Good evening, good evening, good evening, good evening,
good evening and welcome to QI.
What does encyclopaedia mean?
Because it sounds like a kiddy-fiddler on a bike.
LAUGHTER
No, I think...
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Sometimes it is very tricky, I grant you.
It could get an idiot into trouble. But...
That seems so...
LAUGHTER
No. I didn't mean that in that way.
I don't know what you're laughing at.
The entry for "woman" in the original version
of the Encyclopaedia Britannica just says, "the female of man, see homo."
LAUGHTER
He will tell you everything you need to know.
- Yes, exactly. Because he's their best friend. - Ah.
JIMMY LAUGHS
In the 1960s, an American called Dr Harvey Einbinder, who so
- hated the Encyclopaedia Britannica, he wrote a book... - I hate it!
Exactly, he wrote a book where he listed all the things that
were wrong in it. It was 390 pages long.
- Oh, I like the sound of him. - The Myth of Britannica.
- What's his name? - Harvey Einbinder. - Harvey. - Fabulous name, isn't it?
Does he only have one binder?
We meet at last, Mr Einbinder. Yes.
He's a massive binder!
Don't touch my binder!
- Maybe that's why he hated Encyclo... - This is the binder you seek!
Yes, Encyclopaedia Britannica has 52 binders and I only have one!
Ein Binder!
He might have pronounced it "ein BIN-der," for all I know.
Ein Binder!
Now, how was it composed, who wrote the entries and articles?
People on the internet.
- That's now. - Sorry, yes.
That was, that's your Wiki, your wicked-pedia.
- Was it a group of homos? - No, it wasn't a group of homos.
Well, if you ask a homo about everything, obviously they are...
- Yes, I see what you mean. - The homos are the...
I see where you're coming from.
No, it was experts in their chosen field.
Prince Edward.
So, no, in their day, contributors have included...
- Katie Price. - Sigmund Freud.
That would be now, but in the past included
Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Leon Trotsky, Harry Houdini.
I only know three of those people.
And there's strangely no women there at all,
is that because they're all off seeking homos?
LAUGHTER
- I'm incredibly sorry... - To ask.
I apologise, I didn't do the picture research for this particular
item, and if I'd found, I'm sure...
- That's all right, we're used to it, don't worry. - Maybe Marie Curie...
Someone must have written about baking in the book.
SHE LAUGHS SARCASTICALLY
Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!
I don't know if there's points given for bravery,
but there's a certain... I think there's a certain,
but I have to respect that slightly, just in terms of...
- That is panache, definitely. - I'm hiding in plain sight, Jimmy.
Yeah. And maybe, I'd like to think Marie Curie had been asked to do
- one on radiation, for example. - Yes. - Is she a good cook?
LAUGHTER
He keeps at it. You've got to hand it to him.
Just do that bit of singing again. With the...?
Just do that bit of singing again.
TREVOR SINGS AND CLICKS
That's the song.
You don't know me well, Trevor, but I'm on the turn, I'm telling you.
LAUGHTER
SPEECH DROWNED OUT BY LAUGHTER
You've only got Jason and Alan left to seduce, Trevor, I have to say.
- I think he's a cracking fella. - We're all...
LAUGHTER
So, now I want you to take one of those each,
and tie yourselves together, as it were.
- This has gone quite dark now. - It has, hasn't it?
Is it just me? It's like a party game in the '70s.
So put each one of those around your wrist.
No, no, don't undo it.
- Well, I can't get my hand through that, can I? - Oh sorry.
LAUGHTER
Little cock grab, that is.
- Try with this one. - Cock ring! - Swap.
- You can give me that one back. - That's more like it.
There we are. Put your wrists through.
- That's it, and then do that, so that you're tied together. - OK.
- Yes, is that right? - Is that good?
Yes, that, without undoing the knots, untie yourselves.
LAUGHTER
- Oh, I see. - Don't turn around, don't turn around.
That hasn't helped.
LAUGHTER
DAVID: No!
- No, that's it, you go through there. - Yes! - Yes!
No! Emphatically no!
- Completely not. - OK, hang on.
I'm going back up, I'm going back over.
