show".
OK. Another question. Red or green?
Definitely green. I found this out the hard way.
OK. So in university, I went to a kissing party.
Right? And when you went into the party, you chose
to put around your neck either red, green or orange, right?
And if you chose green, you're open to kissing everybody.
OK. Chose red, you don't want to kiss anyone.
And then orange, you're picky. And I at heart was green,
but I thought you want to seem picky.
Oh, OK. So I chose orange
and all the green people were having way more fun.
Traffic light party. We used to do them... Oh, you used to...
Used to do them in the old clubs in Glasgow and...
Find myself thinking, oh, wouldn't you catch viruses? Yes!
That's a sign of age.
But the issue is, as I discovered, having also gone
to one of those traffic light parties,
having worn everything green, I was as green as you could possibly get.
Just being green doesn't mean anyone wants to kiss you.
I'm here!
OK, let me tell you. Red or green is an official
state question in New Mexico.
Oh, so the red party or the green party?
No, it's nothing to do with politics.
Oh, chillies!
Refers to your favoured type of chilli sauce.
OK, here's another question.
What was the worst thing about the great whiskey fire at Dublin?
Terrible waste of whiskey. Well...
KLAXON BLARES
Irish distilleries
did not pay any tax on whiskey until it was about to be sold,
and so they often allowed it to mature
in these duty-free warehouses and the warehouse...
This particular one had 5,000 barrels in it,
which today is like £8 million worth of whiskey.
It went up in smoke on the 18th of June, 1875.
Nobody really knows why. By the early hours,
most of the barrels had burst.
There was a sort of burning river of whiskey in the streets.
The flow was two foot wide. It was six inches deep.
I mean, it would look...
I imagine it looked like the flames on a Christmas pudding.
It was extraordinary. And 13 people died,
but none of them were harmed by the fire.
They died? Yes. So they all died of...
Trying to drink hot... Well...
Hot toddies. ..either acute alcohol poisoning
after drinking alcohol straight from the street
or from the filth mixed in with it.
If you drink anything out of a gutter, it's not good, is it?
People came from all over Dublin for this free hot toddy.
Quite right. They used their hats, their boots to scoop it up.
People were, as you say, supping straight from the street.
There's one place, according to one report,
a house burnt down during a wake.
The family saved the body from
the fire, but went right back to the whiskey.
Now, why could they not just put water on it?
Isn't that...with alcohol, you can't...? Isn't it like a chip pan?
You've got to get the wet tea towel. It is, darling.
It's like oil on top of water. It was impossible.
So what they did was they built a dam out of ash and horse manure
to stop them. People carried on drinking.
Horse manure cocktail. Right. Everybody was safely evacuated,
including pigs and horses that ran wild.
One man was arrested for stealing a barrel of whiskey
that had escaped and rolled down the streets.
I like this - he was fined £1 and the barrel
was sent to a nearby hospital to be given to the patients,
some of whom presumably
were already suffering from alcohol poisoning.
Now who washed Hitler's wig?
Ooh. I'm very much hoping that you're going to reveal
that the wig is his moustache.
Oh. And he had a wig moustache kind of like a merkin or something.
Coincidentally,
this is genuine - the only other time I've painted myself green.
I did a sketch when I first started out in comedy,
and I was completely naked apart from a merkin.
Let me just explain to anybody who doesn't know...
It's a pubic wig. Can I just say the Victoria and Albert Museum
has a merkin department, and you can ask to see them.
I would be very happy to show you mine.
I retained it, and the sketch was...
I painted myself green and I jumped out of a wardrobe shouting,
"I'm a wee goblin! So...
Oh! I remember that sketch!
Yes! I was not looking at the merkin.
Her boobs are just slightly...
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Genuinely. There's one better than the other.
So anyway, I retained the merkin as a beautiful souvenir of...
..something I shouldn't have done.
So... Is it that he had doubles? So we are talking a...
A double. ..a Doppelganger of some kind.
Where might you find such a thing in London, for example?
Oh, at Madame Tussauds. Madame Tussauds. Exactly. Wax museum.
Madame Tussauds was hit by a bomb in 1940.
352 waxwork heads were destroyed,
but Hitler's was just covered in rubble,
and his and other surviving heads, including Mussolini's,
had a post-bombardment shampoo and were put back on display.
