APPLAUSE
Go-oo-oo-ood evening, good evening, good evening, good evening,
good evening, good evening, good evening,
good evening and welcome to QI, for a show all about joints.
And joining me are the shapely ankles of Cal Wilson.
APPLAUSE
The sharp elbows of Jack Whitehall.
APPLAUSE
The cold shoulders of Jimmy Carr.
APPLAUSE
And hip, hip, hooray, it's Alan Davies.
APPLAUSE
But before we begin, let's hear your buzzers. And Jack goes...
# The finger bone connected to the hand bone. #
And Jimmy goes...
# The hand bone connected to the wrist bone. #
And Cal goes...
# The wrist bone connected to the arm bone. #
And Alan goes...
# The minute you walked in the joint. #
Oh, and then you walked in the joint.
Joint, J for Joint.
J for Joint, very good. Excellent. All right.
Well, now, Alan, we're going to make your life a little easier,
- we're going to lower the lights here. - I can go home? - Yeah...
SLOW MUSIC PLAYS
Right. Now, Alan...
Oh, this is unfair. Alan gets a girl. I've got Jack!
Jack's a girl.
Steady, steady.
I'm going to ask Alan a very specific question now.
Can you feel your sphincter relaxing?
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
It's a perfectly innocent question.
I must say, I thought it was until you asked me.
Well, what you might have said is, "Which sphincter?"
Oh, of course. Oh.
Because you may not know this, but you have many sphincters.
Oh, I know a thing or two about sphincters.
Tell me about sphincters.
I once had... This may not be an appropriate story.
I certainly hope not.
I once had a bladder complaint, this is not STI, it was just,
I was getting up in the middle of the night to pee.
Why are you looking at me when you say that?
Because I thought you would understand.
If you go to the doctor, sometimes they say, "We're going to put a camera in and explore,"
and it was in my bladder, there was a bit of an issue.
So they decided to get a camera and just pop it in my bladder.
And obviously the easiest way to get in is to, is to...
Is through the schlong.
And I thought,
I imagined the camera would be like the width of a human hair.
- It was like a pen. - Ow!
- And they fed it in, and it was about ten years ago I had this... - What..?
And it was about ten years ago,
and it was a lovely nurse that was doing the procedure,
and as she fed it, she went, "What do you do for a living?"
Trying to start a conversation at this awkward moment.
"What do you do for a living?" I went, "I'm a comedian."
And she went, "Tell us a joke."
And it is a matter of professional pride that I did.
Oh, well done.
They offer you the DVD, though, at the end, if they've put a camera in you, you get the DVD.
- They do. - But for what eventuality? My dad got one...
YouTube.
..of the inside of his things, but, like, when is that appropriate? At Christmas?
"Oh, let's not watch the Great Escape this year,
"let's watch your dad's stomach."
The Great Escape is when they pull it out.
Ow!
But then, the reason I mentioned that is because there are two sphincters on the way in.
And the painful bit is when go, "We're just going to go through the sphincter,
"you might feel a little tightening."
"You might feel a little something." It's got a camera in it.
I love the way it looks like you're playing snooker or something.
Just going to hit the camera into the...
The point is, a sphincter is a ring of muscle that can contract
and expand, and we'd lowered the lights so that your eye sphincters,
your optic sphincters will have dilated your eyes, Alan.
So your sphincters will have relaxed, we hope.
All of my sphincters are clenched.
There's no photographing my innards this evening.
They can expand or contract, excite and delight.
We have an endoscope here that you may... No, we don't, don't worry, it's all right. No, it's fine.
You really were worried.
I did have a similar experience to Jimmy's in New Zealand.
I was going for a lady's examination, and so lying there with
this doctor doing the examination and she's just tinkering away.
And then she goes, "Haven't I seen you on Thank God You're Here?"
Which is a TV show back home.
And I went, "Yes, but why are you recognising me now?"
I went to get something looked at, which was a sort of rash
near the top of my leg, so it was a slight worry.
It turns out it was nothing, but I didn't know that at the time,
and I went to have it examined and he did the thing where he recognised me, but thought I was George Lamb.
He said, "Oh, you're that guy, George Lamb."
And I was about to correct him, but I thought,
"If that is an STI, I'd rather him thinking
"that George Lamb had it than I did."
Anyway, so, you've got, the other thing is,
you even have within your capillary system, your blood system, each has
a little sphincter, so the chances are we probably have thousands.
Nobody quite knows how many sphincters we have.
We have thousands and thousands of them.
So, now, what is this?
- Snake. - Excuse me? - Is it a snake? - Oh dear!
- What a shame. - Is it a legless lizard? - Yes, it's the right answer.
- It's a lizard. - How can you tell it's drunk?
Because it keeps going, "I love you! You're great."
"Come here."
- "Don't go, have another one." - Yes, it is.