LAUGHTER
Right, go, go through.
- Yes! - No!
Hang on, I've got it, I've got it. Right.
Right. I've got it. If I do a forward flip...
Now...
SUE: Right, let's see if we can get...
Oh, oh.
I think technically you are now married.
LAUGHTER
You have let...
I'm coming down, I'm coming down.
You two hold it for a second and watch,
because I think Sue is onto something.
OK. This is what we did
when we were regularly handcuffed together as children.
No, watch. You mustn't untie the knot. But...
Oh.
Yeah!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Well done. Brilliant!
So, moving on to self knowledge.
How do you know when you've had enough?
Someone always tells me.
It's normally, it's a tap on the shoulder, isn't it?
Yeah, I think Jimmy, Jimmy...
That's, it's the cold steel round both wrists.
LAUGHTER
And the clanging of the door.
And the one phone call.
JIMMY: One phone call.
I've had enough. Who am I speaking to?
LAUGHTER
This is, oh, this is exciting.
This is a remarkable substance.
It's called polyethylene oxide, and it's very gloopy
and also it reacts rather excitedly under ultraviolet light.
And Alan and Victoria, you've got ultraviolet torches
and you can point them at it.
I think we might have some ultraviolet light in the studio.
- Shall I point them now, sir? - Yes, please do.
Oh, look. See. Ooh!
Wow!
Now what I'm going to try and do, I'm going
to stand up to do this, it's a very remarkable effect.
The effect is, when you pour it, if I get it at the right angle,
it pulls itself out of the flask and into here.
It flows uphill and out and down again.
All right.
There we go, Oh, it's pulling itself up, it's pulling itself up,
you see what I mean? It's pulling itself up from the bottom.
If you look at the top one, it's actually flowing uphill there.
Did you see that?
And then it thins out into a little trail of snot.
I'll try that again, so we'll just get a few takes.
It's like when you have a wee after a Berocca, isn't it, that?
LAUGHTER
It is!
It's exactly what it's like. Oh, my goodness.
It's so disgusting. Polyethylene oxide, I don't know what else...
- What's it used for? - It's a very good masturbatory lubricant.
LAUGHTER
- Particularly in the dark. - Yeah.
APPLAUSE
- All right, we'll try again. - It's a little bit awkward
getting two friends to hold the torch though.
Yeah. There we go, that's pulling itself up there nicely.
APPLAUSE
Thank you.
On the subject of keeping still, how hard is it to be a nude model?
LOUD LAUGHTER
Don't you remember that, Alan?
- I do not remember that. - Oh, that was a good night.
It's the woman second from the left who seems to be, er,
most enjoying the view.
- The one with the orange scarf. - Was it cold? Were you being...
She's going to need a bigger pad than that, I tell you that.
They're all just drawing sections of you, aren't they?
I'll do the helmet.
Yeah, oh you're all right there, yeah.
Were you, were you being funny there, or...?
- That's not really him. - It's Photoshopped.
- Oh, it's not real? Oh! - No, we cleverly made it up.
LAUGHTER
I've got this little test for you. Here we are.
And with any luck, the audience might have some bubble wrap too.
They're waving their bubble wrap Thank you, audience.
Do not pop it. This is a really important exercise.
- What do you mean, don't pop it? - Don't pop it, do not...
- Ah! - No! No! No! This is really important.
- Why? - OK, OK. - No problem. Why not though?
This is a test of your worthiness. Don't pop it yet.
One of mine's already popped, I didn't do it.
No, that's all right, as long as you didn't,
because in 2013, a group of Yale psychologists, they found another
use for bubble wrap, which was to measure aggression, all right.
They showed pictures of cute animals, all right.
SUE SQUEALS
- Oh now, now, wait, wait, wait. - Oh, the two little chicks...
- Oooh. - Stop it.
People were told to pop bubble wrap as they watched.
They thought that it was a test for their motor activity and memory.
In fact, it was a test for what's called cute aggression.
If you see something very cute, you start popping more and more.
Not because they wanted to hurt the animals, but because they were
frustrated at not being able to touch them and cuddle them.
And this is called cute aggression.
It's when you kind of go, oooh, like that.
