QI, Series Five [E]

Stephen Fry:
Where is the best place to be when a nuclear bomb goes off?

Jimmy Carr:
I would've gone with downtown Nagasaki. Because what are the chances of that happening again? You've got to play the odds.

Stephen Fry:
What could you make with an ultrasound rectal probe, a light-emitting tube, bicycle helmets, protective clothing, a huge tub of Vaseline, and a wheel-barrow?

Jimmy Carr:
I could make you the happiest man alive.

[About vampire bats.]

Stephen Fry:
How do they ingest their blood? What do they do?

Alan Davies:
They bite and sniff it up. Swallow it. Lick it. Slurp it. Hide it. Store it. Decant it.

Stephen Fry:
Decant it!?

Stephen Fry:
Where is the biggest load of rubbish in the world?

Audience Member:
France

Stephen Fry:
How can you tell that God is a civil engineer? Because when he designed the human body, he put the recreational area right next to the sewage outflow.

Stephen Fry:
Now, question one, I think. I'm naked; it's pouring down with rain. Can you give me a good reason why I should crouch down with my bottom in the air? [Jo immediately rings in; Stephen is already laughing.] Jo.

Jo Brand:
Stephen, I wouldn't have thought you'd need a good reason.

[The number of British people killed by lightning each year]

Stephen Fry:
It's between three and six, actually, it's not very many.

Alan Davies:
Four or five.

Stephen Fry:
You're not doing badly, I must say. A fulsome pair of funbags there.

Jo Brand:
You know what? That was almost heterosexual.

Alan Davies:
But it wasn't though, was it?

["What were cornflakes originally used for?"]

Johnny Vegas:
It was for, er, putting in mattresses, for monks, as, er, an anti-masturbation sound trigger device …

[The audience begins to laugh.]

Stephen Fry:
Johnny Vegas, take some points!

Johnny Vegas:
You're jokin'!

[The whole studio roars with laughter. It's revealed that Will Keith Kellogg was a Seventh Day Adventist, and originally made Corn Flakes in an attempt to inhibit masturbation.]

[After hearing that eating nothing but rabbit will eventually kill you]

Johnny Vegas:
My dad killed my pet rabbit and fed it to me.

[The audience is stunned.]

Stephen Fry:
Did he?! [kindly] Perhaps he was trying to kill you, Johnny.

Stephen Fry:
I love the way your mind works, Alan Davies … and I use the word "works" quite wrongly.

Sean Lock:
It's like a mix between smug and orgasm.

Alan Davies:
Smorgasm.

[About the first words spoken from the surface of the moon]

Bill Bailey:
Was it 'This is the Moon, this is the end of the line...'

Rich Hall:
Great to be here in Philadelph-I mean, the Moon.

David Mitchell:
[in imitation of an outraged right-winger] You don't take an active interest in how your country is run for just forty-five years, and look what happens!

Stephen Fry:
Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit für das deutsche Vaterland! Danach lasst uns alle streben Brüderlich mit Herz und Hand!

Phill Jupitus:
I have an erection.

[Clive Anderson's buzzer is (Everything I Do) I Do It for You by Bryan Adams.]

Stephen Fry:
Sometimes there just isn't enough vomit in the world.

Stephen Fry:
And what are the symptoms of taking E? Do you know, Clive?

Clive Anderson:
Um, I don't know, I haven't taken it myself. I've given ecstasy, but not …

Stephen:
And who are the most dangerous cars driven by in the world?

Jeremy:
Oh, are we talking about men or women, children, babies, dogs...

Stephen:
No, nationalities. The most dangerous cars are green apparently, and driven by the Chinese.

Alan:
...called tanks.

Stephen Fry:
What would you find in the middle of a pearl??

Alan Davies:
An oyster

Jeremy Clarkson:
[Whilst audience are laughing] No

Stephen:
[Surprised voice] You find an oyster in the middle of a pearl?!

[on getting his foot stuck in a giant clam]

Jeremy:
I was going "I wonder what happens if you put your foot in that?" and [claps hands] BOOM! It's got a sort of velvety, soft, rather comfortable place to get stuck.

Stephen:
Doesn't it start ingesting it and squirting enzymes at your foot?

