QI · Season 1
[On Time's arrow]
All you need is an analogy that’s pertinent to you, so in my case: All relationships. And then you realize: Perfect eighteen month, and then they're dead.
The second law of sexual dynamics.
Yeah, according to me, that's how I extrapolate.
To make that statistically significant though, you'd have to have an awful lot of relationships.
Oh, I do.
Not on Earth, but in our solar system. I'm thinking of Neptune or Uranus.
[tittering]
[looking sternly into the camera] No. No. No. No.
Of all these [Saturn's] moons, which one is most likely to be the home to Ewoks?
Would be, um, Titan.
Titan?
It's got a thicker atmosphere than the Earth, so you'd need to be furry.
[Ross and Alan quickly open their notebooks and start writing]
["Fill in the gaps in slogans"]
"Welcome to Northamptonshire - Let yourself..."
"…down."
This is an optimistic one here. "Welcome to Tower Hamlets - Let's make it..."
"…out alive."
[After it turned out the actual slogan is: "Welcome to Tower Hamlets - Let's make it happen."]
There was another slogan, it said: It did happen on Friday the 17th. If you've witnessed it...
[Talking about SatNav]
I've just done voice for them, so that if you have TomTom or Garmin…
No, you drive along, and it goes: "Turn left. Now, the interesting thing about this particular building…" [His voice is drowned under the audience's laughter and applause. Stephen buries his face in his hands.]
Did you do it as if you were talking to me? That's the worrying thing. "Left, you moron!"
I have the key to the city of Port Pirie, in Australia.
Do you?
I was doing a gig, and I was talking to a bloke, turned out he was the mayor. So I went, ‘can I have the key to the city?’ and he went, ‘yeah, alright then.’ So I said, ‘alright then,’ I didn’t want him to back out, I said, ‘where’s your office?’ He says, ‘on the High Street.’ ‘I’ll be down there tomorrow.’ So I turned up, he’d got a shed key and a ribbon and went, ‘there you go.’
I had a sat-nav, after Port Pirie, and the Nullarbor Plain in Australia, big long…
Between Adelaide and Perth.
Yeah. The longest straight road in the world. And I turned it on and it said, “Drive forward for two days.” And the next bit went, “then turn left.” But the thing was… But the stupid thing was, it was such a long road, I missed the left hand turn!
This is a show in which nothing will be fair, from top to bottom, so let’s get it over with and go straight to the scores. In first place, with minus 54, it’s Sandi Toksvig. In second place, with plus 7, it’s Clive Anderson. In third place with minus sechzig (60) is Henning Wehn. And lastly, obviously, with minus 1 gazillion, is Alan Davies.
[Looking at a painting on the screen]
That's a really ugly baby.
That's not any use! Don't learn that expression. "Really ugly baby." There's never an option to use that in real life.
[Explaining a radio interview of an actress]
Cut the long story short, they airbrushed her nipples out of the poster. Her nipples were showing through her costume, just the two little… [motions with his hands]
But this is radio!
[laughing] Not just for the radio. And, uh, she had complained about it. "So why have you airbrushed my nipples, that's ridiculous. Why don't you just leave them?" And the presenter said: "Well, perhaps they thought they weren't suitable for children".
[On corporal punishment]
Children were always beaten. Really, we are the first generation - Um, I'm not. I was beaten huge about when I was a child in prep school.
Really?
God, yes. From age seven 'til thirteen, at least twice a week. I was a bad boy, and I was always being thrashed.
What for?
Oh, stealing, lying, cheating, um, being cheeky, being a nuisance, evading games…
Bit of a smartarse, were you?
Yeah, being a smartarse...
...being too clever for your own good. That sort of thing. Always telling everyone what was going on.
All things that annoyed people about...
Well, they certainly beat that out of you, didn't they?
If you're in your seventies now, how old were you in the end of World War II? Maybe ten years old? How did you help win the war? When you were just ten years old, you did not help win the war.
By not eating bananas.
Yeah. You were nothing but a drain on British resources!
[to the laughing panelists] You've gotta admire his guts, haven't you?
Effectively every 70-year-old Brit, effectively fought on the side of Nazi Germany! And lost the war every little bit as much as we did!
Female sexual dysfunction, for example, started being pushed at the time that various companies were trying to get licences for things like Viagra for the 50% of the population who are unlucky enough not to have a penis. And...
[to Jo Brand] Steady.
Jo's got loads of penises, but they're all in her drawer.
[On flatulence]
It seems that we produce about three pints of wind a day.
Pints?
Yes, it's measured in pints. Released in ten to fifteen individual "episodes".
You can get the box set as well.
Or, you can have a feature-length episode.
These quotes come from Wikiquote's QI pages and are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