Snakes, you think of as looking like that
but lizards can look like that too.
They don't have to have legs.
In fact, two thirds of that is tail.
Real snakes have got movable jaws.
HE GRUMBLES
And lizards don't.
Your thinking of dogs.
That was uncanny, wasn't it? It was like a snake was in the room.
For a moment there, I was, "Whoa!"
Also the eyes are very different.
Snake eyes have this particular film over them.
Another difference, of course, I don't have a lizard in my trousers.
- Ladies! - Dear, oh dear.
In England, you get...
Adders, vipers and grass snakes.
And there is another kind that I had in my garden in Norfolk not long ago,
which is a slowworm.
Which is neither a worm nor a snake but again is a legless lizard.
My brother had them, I think, when he came back from school once.
He had them? Oh, you mean in his tummy?
- Yeah. - Seriously?! - Yeah, and we couldn't lick the loo seat.
Not that we were licking the loo seat before.
He was accused of doing that at school
and we had to get rid of them because he had the worms.
- But that looks a lot bigger. - They accused him of licking the loo seat?
No, because that's how you get worms.
- By licking the loo seat?! - Yes! You lick the loo seat.
I thought you said Lucy.
- The loo seat. - That is definitely my first fact of the evening.
There we are. Off to a flyer.
Like the loo seat and you will get worms of the belly.
You will get more than worms, you will get universal contempt.
That's far worse.
You can get STIs from loo seats, interestingly, Stephen,
but only if you sit down before the last guy has got up.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
STI - is that Sexually Transmitted Information?
Sexually Transmitted Information should be a thing, shouldn't it?
It sounds like the late-night version of QI though, doesn't it?
- The adult after-12 edition. - Yes, STI. - Provocative questions.
I like the sound of it.
All right, now. Let's play Stick The Knees On The Elephants.
You should have cards with elephants on,
and you should have little red dots,
and you have to stick your red dot on the knees of the elephant. Simple as that.
It's a little fun art/craft thing that you can do.
I feel a little bit like we're in, we've under-performed
- and we've been taken to a special class. - More or less right.
Where it's mainly arts and crafts and colouring-in
- and you can't fail, we've all done very well. - That's right.
I'm just doing polka dots.
Very sweet, but try and do it on the knees of the elephant if you can.
I think elephants have got a lot of knees.
That's my, that's my... Because, otherwise,
why would you have given us this many dots?
It is a lot of dots. You don't have to use all the dots, I may say.
This elephant's actually got the same thing that Jack used to have
at the top of his thigh.
- Turns out it was nothing, but it was a real worry. - Yes.
- I've marked his sphincter on there as well. - So have I!
- Well done. - Oh, snap. - We've got matching sphincters.
All right, so if you'd like to present and show?
Sorry. Sphincter, eyes, because it's nice to get to know them.
And four knees.
Can you tilt the cards forward so they're not too shiny?
They reflect on the camera.
OK. I've gone, I've gone four knees on each.
Are you tilting it forward as asked? You're not, are you?
I can't get taken down to a lower class than this, can I?
I'm already doing arts and crafts.
- Dear, oh dear, oh dear. - These are knees.
- Well, I mean... - I've gone knees on the front, none on the back.
Everyone except Alan has at least managed to put dots on the knees,
which are at the back of the elephant, because the front two joints are elbows.
Oh.
All mammals essentially...
Whoa, whoa, you're going to have to back up there a little bit.
He's got elbows on his leg...?
On his front legs, yes. His front legs are essentially arms.
I mean, the bones in his front leg are the radius and the ulna,
just like ours.
They're essentially walking on their hands and on their hind legs.
And we may think of elephants with four knees,
they don't, they only have the two knees at the back.
The two front ones are elbows. It seems unlikely, but it's true.
That means my interesting fact that the elephant
- is the only animal in the world that has four knees is complete rubbish. - Exactly.
It's a common fact on the internet and it's a lie.
- Wow. - And any zoologist will tell you so.
I felt sorry for an elephant the other day.
I watched it and the new BBC show, Planet Earth Live.
- Oh, don't talk to me about that. - With Richard Hammond on it.
He was stood in front of all these elephants
in one of his tragic midlife-crisis necklaces
and it definitely had ivory on it.
It did! It had a little thing! That's probably one of his cousins. Get him!
They put Richard Hammond out in the middle of the night
with lots of lions around
just hoping that he would be savaged live on television.
I'm afraid it's minus ten to everybody except Alan. There you go.
That's very good. So, well done, Alan.
In fact, you got it right in the end.
No, I didn't, I put two knees, I thought it only had two knees...
- Which it does. - But I put them on the front, where the elbows are. - Oh, you put them...did you?
Oh, OK, well yes, you get the minus ten, sorry about that.
We can have here... A man here.
- How many legs does a sheep have, according to him? - Four.