But during the war, did they need a wax version of him?
And did they need to number it? So people would be like,
"125? Who's that? Oh, it's Hitler. It's Hitler."
Well, it's been there since 1933, and since it was installed,
people have tried to destroy the wax works,
doused in red paint,
decorated with a sign that said "mass murderer".
By 1936, it had been repaired so many times
that they decided to put the whole thing in a glass case.
And they only took Hitler off display in 2016,
when neo-Nazis started taking selfies.
Oh, God. It was there till 2016? 2016, yeah.
While we are on wax, you've each got a candle.
Can you guess what those candles are meant to smell like?
Ooh. So let's start with you, Alan. What do you think that smells like?
Oh!
Christ on a bike, that's horrendous.
What it is... It's garlicky and acrid,
and I don't know why anybody would want this.
It's supposed to smell of mustard gas. Oh!
Did you just poison Alan for a question?!
It's for people who want to evoke First World War battlefields. Why?
I mean, that really sets a lovely tone for a dinner party.
Come in and sit down. A bit of mustard gas.
Cariad, what is your one?
Is that vinegar? Chips?
It's cheese and onion. Oh. Oh, crisps. Yeah.
Daliso? Mine's actually quite pleasant. I can't place it.
But I know this scent. Is it, like, liquorice or something?
Well, it's petrol.
Oh, give us it here. I like...
LAUGHTER
I like the smell of petrol.
Do you not remember when you were younger,
at the petrol station, rolling down the window
when your mum was filling up the tank and just going...
No, here's the thing.
The smell of petrol is - this why one might like it -
it temporarily suppresses the nervous system,
so it gives you a sort of euphoric feeling.
But it's incredibly bad for you because the chemicals
disrupt messaging in the brain,
as well as the ability of the blood to carry oxygen.
But that candle promises the joys
of that forbidden fragrance without brain damage. Oh!
Yeah. I mean, if you did it a lot
when you were younger, like, you'd be fine.
Just sniff your candle, darling. What have you got?
What do you think that is?
What, you don't like it?
That is disgust... Is it vomit?
No, it's not!
What is it? Human breast milk.
LAUGHTER
I feel we're on a theme with you. Did you not like it at all?
Which breast did it come from?
Is it...? Sorry, Sandi... Do you know,
of all the things in my life...
Of all the questions I've ever had...
I don't want to smell anything after my mustard gas.
What does breast milk smell like? That doesn't smell of breast milk.
I don't think it does either.
I mean... It smells quite sweet.
And breast milk does smell sweet. It actually doesn't smell that bad.
Made by an artist called Tasha Marks.
Can I just say there's no actual breast milk in it?
But she created this smell.
Mixed messages here, Sandi.
She wanted it to smell warm and evocative.
Doesn't smell of vomit. That's a very unusual reaction, Susan.
It smells of vomit. That's a vomit candle.
What happened to you when you were being breast-fed?
It's making me feel very uncomfortable.
Daliso, give her some more petrol, darling.
LAUGHTER
Right. Which Wikipedia articles are 100% wrong?
I bet it's their articles on Encyclopaedia Britannica.
There are many problems with Wikipedia,
but the way in which it has been sourced
is that anybody with the time and the technology can input,
and you don't necessarily have to know what you are talking about.
So in 2020, it was discovered that nearly half of the articles
on Scots Wikipedia were written
by a North Carolina teenager who didn't speak a word of Scots.
Wow. Yeah. He went by the name AmaryllisGardener,
and between the age of 12 and 19, he created over 20,000 articles.
He made hundreds of thousands of edits.
He essentially took English language articles
and rewrote them with a Scottish accent.
And he then became an administrator and used his power
to undo other people's attempts to correct his work.
Wow. Wikipedia articles are now being used to train AI models,
so you might take something which an AI model has told you
and not know that it's come from Wikipedia.
And some of those AI models may have trained on
the work by the North Carolina teenager who said that it was Scots.
So...so...so...so a teenager from North Carolina
was writing articles on Scots or Scottish?
He was just using English language articles
and rewriting them with what he thought
was a Scottish accent.
So it wasn't like Scots Gaelic or anything.
No, no, not even that.
What a very, very niche thing. Yeah.
Can anybody read the Scots language?
Anybody here? Let's give Susan a go first. Yeah.