So, audience, hold your bubble wrap,
we're going to show you some very cute animals and it's all up to you.
Let's start with the cuteness.
- Oh, dear. - AUDIENCE: Aw!
- That's not, come on, that's not that cute. - Oh, it is.
- He looks sort of dead. - He's not that cute.
- He's kind of dead. - He's not that cute. I think he's been shot.
LAUGHTER
Oh! That's horrible.
- He does look like he's been shot. - Oh, the blue-eyed one.
- No, not that cute, not worth a pop. - All right.
Ah.
THEY ALL POP BUBBLE WRAP
- You did it! - Definitely.
Yeah, that's getting quite a few pops.
- Look at his little eye. - No, I'm not gone yet.
POPPING CONTINUES
I want a dog and then I'm going to pop my load.
LAUGHTER
- That's the first time I've heard that phrase since last night. - Yes, I know.
- Oh, there we go. - Aw! - AUDIENCE: Oh!
THEY POP BUBBLE WRAP
- That's pretty cute. - That was the last one. - Not cute, ginger.
LAUGHTER
Now, how can you knock a building down with a feather?
Like the Shard, for example.
You could knock it down, I could knock it down,
if I prepared things correctly, with a whisk of a feather.
- But not using any electronics. - A very, very large feather.
No, using, I've actually got the feather here that I'm going to use.
It's nice and pink, so it stands out.
That would be the feather I would use.
Do you tickle the architect while he's doing a,
coming up with the plans, so that they're all off? Like that.
- And it falls over. - And then they make it, oh, it didn't work,
well, Stephen was tickling me with a feather.
A cunning thought, but no, this is the existing, standing Shard.
And you could reduce that to rubble with a feather?
Yeah. Shall I show you? I'll show you the principle.
This is my little template to show me where I have to go.
You see, I've got them down here and here's my big, oh, my big load.
- Oops. - Steady.
There we go.
Now, what we've got here is, in varying sizes, kind of dominos.
You can see.
And the idea is that each one is just one-and-a-half times bigger
than the one before it.
And it may seem like a very little amount,
but what we're going to do is make a really loud bang with this.
- Is that meant to be like the Shard? - Dominos, it's the domino effect.
- You would aim this at the Shard. - Yes.
And you would only need 24 of these.
Each one just one-and-a-half times bigger than the one before it.
- That's the point. - To bring down the Shard.
You'd only need 24, and the last one would utterly destroy it.
- Really? - Blimey.
It would be, it's the exponential increase of mass,
just by going one-and-a-half times bigger.
It's all right, it can only fall, yeah.
I've got a splinter off my broom now.
LAUGHTER
Careful, careful. Right, here we go.
We've just made the security services' job
that much more harder, you can bring down the Shard...
Here we go, so you imagine...
Who needs to hijack aircraft any more, QI's given it away.
So you imagine this increasing up to just 24,
and you'd start with one movement of a feather,
and all the potential energy stored in these and all
the mass of them like that, and you just have that effect like, whoa.
- Wow! - There you go.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Excellent.
- That's pretty good, isn't it? - Yeah. - That's brilliant.
Recent research, however, from the Australian National University
suggests that good-looking men earn 22% more
than not good-looking men.
- Because they're attractive? - Yeah, yes.
Or because they're from Australia?
No, no, within Australia, they're all Australian.
Within Australia, the 22 better-looking percentage.
A study of female golfers also found that they were better,
they shot lower scores.
And the theory is that they were more likely to have
offers of sponsorship, and therefore just played that much harder,
knowing how much money they would make.
Surely it's about confidence as well.
If you look in the mirror and you think, oh-ho-ho, I'm a dish,
then you get out there and think, and I can play golf.
Yeah, I suppose that's right.
- But if you look in the mirror and weep. - And think, what a dog.
Well, I look in the mirror and I like it.
And so you bloody well should.
I never look in a mirror, my partner's much taller than me
and she put them all up, so I have never seen...
LAUGHTER
I don't have mirrors, I have windows at street level
and I just pretend I'm different people.
LAUGHTER
I just walk past at the same time and go, I'm looking good today.