- None. - If you go into a butcher, you can order a leg of lamb or two legs
but if it was from just the one lamb, you could have...
Two legs and two drumsticks.
- We have leg of lamb and we have... - Shoulder.
Shoulder. They call the front legs of the lamb the shoulders.
And if it was a pig, what are the front legs of a pig called?
- Drumsticks. - No, they're not drumsticks - Sausages.
No, they're not sausages either.
No. Hands. It's a hand of pig if you go into a butcher.
- The call them hands. - Hand of pig? - I've experienced hand of pig before.
- I'm sure you have. - I've apologised. Don't go on about it.
- That's why you're on that side. - Exactly. It's a court order.
- By the way, how does an elephant drink? - With its trunk.
Oh, Alanny-wanny-woo.
SIREN
There's a sense in which, prepositionally, you were correct, because it does drink with...
I don't understand that.
You said with its trunk, you didn't say THROUGH its trunk.
It doesn't drink through its trunk,
- but in a sense it does drink with its trunk. - It scoops it into its mouth.
Because it sucks it up and then blows it back into its mouth.
They drink to forget, don't they?
So they don't suck it up or they'd drown, it's their nose,
like if we drank through our nose, we would be in real trouble.
- You can do Tequila shots through your nose, can't you? - Oh, yes, you can.
- You can, yeah. I mean it's not, it's not a way to hydrate. - No.
You know how sometimes if you were violently ill and you're sick
and it comes out your mouth and your nose,
could an elephant vomit out of its trunk?
I wouldn't be surprised if it could. And I don't know if anybody's been cruel enough to experiment on making
an elephant dependent on cocaine, because that would be, that would be
a pretty extraordinarily expensive habit, wouldn't it, really?
I view that as the highest calling of the stand-up comedian.
If you're doing a concert and you can time a joke
- so that someone's taking a sip and it comes out of their nose. - Yeah, that is, isn't it?
It's the best thing when they've ruined their evening.
Ah! Covered in snot and booze.
Imagine if you made an elephant laugh so much
something came out of its trunk.
And then it applauded. With its hands.
The front of house staff at the Savoy Theatre, many years ago,
when Noises Off, the Michael Frayn thing,
told me that every single day there were wet seats,
people wet themselves laughing.
- Isn't that because elderly people go to the cinema? - No.
I mean the theatre.
I did a gig in Reading, Reading Festival, and I was doing so well
on stage actually someone in the audience wet himself,
straight into a bottle and then threw it at me.
- That's how good I was doing. I was that funny. - Does that really happen?
- Hit me straight on the head. - Does that really happen?
Monsters of Rock at Donington, they do that, don't they?
Well, they throw stuff up onto the stage.
Yeah, full of urine. It didn't break though?
Well it's like when Bono was meant to play at Glastonbury
and then he pulled out and I'd been literally saving up
months' worth of piss to throw at him
and I had to wait for the entire year.
- You poor thing! - Had about that much, like a vat.
A water cannon.
Poor Bono, he does come in for it, doesn't he? Bless him. Anyway.
He did his back in, that's why he couldn't do it though,
which is fair enough because I imagine my back would be pretty sore
- if I'd spent the last 20 years with my head up my own arse. - Whoa!
APPLAUSE
Oh, wow. Wowzeroony.
So, yes. Yes, your skeleton is just like Jumbo's but, apart from that,
what else do we have in common with elephants, uniquely with elephants?
- Tusks. Tusks. - We don't really have tusks though, to be honest.
- We do, big tusks. - Walruses and others animals do.
Oh, I'm thinking of walruses, sorry.
Is it after a certain age you get the horrible whiskers under your chin?
Oh, now, you just said, what's the last word you said?
- Chin. - That's it, it's as simple as that.
Very oddly, the only mammals that have chins are humans and elephants.
You may say, hang on, dogs have chins, no they don't.
- Wow. - They don't have chins.
Look at that real chin bone, chin bone on the right,
the right, the elephant, the left, the human. But no, obviously there's a big difference
but they both have chins.
The elephant one, the actual face structure looks a bit like
one of those women on Made In Chelsea. It does!
Because they do, all those women on Made In Chelsea look like
a horse that's swallowed an anvil and it's just sitting there.
I was watching it on 3D TV the other day, and one of them started talking
about her gap year and I was nearly knocked off my sofa.
That PG Wodehouse thing about the sort of goofy upper class person
who looked as if he'd swallowed a laundry basket.
You know, that sort of thick neck, and huge Adams apple.
And a constant look on their face
like they've just forgotten their own name, like...
Absolutely right.
And the weird thing is, nobody quite knows why we have chins, as it were.
We know that they're extremely useful for various things -
speech and so on - but do we have a chin because we can speak,
or do we speak because we have a chin?