Jeremy:
I was more worried by the meter saying how much air I had left in the tanks.

Stephen:
Aren't you supposed to have a buddy when you dive?

Jeremy:
Oh, I did. That was my wife, she had buggered off.

Jo Brand:
There's a great story about Conan Doyle, actually. Just for a joke, one day, he wrote a note saying, We are discovered. Flee immediately, and he sent it to five of his friends to see what they would do. And one of them disappeared!

Stephen Fry:
There was a time when all the elevator cables were sheared off in the Empire State Building. Do you know about this story?

Clive Anderson:
Yeah, there was a giant ape on the side of it.

David Mitchell:
Fish don't blink. Which is the main eye defence. If you're ever trying to get the eye out of a fish and it blinks... it may be a lion.

Jimmy Carr:
It's just so stupid, isn't it? Beating your wife... I mean, it's your wife- it's like keying your own car!

David Mitchell:
Society just got a tiny bit worse...

Jimmy Carr:
I like to think I can help.

Stephen Fry:
What happens if an ear wig gets into your ear?

David Mitchell:
It gets into your brain, and it stays there, and you form a sort of symbiotic relation with it. It happened to me 20 years ago, and we've never been happier!

[forfeit alarm sounds]

Jimmy Carr:
You know if a spider lays its eggs underneath your skin, think about how much worse it'd be if it was a goose.

[on baby cats]

Alan Davies:
If you cut their whiskers off, they can get their head stuck in a milk bottle, I know that.

Stephen Fry:
...from experience?

Alan Davies:
They will try, if you put something at the bottom like a bit of tuna.

David Mitchell:
And if they do actually manage it, you end up with a lovely bottled cat! That you can take to a party. "I couldn't decide red or white, so I brought a cat."

[on the myth about the brace position preserving dental records]

David Mitchell:
I've heard that and frankly, I don't know why they don't just tell people! "In the unlikely event of the plane crashing, I think we can all agree, you'd like to be identified. Bite down as hard as you can on your own armrest."

[Alan makes his entrance wearing an elephant mask.]

Alan Davies:
I was the elephant in the room!

Stephen Fry:
I know, it was brilliant.

Alan Davies:
It was brilliant!

Stephen Fry:
Well, bless him, when he arrived-I'm not wishing to sound patronising, but I've just said "bless him," so there's no way out-

Alan Davies:
I took my nephews to London Zoo, because a friend of ours is a zookeeper there, and she can get you in sort of the back. And we went in to see a lion, and they said, "There's some mesh - there's small mesh and big mesh. You must stay on the side where the big mesh is. Don't go near the small mesh. Stay where the big mesh is. Do you understand?" And the kids went-[nods nervously] And we just went in, and my nephew turned to me and said, "What's mesh?"

Bill Bailey:
I was in Brazil, and I went into an enclosure with a Jaguar. And this Brazilian handler said "It's very important: always approach from the front". And I went, right, okay, and I was just getting closer to the front of it. And then he said "Oh no, sorry, never. Sorry! My English..."

Stephen Fry:
So that's all from Bill, Jo, Jeremy, Alan and Pudsey and me and I'll leave you with this thought about one form of entertainment we haven't covered tonight, from Noel Coward: "People are wrong when they say that opera is not what it used to be. It is exactly what it used to be, that is what is wrong with it." Good night.

Stephen Fry:
So that's the Cameroon's Eton tribe. They have other ethnic groups called the Bum, the Bang, the Banana, the Mang, the Fang, the Tang, the Wum, the Wam, the War, and, of course, the Pongo.

Sean Lock:
Who discovered this tribe, Benny Hill?

Alan Davies:
We had a Jimmy Glasscock at school.

Stephen Fry:
Oh, did you?

Alan Davies:
Yeah, you could always see when he was coming.

Stephen Fry:
What is pink, has pendulous breasts, gets sailors all excited and tastes of prime beef? [as Jimmy rings in] Yes?

Jimmy Carr:
Was Princess Margaret buried at sea?

Stephen Fry:
It was before Haile Selassie, there was an emperor...

Jimmy Carr:
Lowly Selassie.

[on getting static shock]

Doon Mackichan:
But some people say, it's because of passion, like when you meet the man or woman of your dreams, you have an electric shock.