Well, it depends what you mean by the Scots language...
Well, it's recognised as one of the three indigenous languages
in Scotland - so Gaelic, English and Scots. Yes.
So I'm going to put a Scots sentence up
from the Scottish Government website on the screen and see
if anybody is a skilled linguist without really knowing it.
In the 2022 census,
that number of people reported that they could speak Scots,
with that number of people reporting
that they could speak, read, write or understand Scots.
There you go. That's fantastic. I love that.
This may be a... Does that count as a...
No, no, this is... No. Don't.
LAUGHTER
"Does that count as a language?" I think it does, Daliso!
I think it does. Burns wrote in Scots.
So Scots is a language used in poetry and music,
and it's still used colloquially by a lot of people in Scotland.
But what I mean is, without ever hearing of this language,
I can understand that.
Well, perhaps you're a greater linguist than you realise.
OK. There is a lot of Wikipedia vandalism.
Willy on Wheels is one of my favourites.
He created thousands of throwaway accounts
so that he could just deface Wikipedia articles,
and his most prolific work was simply adding "on wheels"
to the end of any...to the end of any article title,
as well as redirecting the news page to a picture of a willy.
You know what? Genius comes in all forms.
We should respect it when we see it.
Anyway, Wikipedia is the largest collection of knowledge
in humanity's history.
It is 85% by and about white middle-class men.
That is only going to be perpetuated as AI scrapes this data.
But there are some quite funny ones.
The president of FIFA was given an award by South Africa
after the Football World Cup was held there,
but the official website took his name
from the most recent Wikipedia page, which had been vandalised,
and announced that they had given it to Joseph Sepp Bellend Blatter.
LAUGHTER
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
There's an Australian electronic band called
Peking Duck and they were playing in Melbourne in 2015,
and a fan went backstage and said, I'm the lead singer's stepbrother.
And for proof, he showed them the Wikipedia page,
which he had changed two minutes earlier.
Wow. Wow.
What's the biggest waste of time you can think of?
Oh, yes.
I think they call it doomscrolling.
Doomscrolling? Yeah.
When you're just on your phone looking at nonsense, scrolling...
I hear about this, but I've never done this in my whole life.
Oh, it's so... You never just found... You've gone.
"Oh, I've been here for six hours." Yes.
No. What are you looking at? Like, literally,
it's these sites like TikTok or Instagram,
where their algorithm has mapped
all the things you're mildly interested in.
So if you like cats and you like comedians,
it will find a cat comedian. Like, literally,
it knows you like things you don't even know you like.
And so you just, like, will addictively move
from one useless clip to a next.
OK, so I like Danish things and chainsaws. Is that a thing?
Sandi, now you've said that, the algorithm has heard this.
Danish women chain-sawing giant trees down.
I'm not on Facebook or TikTok or anything. I took everything off.
I've only got two apps left on my phone.
What are the two apps? Um, the only thing...
Left tit, right tit.
LAUGHTER
One's better than the other. One's better than the other.
But I think an app called I Feel A Right Tit is a very...
Meanwhile, what's that woman doing in the desert, Sandi?
Well, this is the thing - that you would not want to be able
to tidy up in a desert. What an incredible waste of time.
There was a guy called William Shanks.
He spent 20 years calculating Pi to 707 places.
But he made an error, which meant that all the digits
after 527 were wrong.
And it was not discovered until 62 years after his death.
He died in 1882, having wasted a great deal of his life.
Is it really a waste? Is it really a waste?
When he died, he thought he'd done it right.
So he died a happy man. That's the... That's the main thing.
That's the main thing.
Yeah, but he could have done something else.
But, like, nothing is pointless which brings you joy.
OK, so take this story and tell me whether you would have
gone this far. 2022, there was a man
in Uttar Pradesh called Tungnath Chaturvedi, OK?
And he had been trying to get 20 rupees back from a train ticket
since 1999, OK?
And he got it... I admire that. It took 23 years. Yeah.
Wow. So what happened was,
he asked for a refund on the spot and he was refused, right?
He went through 100 hearings, and, in the end,
he got his money back and his family were furious.
Said it was an incredible waste of time and money.
He said, "It's not the money that matters.
"This was always about a fight for justice
"and a fight against corruption. So it was worth it."