Best get out to that meeting quick, while I've got that nice suit on.
Oh, dear.
And then I realise I'm wearing a bin bag.
Now we have a Knick-Knack exploding custard powder experiment.
For something to explode, you need certain things,
you need something to light, in this case custard powder.
You need something to light it with and you need oxygen.
But you need a little bit more than that,
because if I try and light this custard powder, you will see...
Boof!
LAUGHTER
- ..That nothing happens. - The trick custard powder, ha-ha-ha!
I blew his arm off! Ha-ha-ha.
It doesn't, the whole point is, nothing happens.
Nothing would happen to that, it's custard, you fool.
- I bet Heston could make it burn. - Ah. He couldn't in this state. - No?
What you need, in order to get something like custard,
or any powder, even metallic powder, to burn and really burn,
is one of these ordinary everyday objects like this.
As you may see, I have a funnel
and I have some safety glasses,
to save my beautiful eye lashes.
And I have a lighter.
I miss Jacques Cousteau.
And I have a pump.
HE MIMICS BREATHING UNDERWATER
I have a pump that rather wants to fall over.
So we'll just raise this here. So it doesn't fall over.
OK, now.
LAUGHTER
What I'm going to do...
I don't want to know what you're going to do!
What I'm going to do is
I'm going to pour the custard powder in this funnel.
And I'm going to, I'm going to present a flame across it.
- ALAN GASPS - Yes. Yes. Be afraid, be very afraid.
Can I use Alan as a human shield?
No, you, you're the shield, you're new!
Oh, my God!
Oh, ho-ho-ho!
There's flame, there's custard powder in there.
I feel the need! The need for speed!
- All I need to do... - Where are you going?!
Why the fuck am I next to it?!
I'm going to the pump.
I'm just going to the pump, because I'm going to pump...
We are now nearer than you!
Can you see what I'm going to do? I'm pumping air...
There's just too many double entendres, you pumping custard.
Stop it. Are your ready for me to pump the custard?!
Oh, my God, don't do it!
LAUGHTER
All right.
Oh, God!
Yes, I'm ready for you to pump your custard.
I need a countdown from the audience.
This is not how I wanted to go, I've got to be honest.
Audience, I want you to count me down from three...
AUDIENCE: Three, two, one... Go!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Wasn't that dangerous?!
Well, I've got, it's quite warm there actually.
- There's... - Can you feel the heat? - Yeah, I can feel the heat.
If I'd been sitting there, I could have been,
I could have been ignited.
You could have been covered in hot custard.
- Nobody knows what colour petrol is. - Well quite, exactly.
Because it goes into your car and you don't see it.
That's right. It could be any colour. And no-one has ever checked.
Nobody's ever gone, what colour is this?
They used to have pink or blue diesel, didn't they, for farmers.
- Yeah, red diesel. - For farmers.
Which you are not allowed to put in your car, and I don't.
No. Quite right.
Evading tax, Jeremy, it's a slippery slope!
All right, now.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Just saying.
There's various people who were given the title of
"the last man to know everything there was to know."
Erasmus, Leibnitz, Von Humboldt, and this man here, Kircher, his name is.
He was a German Jesuit, Athanasius Kircher.
And he certainly was very interested in lots of things,
he was lowered into Vesuvius, he believed the Bubonic plague
was caused by microbes, well ahead of germ theory.
Claimed falsely to have interpreted Egyptian hieroglyphics.
He regarded things like magnetism
and love as branches of the same topic, attraction,
which is a very QI way of looking at things, I like that.
- Yeah, yeah. - But the cats though, what are the cats doing?
Well, we'll come to that. Some things he got right.
He denied the possibility of flying tortoises.
LAUGHTER
I don't know who'd raised the possibility,
but he damn well squashed it and said, no,
- there won't be such a thing as a flying tortoise. - Rubbish.
But he did invent the megaphone, and the Katzenklavier.
Klavier is in fact German for key, from Klaven, Latin, key,
but it's a keyboard instrument.
Key. The cat playing the piano, he invented YouTube.
LAUGHTER
I'm afraid for cat-lovers
it's a little bit more disturbing than that.
Oh, cat string, gut string.