- No-one knows why we've got a chin? - To grow beards on it.
There are things we can do with it. I agree, we can stroke it.
I am currently peacocking, which is what I'm doing with this.
- Are you? - Yeah, this beard is peacocking. That's what I'm doing.
In as much as it's an attractive display to attract women?
To impress, yes, for ladies.
So the ladies in here are currently impressed by this.
I am peacocking with my beard. I know they may not be showing it.
Try and peacock less camply, if you're pursuing ladies.
OK.
It's just a suggestion, if it's the ladies you want to attract.
- "Yeah. Oi, babes, check this out." - That's better, there you go.
"I call it the clunge sponge!"
- Whoa! - Too far? - Maybe. Maybe.
- Split the difference. - Split the difference. - OK.
Oh, dear!
The ancient Greeks used it for earache,
Columbus took 80 tonnes of it to America
and Henry VIII made it compulsory.
- What am I talking about? - Hang on, what's the theme of the show?
- Joints. - Yes. - I'm going to guess marijuana.
Marijuana is the right answer. Hemp. Cannabis.
So he took 80 tonnes to America? You're saying he is a trafficker?
You're saying Columbus was a drug trafficker.
He must've had a very big sphincter.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
It was pretty enormous.
Got a joint in his hand there.
As you probably know,
cannabis plant is also used for the creation of hemp as ropes.
He had tonnes of it just on his ship alone, of rope made from hemp.
Also, under King James, it was made compulsory for the colonials
to grow it and use it because they mostly wore hemp clothing.
Hemp is used as an oil, a lubricant, all kinds of things.
You can buy hemp oil now.
By the middle of the 19th century, cannabis was recommended
by the US Pharmacopeia for the following disorders - neuralgia,
tetanus, typhus, cholera, rabies, dysentery, alcoholism, anthrax,
leprosy, incontinence, snakebite, gout, tonsillitis and insanity.
- That seemed to be a list of pretty much everything there. - It did, didn't it?
If you went into the chemist, they only had one thing.
"What have you got?" "Well, I'll have a think."
Well, there's a good word for that - panacea. The cure all, literally.
They did more or less think it was a panacea, as they did many drugs.
They did with heroin when it came out and cocaine.
In defence of both of those, it will take the edge off.
There are still people who believe it.
They are very keen for the legalisation of medicinal marijuana.
It seems weird that we haven't got medicinal marijuana
but we have got medicinal heroin.
- Yes, isn't it? - That's an odd quirk.
I suppose so except that there is no real painkiller available
except the one that we get from the poppy
which includes morphine and heroin.
We just can't make a drug that does the same thing.
- Mummy's hugs. - Mummy's hugs and kisses. You sweetheart!
- That's so lovely. - And if they don't work, heroin.
You've got it spot on the money, Jack, absolutely.
It is illegal to sell the seeds of cannabis in America
except in one circumstance. Can you imagine what that might be?
Is it if you want to grow a beanstalk?
No, it is for birdseed, funnily enough.
Birdseed can have cannabis seeds in it.
Anyway, there we are. So, what next? Oh, let's have another
pin the something on the something round, shall we?
Because we enjoyed that last time enormously, didn't we?
So let's pin the knee on the bird.
Stick a little sticker on the bird's knee. That's all you have to do.
Well, it's never going to be where I think it's going to be.
In the knee bit.
Oh.
Or it could be a double bluff.
Oh, not a double bluff.
Well, I'm going to put in an early pitch for there.
- I'm going to say it's got a knee in its neck. - Right.
And that's how it bends its neck, and it's a little quirk of nature.
Oh, and Jack's put one on his...
- You're not putting it on the knee, where the knee is! - But he bites it.
No, because the bendy bit would be... Oh, no. That could be a little camp arm.
But the wings are going to be the arms this time, aren't they?
The wings are the arms, aren't they? The wings are the arms.
The wings are the arms.
- The legs have got the knees in. - The legs have got the knees in, definitely.
- Where they bend in the middle. - STEPHEN SPEAKS GOBBLEDYGOOK
- I'm going knees, I'm going in. - Going in, he's going in, ladies and gentlemen.
I'm feeling a double bluff.
You're covering the animal with red dots, Cal.
No, I've just given it a perm.
You're giving it a cock's comb.
There we are, so you've.. Ah, dear. I'm afraid, Alan,
you've fallen into our little trap.
No shit.
Those are not the knees.
People think birds' knees goes backwards, those are ankles.
Ah, you see.
- I thought there was going to be something like that. - Here, maybe?
There. Now, Jack, points for Jack.
You lose one for the bottom one, which is the... Forget that one, in fact.
Is this an unusual flamingo,
in that it's got a duck coming out of its arse?
It's pretty hard to deny.
Where are the duck's knees, for goodness sake?
Ask the flamingo.
Yeah. Well, there are the knees, at the top.
