QI · Season 1
[on the Darwin Awards]
It's the reason they should allow people to walk down the railway tracks if they so wish. If they can't work out a train's coming... [shrugs]
Right.
Let's face it, the gene pool needs a little chlorine. [points around audience] You know who you are.
Another dangerous sport is russian roulette of course.
That's dangerous. In the early days, you had a musket. You'd only have the one.
D'you know what you should drink with the beating heart of a cobra? This is a dish in China where you get a cobra—and it's brought to the table alive. They then slice it open, rip the heart out, and it's beating on the plate there—you have to chase it round the plate, I s'pose—and then you drink the blood of the snake as the wine.
Actually, I ordered the lasagne …
I had occasion to hire a theatrical duck, once …
A luvvie duck!
In my career, I've had occasion to hire many, many an animal, but the most expensive was a pelican.
Was it an enormous bill?
Name something quite interesting that kangaroos can’t do.
They can’t drive.
....good evening and welcome to QI, for another tentative sniff at the enormous bottom of knowledge.
[on the differences between cats and dogs]
Cats mating, it can be a quite exclusive little gang, whereas dogs, they can run riots, so you could have a Great Dane with a Chihuahua.
It's a nice image.
It would involve a stepladder. Or a ditch.
What's the most interesting thing a dog can smell?
[presses buzzer] A dog's dinner?
Yes. To a dog that is the most interesting thing a dog can smell.
Other than that, another dog's bottom.
Yeah. Oh.
[Forfeit klaxon goes off - BOTTOMS]
Oh, there you are. Oh, no.
My crotch. [laughter] Well, they all do.
[Forfeit klaxon goes off - BOLLOCKS]
Can you blame them? They're only flesh and blood...
What comes before a German Bight?
[presses buzzer] A German Bark.
Yeah, ho.
[Forfeit klaxon goes off - GERMAN BARK]
You were thinking of J.S., possibly.
No, they never bark when they're going to attack you. It's when they go quiet, that's when you have to worry.
Germans?
[On the Silbo Gomero whistling language]
Do you know how they communicate across valleys?
Shout.
Mobile phone.
[grinning] No... Not... It's a language they use, but instead of their vocal cords, they...
Fart?
It was my favourite VC winner was a first World War fighter pilot. His name was Ferdinand West, I think. And they were attacked by 7 German planes. In the first, sort of, wave he had his leg shot off - completely off. So he, it was jamming the controls: he took it out and threw it out of the plane, manoeuvred his plane so they could get off some good bursts into the Germans, drove them away, dropped his bombs, landed back at base, apologised for the poor quality of his landing, and then sought medical attention.
My great-uncle had his tongue shot off in the war. He never talked about it.
You know that joke, don't you? What's the similarity is between the pelican and British Gas? They can both can stick their bills up their arses.
Name, if you can, the subject of the three volume book whose first volume is entitled "The Long Years of Obscurity."
The career of Phil Collins.
Is this book about the word obscurity before it got famous? How it was beaten by its adjective father. And left on the doorstep abandoned by its mother, and it was the only noun growing up in a house of verbs. And the verbs were always going out doing lovely things, because they were doing words, and poor old obscurity was stuck inside suffering from asthma. And then after school it was surrounded by quotation marks and got beaten up terribly. And then one day entered into reality TV show and it became very famous and it was much in demand and used to describe all the people who leave Big Brother House?
They built the station next to the power station you see there, which is the third worst eyesore in the country. It was a Country Life thing—do you know what the first one was?
[in a posh accent] People! Public people! Working classes! Poorly groomed servants! The ill-bred ponies! That Blair fellow!
If I find out you've been intercepting my mail …
[Discussing dolphins]
A lot of people say that they're smarter than people, but if they were, wouldn't they be saying that?
These quotes come from Wikiquote's QI pages and are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