No, not cat gut, no, arrange live cats in the right order,
- according to their voice. - Oh.
- And you play... - Drums. - And there you go.
Oh, brilliant.
Oh. That's awesome! Oh if only they had YouTube back then.
LAUGHTER
The outrage on the cat's face.
It's another thing for your list, isn't it?
It's on the list. Yes, right up there. Ho-ho.
You've got to get one of those.
Their tails are fixed in place underneath hammers.
When a key is pressed, the hammer hits the corresponding,
you can even get chords and of course there's dynamics.
- The harder you hit, it the more of a yowl. - ALAN MEOWS
It wouldn't necessarily have to be cruel, you could get the same
mechanism, but just have it sort of tickle the bollocks of a cat.
So it's more like, "meow!" As opposed to, "MEOWWW!"
- For a trill. - Yeah.
HE MEOWS THE DOGGY IN THE WINDOW
What do they think, that you have an A cat and a B cat?
- Yeah. - And a C cat? - I guess you just go round.
- Fantastic. - Yeah. Fantastic.
But there are only six cats and there are more than six keys, so...
Well, that's true, that's a limited range, it's very...
- Experimental music. - Experimental music.
All the other keys hit mice inside the box.
Ah, very good.
Look at this. Phil, I've got this.
- Ooh! - Wow, Christmas party! - Yeah.
- Snow balls. - Yeah. Absolutely. - Oh, I'll have some of that!
It's going to be quite a violent reaction to this.
I'm sure you've all seen dry ice as they call it. And I've got here,
this is sort of bubbles, you blow...
- I don't know where that's going... - Blow bubbles.
So what we're trying to do is make little, little smoky bubbles.
It's a little sort of Christmassy effect, here,
God, I hope I can get the lid on in time.
YELPING AND LAUGHING
- Woo! - Get down there.
Woo, hey, yeah, woo!
What are you doing, Fry?! Get the lid on.
- No! No! - Get the lid on!
PHIL YELPS
Lid, lid! Lid is on, lid is on! Lid is on.
It's going everywhere!
LAUGHTER
Bubbles. Here are my little bubbles.
- Oh, oh! - There's one, look, big one! Pop it. Ping!
- Ooh! - Smokey bubble. - Ah.
- Smokey bubble! - Oh, oh!
- Smokey bubble! - Oh!
Smokey bubble!
APPLAUSE
- Oh, you've really got it going now. - There we are.
I've gone completely reflective.
Oh, there you are. Look, you've made a bauble.
Look at that.
You've made a bauble, because your little experiment,
invented by Mr Tollens, one of the things
he used was silver nitrate, the same thing used in film photography.
- And that is silver. - Wow.
You've got a beautiful silver bauble that you've made
just by mixing those two chemicals.
Can I just say, I've just seen myself, I didn't realise that
I look like Last Christmas by Weight Watcher's Wham.
LAUGHTER
There's one man in micromort who we don't know is Yasuhiro Kubo.
He is a Japanese sky diver, who jumps out of a plane without
a parachute, and then collects it from a partner on the way down.
And we don't know his micromort, because he's still alive,
and it may be that he'll do 4,000 jumps and then die.
Be a good dumb show, you could see if he,
if you see them falling and then he goes over to the bloke who's
got the parachute, and you see the bloke going...
LAUGHTER
- I knew there was something. - Yeah.
HE MIMES SPEECH
Oh, that is so distressing. Anyway...
LAUGHTER
I'll show you this little thing here.
And what's strange about this is that I can spin it one way,
but not the other.
If I spin it anticlockwise, it goes very happily anticlockwise.
But if I try and spin it clockwise, it not only will resist,
it will stop and spin anticlockwise. As you'll see.
So I'm now going to try and spin it clockwise.
Is it because of the shape, the particular shape?
- You'll see, well that obviously is the reason, yes. - Yeah.
- You're twisting its melons, man. - Then it goes round again. - Yeah.
So...
And then round and round and round again.
- That's extraordinary, isn't it? - I know, it is very mysterious.
You've got to have the right flick of the wrist,
which you're clearly very good at, Stephen, which is good.