Jimmy Carr:
Sometimes if I meet an attractive woman, I will tazer her.

[Which island did Britain's fourth Antarctic expedition get stranded on in 1916?]

Jimmy Carr:
Oh! Is it the Island of Reluctant but Inevitable Homosexuality? [laughter] I think I recognise it from that school trip that went horribly wrong …

Stephen Fry:
Lord of the Undone Flies.

[About why Germans like Mr. Bean]

Bill Bailey:
There's a certain efficiency about it. [in German accent] "He does somesing, then he falls over. Is very amusing. Before, he vas valking in a straight line, so he's valking into the door! Is genius!"

Alan Davies:
"Zis is vhat happens vhen you break ze rules!"

Bill Bailey:
"Sometimes I stay up very late!"

[How to keep your children from peeking at their Christmas presents]

Alan Davies:
Blind them.

Phill Jupitus:
[stuffing his face with spaghetti] Can I just say, this is the best quiz I've ever been on.

Stephen Fry:
They say of the Acropolis, where the Parthenon is … [Stephen flubs the line, causing the panellists to rib him mercilessly for the next 3-4 minutes as he tries to nail it for the recording - he eventually manages to force out to great applause:] … there are no straight lines!

Jimmy Carr:
Do they? [sigh]

Alan Davies:
Whatever …

Stephen Fry:
How does a love bomb work?

Rob Brydon:
I turn up and I get on with it. (Applause.) Is a love bomb a bottom noise that can be made whilst you’re making lo...you know, sometimes you’re... and then all of a sudden, you know that noise, it’s really awkward and you pretend you haven’t heard it?

Stephen Fry:
Rob? Rob, can I remind you of something? Your father is in the audience.

Rob Brydon:
He’s happy to go ‘that’s my boy! You’re putting Wales on the map, Robert!’

Stephen Fry:
Now the atmosphere is completely: um, what's the word I'm looking for?

Alan Davies:
Electric?

[Forfeit Klaxon goes off - ELECTRIC]

Stephen Fry:
When did rabbits arrive in Britain?

Alan Davies:
Tuesday.

Stephen Fry:
Do you remember what year it was?

Alan Davies:
3000 years ago. Tuesday morning.

Stephen Fry:
Where do you put your ladder if you want it to go into space?

Rich Hall:
On top of a spaceship. With a flag hanging on it, so other spaceships don't follow you too closely.

Bill Bailey:
It's a conceptual question. How about this: Up against the wall of silence.

Stephen Fry:
You should have railings build around you and people come and worship you as a kind of modern Buddha. You've got the look, I have to say.

Bill Bailey:
Oh, thank you very much.

Stephen Fry:
Buddha look.

Bill Bailey:
Rural Buddha [in a West Country accent] Wisdom...and cheap cider.

[after several hare brained schemes have been proposed by the panellists]:

Bill Bailey:
How about this: You could just...imagine.

Stephen Fry:
Oh Bill, that is so beautiful.

Bill Bailey:
'Tis the wisdom of the rural Buddha.

Sean Lock:
The Dalai Farmer.

[On the problems of having sex in space]

Stephen Fry:
The male member would be slightly smaller in space. 'Cause blood pressure is lower.

Rich Hall:
In space, no one can hear you apologize.

David Mitchell:
Edward VII took a lot of mercury.

Stephen Fry:
I think he might have done.

David Mitchell:
I thought it was for constipation. A very literal way of treating it. Drink a heavy liquid, force the poo down. Alternative would be, stand on your hands and have a lot of helium.

[On the composition of dust in a home]

Jeremy Clarkson:
Animals, insects...

Clive Anderson:
Dust mites.

Jeremy:
...bits of smashed badgers.

[forfeit klaxon sounds]

Jeremy:
[incredulous] Smashed badgers is coming up there!?

Stephen Fry:
And how are you eating yours, Alan?

Alan Davies:
By hand.

Stephen Fry:
Do you know, the thing is, Alan gets 20 points, because that’s how Neopolitans eat spaghetti. They lean back and drop it into their mouths by hand.

Jimmy Carr:
That’s not fair! Alan thinks mashed potatoes are finger food!