They're usually covered in feather. And the bottom bit is the ankle.
I know it seems strange.
So there's a chance, if you kicked a flamingo in the knees
and the balls at the same time, that's some pain, isn't it?
- Whoa, yes. - Because they must be in the same sort of area.
Yes. They don't really have testicles, though, do they?
I mean, they have little sexual parts.
Well, so as do I.
It would be quite an unnerving sight,
as flocks of flamingos flew overhead,
if they did have dangling testicles.
Yeah, boy, girl, boy, girl, boy, girl.
It would be very worrying.
- So, have I got a point? - I think so, Jack, yeah. Yeah.
There's an apple for you.
Oh! Oh, I can't tell you how much that works.
- That always works with me. Thank you. - There's more where that's from. - Bless you. Apple for me.
Starts with an apple, next thing you know, you're in some sort of therapy. Be careful.
Behave. What did Glaswegian women lose on their wedding night?
A fight.
A fight!
A fight with a Glaswegian man.
A long battle against alcoholism?
It's, I mean not necessarily Glaswegian, but I mean...
Oh, their chips.
In the past, it was a very traditional thing on your wedding,
to lose, almost as a dowry, and the men would be given it
as a 21st birthday present, it would be the loss of their..?
Teeth.
Teeth is the right answer.
Have them all out in one go, have a few days of eating milk
and bread and then have dentures put in.
It was considered a good thing. It would save you all dentistry bills for the rest of your life.
- My mother was offered this. - Was she?
My mother got offered this when she was a young woman,
I think she was about 18, she was nursing in Limerick, I think,
and she went in to see her dentist about like a back tooth,
and he tried to convince her to have all her teeth taken out.
He just went, "Well, you've got, I mean, you've got quite
"good teeth, but really, it's going to be expensive over the years.
"You know what, we've got an offer on,
"I will take all of these out and we can just put in dentures.
"And dentures really are the future."
It does seem a bit odd, it does seem that
the woman getting her teeth out on her wedding night
is more of a present for the husband, really, doesn't it?
There are advantages, you might say, yes, absolutely, that there
could be pleasurable outcomes.
That was unfortunate!
Stop it and behave. So...
You'd be very good on those sex chat lines.
"Would you like a pleasurable outcome with your little sexual bits?"
Let's return to the 19th century and think about false teeth.
- Now, what were false teeth made of in those days? - Wood.
They were. Wood was used. Supposedly George Washington...
- Abraham Lincoln had wooden false teeth. - Well, yes, he did.
And he would fall asleep in Congress,
or wherever they sit and they were sprung loaded, these things,
so if you relax your jaw, the spring would fire them out of your mouth.
That's absolutely right, they did.
They did have springs, in France, in particular, they had
holes in their gums with, so they would sort of hang the tooth on it.
I was looking at my granny the other day and I had a really good idea, OK.
This is what I'm going to pitch when I go on Dragons Den, is to create
some dentures that clamp shut every time they sense racism coming out.
It would be brilliant, wouldn't it?
As soon as she starts... Doof! You'd get through a lot at Christmas.
"I've got nothing against them personally, but..."
I think the word, the word "but" would be the key, wouldn't it,
the trigger word. "I'm not racist, but..."
Yeah.
Teeth is the answer.
Well, yes, exactly.
I think they used teeth.
They did, but whose teeth could they use?
Well, either... Did poor people sell their teeth?
Yes, poor people did sell their teeth.
And also I think dead people.
- But a particular kind of dead person. You were not allowed to rob a grave. - Are we not?
- Not a grave, no. So there are other places... - Oh!
I know, it's disappointing.
I'm in a lot of trouble.
There are other places where you might find too many dead bodies,
of healthy young men, usually, who might have good teeth.
- Oh, battlefields. - Battlefields is the right answer. - How depressing.
What became known as Waterloo teeth. It became almost your patriotic duty,
if you lost a tooth, to fit in that of a dead soldier from Waterloo.
There were these scavengers who went around the battlefields
pulling out the teeth of the dead bodies
and sending them back in barrels, and people would buy them
and fit them into the holes where their teeth were, and use them.
Barrels? How many people died?
- Well, thousands died in the Battle of Waterloo. - Barrels, wow!
Yes, yeah, and each head had 32 teeth in it.
And the dead horses, their teeth were sent to the people from the Only Way Is Essex.
Absolutely right. Spot on. Spot on.
But right up until the American Civil War and past the 1860s,
they were called Waterloo teeth, even though, of course, that was,
the Battle of Waterloo was in 1815, so it was, you know, 45 years later.
There's a tourist attraction in Victoria in Australia
called Casper's World In Miniature. It's all a bit bonkers.
Then you get to the end of it, you walk into this room
and suddenly you're in this room full of sculptures made out of human teeth.