- What if you did a murder with your reflex? - It does happen.
If someone sort of attacked your knee and then the reflex,
you had a knife attached to your shoe or something.
You broke their neck.
And you killed them, would you be able to say,
ah, but the reflex, it didn't go to my brain, it
- only went to the bottom of my spine, so I didn't really do it. - Yes.
But it does happen if you're driving,
you have an automated response called murder by autometer.
You don't go to prison.
If you sneeze, for instance, and then you run someone over...
- Someone sneezed, literally. - Yeah.
LAUGHTER
Literally at that moment. Talk about a reflex!
That means there's been a murder! There's a killer!
LAUGHTER
They've just murdered someone.
- Now they know they'll get away with it. - Wow.
- It's something like... - The SE1...
So if I walk into a room with a gun cocked, sneeze, it goes off,
you kill someone, you're in the clear?
So, if you want to kill your wife, what you do is,
you drive down to Dover, you get her right up against a cliff.
You put your leg behind her and then get a doctor to tap her knee.
- Off she goes. - That I'm afraid would...
And the doctor would go to prison.
- The doctor would go to prison. I think so. - And you.
What if he was sneezing as he tapped her knee? Yes!
- The perfect crime. - Yeah.
Broadchurch series two sorted.
LAUGHTER
What I'm going to do is, I've got three bricks here.
STEPHEN WHIMPERS
And it is, ah.
It's like the first ever game of Jenga.
It is. All right, OK. Yeah. Oh, God.
I have to focus my energy.
I know, it's, all right, it sounds...
But I have to focus, have to go through, I have to...
Oh, God.
I'm so nervous now.
APPLAUSE
Didn't get them all.
Last time I got them all.
OK. But, even more... Oh, I've got another one.
Another load here and this time, in theory...
You're going to do it with your penis.
LAUGHTER
In theory here, ow.
STEPHEN MOANS
So choose top middle or bottom?
- Middle. - Oh, no.
- OK. I'll try and break just the middle then. - Top.
I'll bet you Chuck Norris is crapping himself.
LAUGHTER
I'm going to try and break just the middle one.
Again, this takes extreme focus and extreme pain.
Go through.
- I just don't want to do this. - You don't want to do it again.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
That was a good one. Oh, thank you very much indeed.
Thank you.
Has your crown slipped?
Yeah, it's, look, it's done that, you see, that's a... Like that.
It's a medieval torture.
Yeah, this is what they put round royal dogs to stop them
nibbling their stitches.
Imagine the crown maker...
- Has your head lost weight? - Yes, it has, yes. Yeah.
You've lost even more hair than when we started, sorry.
- That's right. - That's very unfair.
- Yes, I do apologise. It's just... - You're welcome to take it off.
- We're going to need a bigger king. - You can abdicate.
LAUGHTER
- No, that's going to hurt. - Shall I...? - Just, no!
- It's like watching a two-year-old take their clothes off. - How's that?
Bill, try and get it down the other way.
Shall I try and go through it?
Yeah, try and go through it. I think this is...
LAUGHTER
Come on, Bill.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
And that's the last we ever saw of him.
That's not good, that's not a good look.
LAUGHTER
I was thinking of Zoidberg from Futurama.
You honestly, you look fine. You look fine.
That's so like something out of Lord of the Rings now.
- It's a great look. - Even more than ever.
I'm going to wear, I'm going to put this as my passport photo.
What do you do?
I'm a fighting king, what do you want?
And now it's time for one of my Knick-Knacks.
Crikey, how did that get there?!
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
I'm going to demonstrate...
- What a marvellous outing for the word "crikey." - Yes.
I'm going to demonstrate to you how a chain reaction takes place.
Imagine these are little atoms,
and what I have is a series of mouse trap, ow, mouse traps.
Used for obviously killing mice!
HE YELPS
And fortunately no mice will be harmed in this experiment.
All you will see is the spectacular sight of random and explosive
chain reaction caused by one atom touching another,
which are all in...
Ball number 16, the eighth appearance this year.
Yes. So are you ready?
- Yes. - Here we go.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
JASON: All that, all that for three seconds.
It's a lot of effort for the money.
Good night.