Yes! Yes! I like that.
This man...
Absolute legend. Yeah. Go for it.
Anyway, he got his money back.
My favourite of the things that you think,
"Wow, that's a waste of time, but good on you..."
1934, Paramount Pictures made an amazing film,
which I have seen and they called it It Ain't No Sin, right?
So as a publicity stunt,
what they did was they got a load of parrots in a room
and they continuously played them the name of the movie, right?
Wow. Continuously played them It Ain't No Sin, and the idea was
the birds would learn to say it, and then the studio would send one
to every single reviewer in the land
and the birds would keep saying the name of the movie.
Unfortunately, at the last moment, the movie, which starred Mae West,
had to change its name
because it was regarded as too risque.
So they changed the name to Belle Of The Nineties,
and so they had a load of parrots who could say,
"It ain't no sin! It ain't no sin!"
but it was completely pointless and they didn't send them to anybody.
Oh! Wow.
I know. Don't you love that?
Now, it's time for the second most pointless quiz on television -
General Ignorance. Fingers on buzzers, please.
My first question - do you have common sense?
Why Why Why by Shawn Mendes
Daliso? Naturally. Of course I do.
KLAXON Oh, OK...
I know... This is the first time
I am going to call to question that ringing.
OK, so what do you think is common sense, darling?
Common sense is, like,
acquired...um...logic...
Not... Acquired, like, um... More than logic.
It's just like homespun knowledge.
Right, so you can't really define it,
is that what you're saying?
Ah. I see your point.
Well, I think part of the problem is that we all disagree...
Oh, I see. ..about what common sense is.
So there was a team at the University of Pennsylvania in 2024.
They took a group of over 2,000 people,
and they asked them to look at more than 4,000 statements,
and then people had to rate them -
whether or not they thought they were common sense.
And the idea was that maybe if a large enough cohort of people
could agree on something,
that statement could be called common sense.
Yeah, yeah. It's incredibly personal. So the only things
that people could actually agree on were statements of fact.
So - a triangle has got three sides.
But statements, things like, "Numbers don't lie,
"we should always trust the math, all human beings are created equal,"
things like that seemed more divisive.
Those are the things that people would argue about.
And it's interesting - when they try and decide
to program AI systems using human common sense,
we're never going to agree as to exactly what that is.
I mean, a lot of it's passed down. That's the problem.
So, I still always have money in my purse
in case I need to use a phone box.
I mean, good luck with that!
I was at Paddington Station not that long ago,
and there was a young boy who hadn't got his phone,
and I taught him how to use a payphone.
Wow. And it was one of the nicest moments of my life.
Are you sure it wasn't a defibrillator?
And I felt great because it felt like all my training as a Brownie,
finally, 40 years later, come to fruition.
I bet that uniform still fits.
I still have it, and I still wear it.
Love that. Common...
LAUGHTER
Common sense is less common than common sense suggests.
What would a French person call this?
A chaise longue... Sorry.
Why by Annie Lennox
KLAXON BLARES
That was scary. Several things went off at once. Sorry!
What were you going to say?
A lady.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
So, not a chaise longue.
They used that for a different kind of chair.
A deck chair is a chaise longue.
Is it?!
It is. Yes, absolutely.
The thing that we have here is a meridian.
Meridian? Meridian.
From the Latin for "midday".
She looks really pissed off about it. She wanted a deck chair.
I'm so sorry... A chaise longue is a deck chair?!
It's a deck chair, yeah.
So, what have I got in my house?
Cos I was sold a chaise longue!
Why do we call that a chaise longue?
I mean, that is a long chair. Long chair.
Because the English are just much more straightforward about it.
"Oh, you want to get one of them long chairs..." Long chairs.
"..that you can lie on." "How long do you want it?"
So all that remains is to hand out the medals.
Let's see who gets what.
In last place, with -44,
it's Alan!
Next, with -6, Daliso!
In second place, but who's counting, with -5, Cariad!
And in first place, with the utmost wherewithal,
with three whole points... Come on!
..Susan. CHEERING
Thank you to Susan, Daliso, Cariad, and, of course, Alan.
And I leave you with this question
from American comedian Rita Rudner.
How come when you mix water and flour together,
you get glue, and then you add eggs and sugar and you get cake?
Where does the glue go?
Goodnight.