- Oh, my goodness! - Crazy things like a tooth fairy made out of human teeth
and a hamburger made of human teeth and a castle made out of human teeth!
The horrible thing is, because it's food,
you're looking at a hamburger and you wonder what it would taste like,
and you think about teeth on teeth. It's very grotesque.
- And this is in Victoria? - In Victoria in Australia.
And then, we went through this exhibition, all quite disturbed,
and we walked out through the gift shop
and there was an elderly man sitting there eating mashed banana
- because he had no teeth! - Oh, my God!
I always find whenever I'm in Melbourne,
I can't get the image out of my head when they say,
"There's a terrible crime," or something like that,
"Victorian Police were soon on the scene,"
and I picture truncheons, moutaches, "How now, then!"
You just can't help...
Victorian police just means something very particular.
Absolutely.
There's a story you may have come across in the newspapers
not that long ago about a Polish dentist.
Does that ring a bell? A female Polish dentist?
She got revenge on someone by...
Her lover left her.
And she took out all his teeth.
Her lover left her and then went to see her when he had,
stupid idiot, went to see her when he had toothache,
and she took all his teeth out.
Apparently, it was in all the newspapers, but it's bollocks.
Can you imagine, something in British newspapers that isn't true?!
- She took his bollocks out? - No, no.
What she should have done is taken all the teeth out
and then made a little hole in his scrotum and put them all in there.
Just loose and then sewn it up again.
Yes, that is a much better idea.
I think we can all agree she missed a great opportunity.
He just would have had a bag of teeth hanging around there.
Oh!
But you can have a look at this little device. What do you think that might be?
I think it's a piece of dental equipment, Stephen.
It's certainly a piece of dental equipment.
I pieced that together myself.
I need that more specifically.
I bet it's a tongue clamp or something grotesque.
No, it's not a tongue clamp.
Oh, is it for snipping open the scrotum to put the teeth in?
Behave yourself, behave yourself!
Well, presumably to yank something out.
It looks like a yanky out thing.
It's not a yanky out thing.
Well, it kind of crosses over and it's got those sort
of cutting things, is it for making, turning the upper lip into a fringe?
I think it looks like you might jam it in somewhere, open it up
and then you could put the tooth in.
Ow! No, it's not that. It's called the masticator.
It's for people who had no teeth, you first chopped your food
up a little and then you really mash it up.
And so it's ready, you don't need your teeth to chew.
It basically just gets your food into a soft pulp.
That's it, exactly.
There was a very common belief in the...
Ow! You see.
A load of teeth have fallen out!
It's a valuable exhibit in the British Dental Museum and we're very grateful. Be careful with it.
- It's a rusty old tool. - You could use it on your apple.
- I could, couldn't I? - Remember? - On my lovely apple.
I might do that.
You're being very flirty, Jack. I quite like it.
So, anyway...
APPLAUSE
Yeah, that's...
My sphincter just tightened.
So...
Not for the first time this evening, I shouldn't wonder.
That's your masticator and...
It's not your sphincter, it's your masticator.
So, who's got noisy knees and a urine-soaked hairbrush?
Oh, who hasn't?!
A creaking knees is something that just happens to you.
It sounds like a parent complaint.
You know, your knees go and the kid's peed on your hairbrush!
That would indeed happen, but this is a very particular species.
My grandmother? We're returning to her.
Your grandmother's not coming well out of this programme, is she?
Racist, pissy gran!
- Is it a bushbaby? - No, it's not. It is a mammal.
It's an ungulate, you'll find it in Africa in the Savannah.
- What kind of ungulates do we find in the Savannah? - Richard Hammond.
- Klipspringers. Things like that. - Yeah. Antelopes.
It's a kind of antelope called an eland, which you may have heard of.
- There it is. Fine specimen. - I can't see it's hairbrush.
It's hairbrush is the tufty little bit up the top,
and the bigger and the maler they are, the bigger their hairbrush.
There it is. And they soak it in their own urine
in order to face off other males for the right to mate
and pass on their genes.
And what you were talking about was your display.
I sometimes soak this is urine. I don't want any trouble.
That's its hairbrush, anyway.
And it soaks it in urine, and this apparently is a big, butch thing to do if you're an eland.
But the other thing is it snaps its tendons over its legs
like a guitar string, which makes a really very loud noise,
and the thicker and the bigger the muscles of its leg,
the louder the noise, and hence the more chance it has of mating.
A lot of animals do make noises to attract mates in different ways.
I don't know any humans that get mates by...
When you get to a certain age, you get out of a chair
and something makes a noise, you go, "Was that me?"
Something creaks. A weird snap.
Or if you squat and go for a low shelf in the library,
as you stand up, there's a sound of crunching gravel as your knees...
I don't know at what age you start going, "Oohhh!"
when you sit into or get out of a chair.
Yes, it was a Billy Connolly point, wasn't it,
when you shout to pick something up - "Aaah!"
So true.
I had my son when I was 38, and so he's three now,
but he's grown up so that when he bends down to pick things up, he goes, "Uurghh!"
- Cos that's what Mummy does! - That's perfect!
THEY BOTH GROAN
My little girl, if you carry her up the stairs, she goes,
"Oh, so many stairs!"
- If you carry her! - She's copying me. They were virtually her first words.
I'm only 23 and I got depressed so much the other day
cos I turned down sexual intercourse with my girlfriend and the reason that I gave was cos I had heartburn.
23! That shouldn't be happening.
She said, "I'll give you anything you want."
I was like, "Some Rennie, some Rennie, quick!"
You need PPI, proton pump inhibitors.
Oh, I offered her one of them as well!
Well, really, that is sad news, a 23-year-old, you really shouldn't
be using that as an excuse not to have sex, to be perfectly honest.
That's not good enough. No. I can recommend a diet for you.
Come and see me.
- Anyway... - I knew this would happen.
- It involves nuts. - Stop it.
There is a new meaning to "We shall march on Whitehall."
- Who wrote The Cat In The Hat? - Dr Seuss.
SIREN
- I'm afraid, not Dr "Syooce", but Dr "Zoyce". - Zoyce.
He's spelt S-E-U-S-S, a Germanic name.
His real name was Theodor Seuss Geisel.
But there was a Dr "Syooce", and he did really propose something,
which is still held to be true today,
and I wonder if you might guess what that is.
- A scientific thing? - It is a very scientific thing, yes.
It doesn't look like he enjoyed it, though, does he?
Well, like a lot of Victorians, he does look a bit sombre
and solemn, shall we say.
Jack, Jack, it's a proper beard.
Physics? Chemistry? hats?
One that transformed the way we looked at the world, literally.
Glasses.
- I was trying to stress not "looked" but "world". - Geology. - Yeah.
He discovered by looking at rock formations and fossils,
there were so many strange things in common with the way
the different continents fit together.
Was he the guy that did continental drift?
Not so much continental drift,
but he had this idea that there was once one big super continent.
- Gondwanaland. - Which he called Gondwanaland, exactly.
He was the man who named it, and as you know,
New Zealand was one of the islands that spun off from it.
India, Africa, and you can see
where South America and Africa fit together like jigsaw puzzles.
That photo was taken earlier?
Quite a lot earlier, yes, millions of years earlier.
And that's what Dr Suess did, and he was pronounced Dr "Syooce",
as opposed to Theodor "Zoyce" Geisel,
who created The Cat In The Hat and Sam I Am and other such things.
His first children's manuscript story was rejected 27 times
because he was told it had no moral. There he is,
with his most famous creation, I suppose.
And he tried different surnames. He tried, for example, Rosetta Stone.
Quite a good idea.
And Theo Lesieg, "Lesieg" being "Geisel" backwards.
But in the end, Dr "Zoyce" was the one that caught on.
So anyway, Dr Edward "Syooce" is the man who first came up with
the idea of the supercontinent Gondwanaland.
So, what kind of glass does the Pope-mobile have in its windows?
Oh, probably, has he got the slidey kind so he can sell ice creams?
I imagine it plays the ice cream van music,
I'm not casting aspersions on the Catholic Church, but...
Now, be very careful.
- Stained glass. - Stained glass, that's a very good point.
- It's tinted. - How lovely would that be? - Tinted.
Is it tinted so like when they're all waving, everyone thinks that
he's in there doing that, but actually he's cracking open some tinnies, flicking the v's at people.
What else would you say about the glass?
You want us to say bulletproof, don't you, that's a thing, isn't it?
- I wouldn't, would I, want you to say what? - Bulletproof. - Oh!
SIREN
I'm afraid we're being very technical with you, there is
no such thing as bulletproof glass, by any manufacturer.
- That's cost me a fortune in my house! - It's bullet-resistant glass.
They don't claim it to be bulletproof. Four inches thick will do, it's layered with vinyl
and things in between to absorb the shock of the bullet.
But there's a really clever, which is one-way bullet-resistant glass,
where you shoot into it and the bullet does that,
but you can shoot out from the other side and it goes through.
If that gets fitted incorrectly...
- So the Pope could fire back. - You've got one shot.
I can't see how that could be possible.
It's because of the lamination. I can describe it to you if you wish.
It's because of the order in which the layers are assembled.
The shock absorber layer is on the inside, with the glass on the outside, was the reason.
That would be great if you could be shot by the Pope.
How exciting would that be?
He'd shoot you, "Yeah, you're going to hell, I've had a word."
He'd definitely do the sideways thing, wouldn't he?
Just as a matter of interest, how many Popes does the Vatican have per square kilometre?
- How many Popes? - Yeah.
Like, buried or in storage?
No, actually live, living Popes?
- One. - No.
There's actually 2.27 recurring, because Vatican City is only
0.44 of a kilometre, so the average would be, per square kilometre...
Well, I think we have it, ladies and gentlemen - the most annoying question ever asked.
I think we've done it!
I understand your point of view, you're quite right.
- Well, we weren't going to get it, were we? - No, you weren't.
So, anyway, how would you improve this plane here?
- How would you make it a bit safer? - Well, now... It's incomplete.
Well, I'm no aeronautical engineer, but I can see a flaw.
Yeah.
- Ryanair just get worse and worse, don't they? - They do, don't they?
O'Leary would charge you for the extra air conditioning.
Is it so you get a cheaper ticket if you bring your own fuselage?
When Michael O'Leary dies, they should put him in his coffin
and then build a grave that is slightly too small for the coffin to fit into,
- so it's just like that baggage thing that you have to try and put the baggage in. - Yes!
His family will be trying to shove him in, and when they can't,
- "Sorry, we'll have to charge you extra." - Oh, there would be much cheering.
No. This was a rather cunning insight that when airplanes returned
you know, battered and hurt like that, that one there,
as you can see, has been pretty badly hurt,
but it came back and the crew survived.
But the ones that didn't come back were hit elsewhere.
If you're hit there, you can clearly survive.
So spend the money on extra armouring
on the bits where it wasn't hit.
And that's where its knees are.
And there are the fine, four Merlin engines.
It's good, isn't it? It's a clever insight.
It is quite cunning. So there you are.
But now we're going to close, very excitingly, with a jolly jape,
which I like to do from time to time,
which is to bring out a really extraordinary mechanism, a device.
It's called the Strandbeest.
And if you know Dutch, you'll know that means...
- Er, Strandbeest. - Yeah. - It means "sexy good times, Def Leppard".
That's all the Dutch I know.
Strand is like English word strand, beach.
And beest, as in hartebeest or wildebeest,
is beast, basically. So it...
- A sand beast. - A sand beast.
So is this like a waiter that's done loads of tourists?
There's a man called Theo Jansen who's an extraordinary artist inventor,
- who has created this remarkable machine. Do you know about it? - It walks along.
It walks on the sand without any electronics
or anything else like that, just powered by the wind.
I mean, it's extraordinary. Come of the things it can do -
No metallic or electronic parts, remember that.
It can detect the tide coming in, walk away from the water,
anchor itself by hammering a pin into the ground,
that's what it looks like, if the wind is too strong.
It can even store up air in bottles when the wind is blowing
and release it to keep itself moving when the wind drops.
Lots of clips on YouTube,
but you have to go to Holland to see them live on the beach.
But through the magic of the next big thing in tech,
which is 3D printing, where you can print an object out.
This is a 3D printed object, it's entirely 3D printed.
It needed no extra thing except the propeller on the end.
Wow.
And this is a version of the sea beast.
And instead of blowing,
I'm going to use a little sort of electric fan, like so.
There we go.
Whoa, whoa! Sand beast!
Isn't that cool?
That's great.
And that was printed out?
But isn't that an amazing object?
Oh, it looks really spooky.
I can't believe you got that from a 3D printer.
- I know. - I feel like this is going to be bluff,
- that can't be a real thing. - I promise you it's true.
So how does it work? Is it a block of resin?
It's basically lasers fusing powdered plastic together.
Even though they consist of at least
76 separate moving interlocking parts,
they emerge from the printer ready to operate without the need for
further assembly, with the exception of the addition of the propeller.
- No way. - That's absolutely right.
- That is the future. - Isn't it amazing?
You want to make sure you hit the right number of copies.
- Yeah. - Don't you, when... Oh, 12, oh..
12, it does take rather a long time.
My house is full of sand beasts. Argh! There are sand beasts!
But they are becoming commercially available.
Now you can get a consumer 3D printer for about ?1,600.
Although it's available on the QI website for ?12.99.
I'm blown away by that, it's amazing.
I think we should, let's hear it for this amazing machine.
APPLAUSE
Brilliant.
Really impressive. How lovely.
Well, that brings us to the end of tonight's questions,
so please do join me now for the scoreboard.
We have a clear winner. With minus five points, it's Cal Wilson.
APPLAUSE
And a highly creditable blue and dewy-eyed second, with minus 24 is Jack Whitehall.
APPLAUSE
It's crowded at the bottom. That's a very unfortunate phrase.
With minus 45, in third place, Jimmy Carr.
- Minus 45? - APPLAUSE
But, six of the best behind, on minus 51, Alan Davies!
APPLAUSE
Thank you all very much indeed for watching. That's all from Jack, Jimmy, Cal, Alan and me.
Spend the rest of your lives being extremely good to each other. Goodnight.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd