517: No Such Thing As Julius Caesar's Dad Jokes

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Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with Anna Tashinsky, James Harkin, and Andrew Hunt and Murray.

And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is Andy.

My fact is that thousands of soldiers who died at Waterloo were turned into sugar.

Incredible.

It's a horrible fact about a horrible battle.

Wow.

It's incredible.

It's really bad, this one.

Yeah, how do you turn a person into sugar?

That seems very unlikely.

Well, first of all.

Looking for a friend.

You have to lure them to Waterloo

in 1815, kill them.

So I have to be French.

Well, oh, I'm so glad we got onto this already.

There are so many nationalities who fought at Waterloo.

Oh, yeah, actually.

Most of the English army was German.

Isn't that nuts?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Two-thirds were German speaking as a first language.

Lots of Dutch soldiers as well.

Belgian, yeah.

Yeah, they were just brought in, weren't they?

Sort of, we don't have enough.

Can you fight?

If you're listening to this in Europe, probably probably your nationality was represented at Waterloo in some capacity or another.

And more than the Brits, who constituted about 12% of the British-led army.

Oh, it was about a third.

It was about a third.

Estimates may vary.

Oh, they do.

They're very thick.

I think at the lower end, we think maybe only, you know.

So, what are we saying in case you don't like British sugar?

Don't worry.

There is multinational sugar in it.

Well, it was, they set up a sugar factory pretty much on the battlefield.

I mean, it's all a bit.

Can I refer you to my earlier question?

How does one turn a human into sugar?

All All right, thank you.

Because sugar is a thing that grows in the ground in sugar beet or sugar cane.

And then you harvest it and there are no humans involved.

That's true.

That's true.

But what you do need to do is filter sugar syrup when you're making the sugar.

Ah.

So this was something basically

very, very few bodies have been found on the...

battlefield at Waterloo.

Like suspiciously few.

Two full skeletons.

Of $20,000.

Are we sure it wasn't just Napoleon and

Wellington just coming at it?

And they just really over-edged, like, whoever won really told a much bigger lie about what had happened there.

It's the greatest prank in history.

Let's really pull the wool over those 21st-century idiots' eyes.

No, so there were lots of graves, and there were huge graves, but only a few bones have been found.

As you say, two full skeletons.

They found three legs relatively recently, as well, recently, which was near one of the hospitals.

So those were probably amputated legs on the day.

Oh, that's right.

So it's not that it was Napoleon versus Wellington and one of them had three legs.

That's what I was hoping.

One of the skeletons was a tripod.

But you're right.

There should have been huge numbers of dead people or sort of bodies in the ground.

And the theory is, and this is quite a recent theory that's been developed, is that in the aftermath of the battle, the local residents, the sort of local peasants, they dug up the corpses and they sold the bones to people working in the sugar beet industry because the bones were really valuable at the time.

And normally animal bones were used.

You would cook the bones.

That made a powder called noir animal uh which you could use to filter the sugar syrup and make lovely clean sugar so these days um noir animal is still used but animal animal bones yeah and also not in sugar it's used for other products and things so sugar these days doesn't hasn't sugar is vegan don't worry yeah vegetarians worldwide

sugar is vegan but the theory is that local peasants just dug up the bodies and used the bones for the this industry and it's a pretty compelling theory at the time because we've known for ages that they took the teeth out of people didn't didn't they?

Yeah.

And they used them for false teeth.

And so false teeth were known as Waterloo teeth.

Yeah, Waterloo ivory.

Yeah, it's so dark.

Very macabre.

And they did write about the sugar thing back in the 1800s.

It was a German newspaper that actually wrote, you should be using honey to sweeten food and avoid risk of having your great-grandfather's atoms dissolved in your coffee one fine morning.

Wow.

I like that.

I quite like that idea of recycling your grandparents

into your body.

And in 1822, there there was an article in The Observer that said it is now ascertained beyond a doubt by actual experiment on an extensive scale that a dead soldier is a most valuable article of commerce.

And they were talking about the fact that they were ground up and used as fertilizer.

Yes, they were, weren't they?

They covered the fields of Europe.

I suppose, in a way, it's recycling.

Yeah, good on it.

Isn't it?

Like, once you're dead, like, do you really care?

Exactly.

A controversial question.

Wow.

Oh, it's not that controversial.

Once you're dead, I'm pretty sure you don't care.

Unless you're a ghost, I see.

Sorry.

A woman does one care.

Some people care what happens to

the dead.

There was this thing called the bone rush.

And it was partly because, it was actually partly because of Britain, because Britain blockaded sugar, because most sugar came from places like the West Indies, which were British...

colonies at the time and Britain had blockaded that so not much sugar could get to Europe.

So Europe set up a big sugar beet industry that was a kind of way of making sugar that didn't rely on shipping.

Yeah, so that, and then that needed the bones.

So, yeah,

thank God for Waterloo.

In a sense, it's our fault.

Yeah, yeah, in a sense, in a sense, in a sense.

Waterloo, I can't believe, I can't believe we've hardly talked about Waterloo before.

I'm so excited.

I can't believe we were only going to do one section on it.

I got like the rest is history, guys.

They would get eight episodes out of the Battle of Waterloo, and we have to cram it into 15 minutes.

It's not fair.

I think you're optimistic about 15 minutes, I'll be honest.

I'm looking at some of the other facts coming up, and I reckon they might be a bit longer.

You allow one fact, Andy.

We've got to go through that.

What's your fave?

What's your fave Waterloo fact?

Apart from the headline, obviously, which

my definition is.

I'm quite interested in the cavalry charges and stuff, and

the farmhouse at the centre of it all, and all that.

You know, the stuff that doesn't make very good stuff for our show.

You have brought a lot of toy soldiers onto the table.

Well, there is.

Have you heard of the Siborn model?

No.

This is so cool.

This is like, I sort of, I tried to stick to mostly the aftermath of the battle rather than like in-depth troop movements

You're welcome

But there was a captain called William Siborn who made a huge model of the Battle of Waterloo 15 years after it had happened and he spent eight weeks on the battlefield itself just researching he took seven years to make it he made well he certainly put 80,000 model soldiers on this 400 square foot model.

It's massive in a way though What we've got is one guy going to the battlefield saying okay i need to know where everyone was so i can make the model.

But at the same time, all of the locals are coming in, moving all the bodies around and taking all the bodies and stuff.

That must have been really awkward.

Yeah, I'm sure he was very annoying.

And actually, 15 years afterwards was around the time they were doing the sugar harvesting.

And he interviewed dozens of soldiers saying, where were you at 7 p.m.

on the 18th of June, 1850?

Like, he really went into detail.

And then he assumed the government was going to pay for it because it was his life's work.

And the government kind of had said, we'll pay for it, but kind of didn't.

And like Wellington was annoyed because the model had too many Prussians, is the theory.

So he died poor and broke just with this 400-square-foot model of the Battle of Waterloo at 7pm.

Do we still have it?

It's in the National Army Museum now, which is in Chelsea.

So it does still exist.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's awesome, but it kind of ruined his life.

Yeah.

We should probably say Waterloo happened because Napoleon had been dealt with, defeated by the combined Allied powers, and he'd been sent away to Elba, where he was given, which is a little island off Italy, where he was given command of the island.

He was was also given a small army and navy.

What are you thinking?

This is the best military commander in history.

He's got a small army and navy.

He can't possibly gave that to him, the British.

I don't, I think it was like a sort of allied decision.

Like they just said, we'll just, it's fine.

He'll step down.

He won't want to come back.

What a weird, like, what, like a desert island disc luxury island.

Elba is not that far away.

That's the crazy thing.

Like, it's quite close.

I've been there.

It's quite close to Italy.

It's really easy to get back.

So obviously, he does a few, like, he he improves Elba a bit, just sort of fixes it in various ways.

Then he comes back, like, straight back, but only with a small army.

With a small army.

And then, so, this is in 1815.

It's called the Hundred Days between him like leaving Elba and getting to Waterloo, where he's eventually defeated because everyone has suddenly scrambled back into action.

Yeah.

But and the Bourbon monarchy has been restored.

It's Louis XVIII, I think, who's been put on the throne of France.

Slightly embarrassing, obviously.

He's just sort of sidled back onto the throne.

And as soon as Napoleon lands in France, Louis XVIII sends two big forces led by two marshals, who are like Napoleon's generals, were all called marshals, sends two marshals.

As soon as they meet Napoleon, they change sides like instantly.

Oh, really?

He just says, Look, it's me, it's Napoleon, bone is back.

Let's go.

And they just change sides.

And he's in charge of France again, and the monarchy flees again.

And then all of Europe has to wake up and scramble and, you know,

draw him to Waterloo and try and defeat him.

And they're basically led by a duo of Wellington and Blucher, and they were really different characters.

Were they?

So, Wellington sounds like a bit of a dick, maybe, to hang out with, but really good general.

So, his forces didn't really love him

because he was quite cold, quite arrogant.

The Iron Duke.

The Iron Duke, yes.

You're never going to love someone called the Iron Duke, go to the parties with him.

Whereas Bluker was more

very brave, not a good strategist, didn't plan ahead, but he was the disco ball duke.

Exactly, yes.

So, and he was called Papa Bluca by his men,

and they loved and trusted him.

But yeah, Wellington quite cocky, apparently.

And the interesting thing about Bluca, or one of the interesting things, is he invented a type of boot, didn't he?

Did he?

Just like Wellington did.

So Wellington had his boot.

Hang on.

That's not his boot, is it?

The Wellington boot?

It's named after him.

Yeah, and he didn't invent it.

Well, he did.

He wanted people to have a special kind of boots to go into battle with.

Yeah, right.

Two boots each.

Yeah.

One of them had three.

And he, yeah,

he didn't do the designing or the making of it or anything like that, but it was his idea, I think.

And they weren't wellies at the time.

They weren't wellies.

Yeah, yeah.

They were proper boots.

Yeah, it wasn't like a farmer.

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking of.

Imagine squelching into it.

Or like some shiny ones with rainbows on, like you're getting glass to break.

Napoleon actually lost because he wore his kitten heels on the day of the battle and he got stuck in some mud.

So he was in Crocs.

Bluca had a boot, too.

Yeah, so Wellington had his boot, but they weren't, that hadn't been invented at the Battle of Waterloo, but Blucher's boot had been.

So the Blucher army went in in Blucher's boots, but the Wellington army didn't go out in Wellington boots because they hadn't been invented.

The idea of generals having their kind of their merch.

It's a good idea.

You can imagine the final speech on the morning of the battle.

And if you put in the offer code Bluker, you'll get 10 marks off the price of your first pair.

But no, it was this huge, like it was 200,000 men crammed into about five square miles.

Like it was a very, very, very deadly battle.

Like lots of casualties, hence all the bodies.

I think 50,000 were killed or seriously injured.

It was a really sort of bloody.

It took place over about four days.

Waterloo was on the final day, and there were three,

like three smaller battles leading up to the big final confrontation.

Not in Waterloo as well, we should say.

No, nearby.

Yeah.

It's like with Roswell, subtracted the alien incident.

Oh, right.

You know, it was because the aliens were brought back to Roswell.

It's called Roswell.

This was the information was sent from Waterloo.

I thought it was safe from you.

I thought this fact was sort of like this is a damn-proof fact.

There's no way he's going to be able to get onto the ship.

The tripod came down onto the battlefield.

That's interesting.

So that was where his office was.

That's where they were stationed, yeah.

And basically, as it says, it's like the official report had the date line and the location on it, and Waterloo was the location.

Which was close.

It was super close.

As was Roswell, Roswell was right next door to Corona.

Corona.

That's where, yeah,

I know, right?

No one else has been pushing this conspiracy like I have, so I'm glad we're all on board.

But yes, aliens gave us the coronavirus.

Wow.

This was the end of the Napoleonic War.

Or was it?

There was actually another battle afterwards, which France won in the Napoleonic War.

So France won the last battle of the Napoleonic War.

Get out.

The Battle of Wevre.

And what happened was it was French reinforcements coming to Waterloo.

And they met up with the Prussians and there was a big battle.

But what they didn't realize is the Battle of Waterloo had already finished.

And so Napoleon had lost, but there was another battle going on to bring reinforcements.

France won that.

Brilliant.

Let's go.

Oh, it's finished.

Wow.

That is so interesting.

I didn't know that.

Yeah.

So, technically, if you win the last battle of a war, does it mean that you win the whole war?

I reckon if it's like winner stays on, this last goal wins.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Are we trying to get to our friends listeners?

I'm not counting it.

Andy, you've probably got a few more minutes.

Stop, stop, stop, stop.

Never talk about Waterloo ever again.

There are a few Joan of Arc types at Waterloo.

A few women.

Yes.

They seem to be mostly on the Prussian side, actually.

There was a woman called Eleanor Prochaska and Friedrich, I think she called herself Frederick.

It wasn't her actual name.

Kruger.

And they just cut their hair.

Freddy Kruger.

Freddy Krueger.

How did I not?

Oh, my God.

Wow.

Oh, my God.

I'm trying to welcome Dan back into the conversation.

Yeah, Freddy Krueger.

That was where he got famous.

That's so good because there's also a famous water skier called Freddy Krueger.

Really?

As this person at the batter, we're only one away from an Old Lee Connect question.

Well, there you go, Victoria Corrin, if you're listening.

Frederick Kruger

cut her hair, went and fought at Waterloo, gave herself away.

Apparently, one account said when she spoke in a particularly high voice suddenly.

I'll find you in your dreams.

I've done it for you.

Don't go for sleep.

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Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that puffer fish don't have a functioning stomach, so they digest food in their rectum.

Much like President Garfield.

Yes.

Oh, wow.

I hadn't made that connection.

Or those people on a boat one time, you know, who like put food up the bum.

Did they?

I don't remember this.

Do you remember?

I don't think Hannah was there.

This is one of your yacht parties, isn't it?

It was the they put turtle blood up their anus or something.

Oh, yes.

The shipwreck.

That's a shipwrecked family.

That's right.

The animas, the total animas.

So we've got President Garfield, those guys, the pufferfish, we just won away from an only connect question.

If you're listening, Victoria.

So do they, like President Garfield, put the food up their bums?

No, they do not.

Okay.

Pufferfish get the name because they puff up.

If they're in danger, they make themselves much bigger by sucking in a load of water and just becoming a big ball.

Now, in order to do that, they've lost their stomach because the stomach would get in the way of this skill.

You mean evolutionarily, or just every time they puff up, their stomach disappears?

Evolutionarily.

or by design from God, they have lost their stomach.

And so the way that they eat is they get the food into their body and they absorb the nutrients when it's going down their throat, when it's going in their intestines, and also when it's going into their rectum.

They have enzymes that break down the food.

They have, you know, they have an acidic mucus all the way down their digestive system.

But the reason that they don't have a stomach is to have a stomach, you need to have a sphincter on either side and it to be a bag, and they don't have that particular thing.

They've only got one sphincter.

They only have one sphincter

in that system.

And then the mouth is the other one.

It's really interesting when you think, you know, we're all just a bag with two sphincters.

We are, really.

Yeah, we're a deuterostome.

Yeah.

As in the mouth comes first, and then the anus comes, and then all the other bits come.

There's the tube stuff, yeah.

It's humbling stuff, isn't it?

It is, yeah, yeah.

But they're very good.

I didn't really, they're awesome.

I really like them.

Pufferfish are awesome.

Yeah, they're so cool.

They're quite silly, I think.

They're very silly.

I think as a defense mechanism, I think inflating yourself like a balloon rather.

And I think basically they had to evolve that because they're not very good swimmers.

And so instead, they just puff themselves up until they're too big to eat, like a comedy animal they're the only fish that my daughter can recognize the only species of fish oh really oh wow that's a fact that's a good fact as in if you give her a picture of loads of fish she'll recognize that they're fish but the puffer fish will go puffer fish

i used to have a puffer fish as a kid as a cat yeah yeah really it was dead but i was given it in hong kong on the uh was it inflated Yeah, it was.

Nice.

It was inflated and a guy had caught it.

And I went, it was a fishing village in Hong Kong and he gave it to me.

It was dead.

It gave it to me in a bag.

And I brought it home and I kept it in it.

We had a fridge for some reason in the hallway of the building that we lived in.

So it was like on the group staircase.

So I used to go every day and visit my puppet fish and just open it and see it.

Does it count as a pet if it's dead?

I think I, because I visited it, that's how I count it.

I kind of like, yeah, and it stunk out the whole building.

I didn't recognize because I was so used to the smell and no one could locate it where the smell was in.

How could they not locate it if it was in the fridge?

When someone else opened the fridge, didn't they say?

Well, I guess no one did.

No one opened the fridge.

No one ever opened the fridge.

Because it was our fridge.

No one touched our fridge.

So, how old were you?

I was about eight.

So, how come your parents opened the fridge, right?

Did your parents never say, you know what, Dan, I think it's time you threw out this dead pufferfish?

They just didn't tell them, so they just didn't know where this thing was coming from.

Probably after a while, it would have got a load of flies and worms and stuff in it, right?

It was pretty rotten, yeah.

So your parents would have to, after a while, go, Dan, I've got bad news.

Your dead pufferfish is alive.

Yeah, so true.

Anna,

I've actually got a pufferfish anecdote.

It's not as good as these twos.

My daughter can recognize, slash, I used to have a dead pet one.

But I was at an antiques market a couple of months ago and one of the items on sale there was a puffer fish lamp where someone had inflated a puffer fish and then, I don't know how, got a light bulb into it.

Oh, one of the Sphinxes probably are.

Probably will get it.

But I didn't buy it.

Did you not?

I don't regret not buying it because it was a pretty macabre thing.

Wow, this this is amazing.

So Andy's got a pufferfish story.

You've got one.

I've got one.

If we can get Anna one, we'll have another question.

This is going to be the most esoteric episode of an already quite esoteric show.

All right.

Tune in for my spin-off documentary.

Anna Finds a Pufferfish Story.

Anna and the Blowfish.

Are the Blowfish the same as a Pufferfish?

Yes.

And they're the same as Fugu.

Yes.

Yeah, I think the Fugu are traditionally dead as well, but less rotten than Dan.

This is one of their defences, the puffing up, but it's not their only defense because they're incredibly poisonous.

Is it a defense though if you can't use, they can't shoot their livers out of themselves, right?

Which is what is

with most of the toxins.

Yeah, but it's a defense.

Advertise that you're poisonous with what you look like, I suppose.

You know, there's a thing in Japan where, so pufferfish and fugu, there's different species of pufferfish, right?

I think there's something like 200 species, and they all look a bit different.

Fugu is a big one in Japan.

It's a delicacy.

We all know it to be dangerous if not prepared by the correct chef because of all these toxins and poisons.

When you do get trained as a chef, you've got to be over 20.

You've got to spend years in an academy doing it.

Well, can I just quickly say?

Yeah.

You don't.

Exactly.

This is the problem.

It's regionally specific.

Yeah.

So in some areas of Japan, you have to, as Dan says, you do a written test, you do a practical test, you do all sorts of stuff.

In other bits of Japan, just go to a lecture.

Yeah.

You just go to

an hour series, isn't it?

And you do it on Zoom.

Yeah.

You can get a license.

Because that would be great because you could just watch it and then put your camera so no one can see you.

And then I can just go to the pub.

Yeah.

So chefs keep wanting to have regulations put in place.

So I read an article in 2009.

Hundreds of people were poisoned by badly prepared fugu.

34 of them died.

Wow.

Yeah.

There was one guy.

Sorry, there was a group of men in northern Japan who, when they ate grilled blowfish testicles, found themselves very, very ill because of unlicensed chefs.

Wow.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Gotcha.

I've just realized I've made a mistake.

That was before the new license system in 2019.

Yeah.

So yes.

It used to be regionally specific.

I believe maybe now you can no longer just go to the Zoom lecture.

It was for a long time and thousands of people were dying.

What is wrong with us though?

It can't.

Is it curiosity?

It can't be that good.

What's wrong with us that we want to eat it?

I think it's tasty.

Tasty.

It can be that good.

It gives you a bit of a buzz.

It makes your mouth tingle.

But I mean, and if you eat and the liver's the best bit and you're not allowed to eat that, I don't think at all, are you?

Even if you're serving fugu.

Because

you have to remove the...

Well, it's it's mentally.

So, like in 2011, there was a woman in a restaurant who specifically said to the chef, you know, please give me the liver.

I know you're not supposed to, but do it, and I think they do.

So, he did, and then she ended up going to hospital.

There was a famous actor, a Japanese kabuki theater actor, called Mitsuguro Bando VIII.

And in 1975, he went to a fugu restaurant and he persuaded one of the chefs that he had developed a natural resistance to the toxin.

He built it up and he asked the chef, Can you do me some fugu livers?

And he got the plate, he ate four fugu livers, then he died yeah so I don't think he had whether he thought he had built up a resistance or not he hadn't the other thing is that these days you can make harmless fugu so they get the poison by eating the special bacteria yeah so if you can make your fugu fish grow up in a place where this bacteria doesn't exist then it's not going to be poisonous it's amazing it's not the same it's not the same what they tingle as chefs say that's it seems insane we can now breed fugu that tastes the same but don't poison you and one chef has asked about it and said no i'm not going to serve it it's obviously more than a little exciting to go to a restaurant knowing it might be the last meal you ever eat where's the enjoyment in eating something with no risk in it

i completely agree yeah you know how you said it's different regionally in some places in shimonoseki area it's not called fugu it's called fuck you

seems more appropriate yeah because that's actually your last words to the chef when you die

i don't think i don't think you know that you've been poisoned until about 25 minutes minutes later.

So I think you've got time to get the bill.

You have to pay it.

And then you realize as you're leaving, hang on a second.

As someone who's been to a puff fish restaurant, they are very quick with the bill.

We only had a starter because there was nothing that wasn't fugu on the menu.

I think I've

and you thought you were going to have the chicken nuggets and they were the testicles.

It was the testicles.

But now that I've heard that the testicles are poisonous and killed someone, I'm kind of glad that I didn't.

They're served separately often.

They often have like a sole fugu meal.

Right.

And it starts off with some sashimi slices.

So just little raw slices arranged to look like a crane about to take flight, which is a symbol of longevity.

How I run it.

And then you get some fugu stew, fugu and rice porridge, and hot sake with grilled fugu fin in it and the testicles on the side.

And fugu jelly and fugu ice cream.

Oh, lovely.

With some fugu hundreds of thousands, and then a fugu mint.

Have you ever tried pufferfish semen, which is another delicacy?

Okay.

Oh, no.

No.

Do you not have mayonnaise with your nuggets?

Is it poisonous?

Probably.

Oh.

I have no idea.

No, I don't.

Have you ever had milt in the UK?

Milt on toast?

Yeah, it was delicious.

What?

Milt is a relatively common, not these days.

No, it is.

Like a hundred years ago in the northeast of England, you would eat milt for sure.

Stop it.

No, definitely.

It's a kind of thing my mum always eats and then goes, it's ridiculous that people don't have this every day these days.

Come by, actually, in the Tesco Metro.

Come by.

You know Milton Keynes?

Yeah.

That was named after the economist Keynes.

John Keynes.

He was ejaculated on by a fish

and named the town after him.

God.

That is torturous.

Oh, I love it.

I feel like we should talk about live puffer fish.

Yeah, okay.

Because they're quite nice when they're alive.

And they make crop circles.

Oh, yes.

Which are stunning and worth looking at.

And we only realised this recently.

So we found.

It's amazing they can get that far in land it's stunning

well there is a theory that the Roswell aliens actually were pufferfish yeah yeah there's not but they do make these extraordinary they look like perfect fossils you know you get the the typical um like ammonite like ammonite fossils yeah um on the floor of the ocean they're perfectly symmetrical they're concentric rings with um kind of spokes coming out from them and beautiful patterns and they were discovered in 1995 and no one knew what they were.

They were just these mysterious things on the floor of the ocean.

And it was only in 2013 that someone was down there doing a dive off the coast of Japan somewhere and went, Hey, there's this puffer fish just flapping its fins weirdly and making this pattern.

Was it a mating thing, or is it a different thing?

Because it was a mating.

There was some female on it, wasn't it?

Yeah.

So the female gets to sit in the middle of these concentric circles.

And if she likes it, she gives an egg up and he gives a sperm up.

And in about one second, that's the mating done.

Yeah.

And if not, she doesn't.

There is one theory that all she cares about is how much sand is there.

Yeah, right.

And she doesn't care about all these beautiful kind of circles and that.

And the fact is that the circles are a byproduct of the fact that you have to do that to get all the sand into the middle.

You just have to do it in a certain order.

So is it like

the equivalent of actually my wife isn't interested in my model railway?

It's that I've got a nice home which the model railway is in.

That's a really good point.

Yeah, yeah, that's almost a flawless analogy.

I've got some questions to ask when I go home, actually.

okay it is time for fact number three and that is my fact my fact this week is as there used to be no way of duplicating a record one of the best-selling songs of the 1890s had to be recorded over 10,000 times by the same singer

that's amazing what a day in the recording studio it must have been well Days and days and days and weeks and months because basically every single record that you used to make back in the day was a master copy.

That's what got sold.

There was no way of then recording that into being another record in the way that we have now.

Yeah, so it's quite nice in a way because your record's different to everyone else's.

Yeah, exactly.

You literally have a bespoke record.

There's a little fart in the background.

It's just for you.

Yeah.

So there were no mics, there were no amplifiers.

You had to just yell into the horn of the phonograph.

And if you were particularly wealthy, you were able to get four or five horns around you.

And so you could make up to five copies of a single song.

So it's thought that the best-selling single of the 1890s was sung by a guy who was an african-american called george washington johnson and he was a street singer on the new york streets he was just doing it for pennies and he used to sing a couple of songs which were very very backward and racist and i think that's why people didn't mind uh a black singer being uh that well distributed uh it was called you know one that was had what were they called you don't need to read that out yeah yeah yeah some lyrics um yeah um no but there was there was a lot of it was a a lot of taking himself down within the song.

But one of the songs, which was The Laughing Song, that was the biggest song of the time.

It sold 50,000 copies.

So it's said that he did copies that were like four to five horns in one go.

And it sold 50,000.

So at minimum, he sang it 10,000 times.

Amazing.

But it was probably more than...

Was the laughing song just laughing?

No, that was the chorus.

So people might know it, actually.

I reckon people listening to this, some of them will know it, because it was covered loads of times, especially in the UK, a slightly different version called the Laughing Policeman Song, which I love.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, it's exactly the same.

It's the same song, but obviously they removed all of the racist stuff and replaced it with a fat policeman who goes,

and that's the song.

It's great.

Yeah, it's really great.

When I was reading about this, I thought, how I can't believe the things that entertain people in the 1890s.

And no, you're right.

We found that very entertaining in our childhood.

Good on him.

Yeah, Johnson, George Washington Johnson, he had a

quite a sad end because they worked out how to replicate music and he was no, he no longer had a job for life, basically.

Yeah, because there were no royalties.

No, so you got paid for doing your recording.

Yeah.

But once they managed to just copy stuff, then you never got any money anymore.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like Spotify of its day.

Yeah.

Oh,

controversial for our largest distribution outlet.

Let me finish.

Yeah, he had a the middle bit where he was singing this song might have been the only kind of peaceful bit of his life, really, because he was born in 1846 into slavery.

He was made to be the best friend of the child of the family, so he sort of had playmate

for the white family.

Yeah, so he then was freed and he went to New York where he lived in Hell's Kitchen and he was doing all this stuff where he was sort of, you know, on the streets singing.

Then this big moment happens where he gets to sing all these songs.

As James points out, then they work out how to duplicate it.

So his career is dead after, you know, sitting in a booth 20,000 times minimum singing this stuff.

And then life gets really weird for him, as Andy points out.

He was charged with murder.

He was never convicted, but it was brought on to him.

Both of his wives died suddenly when living with him.

And yeah, he was charged with trying to murder one of them.

Well, actually murdering one of them.

I did read a report of an altercation he had with his wife.

This was in the Earth newspaper in 1899.

And its headline was Too Much Whistling.

Because his main thing was whistling, right?

And he was famous on the streets of New York for whistling.

And it said, George Washington Johnson is in trouble because he couldn't restrain his disposition to whistle at all times.

He quarreled with his wife because she got tired of him whistling all over the house.

So she shot him and he thumped her and died the next night.

So that was a story in what I assume was a tabloid equivalent.

He whistled too much, she shot him, he hit her, and then she died.

And then she died

in the olden days.

You could just make a living from being really good at whistling.

I was just thinking that.

But you don't have to code or anything.

No, you could just whistle.

There was a guy called Freeman Davis, who was known as Brother Bones, who was a shoe shine boy, and people noticed how good he was at whistling.

And he would also play his shoeshine instruments like, you know, spoons, like the spoons you might do.

and he became really famous and his uh whistling became the theme song of the harlem club trotters there was sibyl sanderson fagan who was one of the most famous whistlers in america in the 1920s and she would do whistling of birdsong so you would buy a vinyl and it would just be her pretending to be a thrush or a mockingbird or something she left her husband who was a playwright called eugene p bardin because um she claimed that he had drugged her on her wedding day.

And so she got married because she said that she'd been drugged into getting married.

He drugged her into the marriage.

I thought you meant after the wedding had happened, then he drugged her.

Oh my goodness.

There was Fred Lowry, who was a professional whistler in the 40s and 50s, who was blinded by scarlet fever at the age of two, then became a whistler.

And then he later went away from pop music and became a religious whistler.

Oh, a religious whistler.

Yeah, he would go to churches and whistle hymns instead of whistling pop songs.

Nice.

But yeah, it's just amazing that you've got all these people who all they could do was whistle.

I'm not, all we can do is podcast.

So it's exactly.

Yeah, yeah.

I can whistle.

I can whistle.

Oh, yeah.

Let's hear your thrush.

Oh, my thrush.

Oh, shit, I've got thrush.

Well, wasn't the first, was it Eurovision?

The halftime act was a troop of whistlers.

Well, that's it.

The Rossignols, I think.

Yeah.

Oh, that means Nightingale in French.

Oh, there we go.

Okay, well, that's

all coming together.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So it's a big, big deal.

If you say in French, Jai les Rossignol, which I think means I have rosignoles, it means there's a problem with your car because it's like you have nightingales in your engine and it's making a weird tweeting noise.

The earliest sound recording we have, we actually only heard a few years ago, but it was from way earlier than we thought, like 20 years before Edison in 1857.

And it was a French guy called Edouard Léon Scott de Martin V.

And he basically recorded sound, but he didn't know how to play it back.

He hadn't invented the instrument to transmit it in.

He just recorded it onto a bit of paper.

That's takes a lot of trust when you go to the dragons.

No, honestly, I have recorded sound, you just can't hear it.

It's fine.

You can show them the paper and go, this would sound amazing if you tried to imagine it.

And we managed to engineer it in 2008 to play one of those.

His piece of paper.

His piece of paper.

His 1860 piece of paper.

Yeah, it was covered in soot, and the sound waves were etched in.

So vinyl is PVC, PVC, right?

And that was invented or first synthesized by a guy, a German chemist called Eugene Baumann in 1872.

And he had been making some vinyl chloride in a flask and had just left it on a shelf for a few days, maybe a few weeks.

The sunlight had got on it, and then there was a white compound in there.

And he thought, I wonder what this is.

And that turned out to be PVC.

Wow.

And then

he then stick his arm in the flask to try and get it out and it formed a sexy PVC glove?

And he realised this has huge implications for the erotic clothing industry.

Well, that is the story.

That's barely what happened.

Eugene Bellman also identified the source for the smells in urine.

and proved the active ingredient in your thyroid gland, which is what stops you from getting goiters.

Oh.

So just a few things back.

Wow.

Wow.

Yeah.

It's all chemistry.

What do you lead with, though?

On the CVs.

Oh, I know why P smells.

I know why piss smells.

If you're sat next to someone at a wedding and they say, what do you do?

You say, I'm a chemist.

And they go, oh, have you chemisted anything that I might know?

Then what is your response?

Have you ever smelled some piss?

I know why.

Your best man is very rude.

Oh, dear.

I don't think we've ever mentioned Chichester Bell before.

Okay.

Because I didn't know about him anyway.

He's a person.

He's Alexander Graham Bell's brother.

Stop it.

He's.

Really?

Also, a phonograph pioneer.

Chichester Bell.

What a name.

He invented the earliest voicemail.

Around about the time his brother Alex was working on phones.

Yeah, he invented voicemail.

And the way it worked was

it was a phonograph cylinder that you recorded your voice onto.

Yeah.

So the grooves are all in the right place.

And then you just, but you posted it to your friend.

The problem is that they would get it and they'd be like, oh, who's it from?

And they go Chitchester Bell and they're going, fuck off.

That's just spam, mate.

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Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that the U.S.

government maintains a database of dad jokes.

What an excellent fact.

There we go.

We're off the blocks.

There we go.

Three guys absolutely straining for a dad joke there.

I don't know why I presented this fact because this promises to be hell the next 20 minutes with you guys.

But this is on a website that's run by the Office of Family Assistance, which is a government resource for fathers, basically, for families.

And they have a website within that called the National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse.

And if you go to that website, which I would recommend,

then you can click on

dad resources and you can submit your own dad jokes.

And you can click, give me a joke, and they'll give you a dad joke.

You can click, give me another, they'll give you another.

I don't know how long it goes on for.

I sat there for about half an hour.

Wow.

If you go to the mum section of this website, is it all practical stuff?

Like how to feed a baby, how to change a baby, how to keep a baby alive.

It's a load of your mum jokes.

And yeah, I thought that was really interesting.

And I guess the idea is that being a father is perhaps something people need help with, of course, as they do with all bits of parenting.

And it's a useful skill to have in your back pocket as a dad, being able to whip out a really bad, really inoffensive joke, which seems to basically be the definition: is that they're bad and they're not offensive.

Yeah.

So they give you a bunch of the jokes with the reveals on the site.

Oh, okay.

All right.

So here's the first one that came up that I saw.

What do you call a man with a rubber toe?

Roberto.

Roberto, yes.

Really?

I don't think that's a dad joke, actually.

I kind of agree.

I would say.

Why not?

So my definition of a dad joke is a joke where it is in response to something a child often says.

Yep.

And you always repeat it all the time, all the time, all the time.

So for instance, Anna's mum joke, which is, can you turn on the light?

And then your mum goes and flirts with the light and she's like, are you turned on yet?

I think that's a dad joke because it's something that kids will always say.

I have an actual dad joke that I do and I've been doing for six years now every single time it's said.

And it's whenever it's kind of getting to the evening and Fenela says, can you draw the curtains?

Okay.

Always say.

Can I have a pencil?

I'd love to, but I don't have a pencil.

Yeah, that's a dad joke, I think.

Interesting.

I think there are two strands of dad jokeism, which, you know, is a complex being.

I agree that is one.

But then I think I remember, you know, my dad told jokes and they seem to very much fall into the dad joke category of what does a dog call the the thing on top of a house?

Ruff.

And he regularly say it.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

I think these are things that you regularly say, right?

I kind of feel like they're more cracker jokes.

Yeah.

Like Christmas.

Well,

there's a thin line.

There's a really nice theory about why dad jokes are good.

This is great.

Okay.

Why they're good.

Well, no, no, sorry.

Why they happen.

They are good.

Well, no, I mean your one about the curtains.

Just a mantle, please.

Brilliant.

Get to laugh every time.

So the idea is that this is from the British Psychological Society.

I personally, I'm not sure I buy it, but I like it.

It's that by continually telling their children jokes that are so bad they're embarrassing, fathers may be pushing their children's limits of how much embarrassment they can handle.

So, yeah.

That's great.

Showing your child that embarrassment isn't fatal because the child is mortified to hear.

And if you're, you know, your child is adolescent, which feels again a bit like the ship that sailed in terms of, you know, dad jokes are normally when a child is five.

Yeah.

But there's a sort of theory builds because the theory is if your child has been exposed to years of awful jokes by this point and has shown that dad can cope with people not caring, that people think dad is an idiot, the children will be able to be themselves better.

How interesting.

But it's more for the benefit of the dad.

I don't know.

I feel like, well, James, I feel like you wrote this up in a book for one of the QI books.

So I read quite a few theories, that one included.

Another one.

about why they happen is when you have a kid who's two years old like I do almost basically they'll they'll laugh at anything like literally anything if i say to my daughter like she wants to read mog and i say do you want to read moog

she will piss herself laughing and then if i'm like oh do you want to read the very hooi kutipoode she'll just find it the funniest thing in the world right and the idea being you're making her racist against buildings

i'm still not over waterline

um the thing is the kids will laugh at almost anything and then as a dad that kind of builds your confidence.

And then as you get older, you're like, this idiot will laugh at everything.

And she always laughed at whenever I said moog instead of mog, so I'm going to keep doing it.

And you just keep doing it and keep doing it.

And then as the kids get older, they realize this isn't funny at all.

And that's when they realize that they're dad jokes.

Wow.

Does the dadness of the joke depend on the child understanding it's not funny?

I think someone has to be on the outside knowing that it's not funny.

It might be my wife.

For instance, she would know it's a dad joke.

But the other thing is, like, quite often they're kind of wordplay-ish.

And there's a theory that by doing this wordplay again and again and again, it helps to teach language skills.

Yeah.

Exactly that.

And I think also it teaches them joke structure and to and it just brings funniness to the house.

It's just a great way to keep things funny in the house.

I still think that I really like them.

I'm very fond of them.

I think by definition a dad joke isn't funny.

That's what it is.

It's a joke that's kind of predictable.

So I read an article by a linguist about dad jokes and I thought the example that she used was not a dad joke for me because I thought it was actually funny.

It wasn't the bunga bunga one, was it?

We can't offer that again, the letter of last time.

Oh, it's perfectly inoffensive, okay?

It doesn't cross that boundary, but the joke is that a man comes up to a widow at the funeral of his old friend and he says to the widow, do you mind if I say a word?

And she nods.

And the man clears his throat and says gently, plethora.

And the wife smiles sadly and replies, thanks.

That means a lot.

Oh, yeah.

I think that's a very good joke.

It's a good joke.

It's too good.

It's too good.

Can I give you some examples of dad jokes?

When I was writing this article for the QI Book, I asked my followers on Twitter for some dad jokes.

So I'll give you the kid saying something, and you have to say what the dad says as a joke in response.

So Adam Sia said that he would say, Are you all right, dad?

No, I've got a left-hand side as well.

No, I'm half left.

Yeah.

Okay.

Okay.

Chris Emerson, our friend Chris Emerson, said he would say to his dad, I'm off.

Off what?

Off-com.

No.

And the dad would reply, I wondered what that smell was.

Oh, that's good.

And Cardinal Grumpy, I think perhaps not his real name,

senior prelate in the Catholic Church.

If they said, I'm thirsty to their dad, what would be the reply?

I'm dad.

Nice to meet you.

Pretty close.

Oh, no, it's Wednesday.

Oh, put them together.

Hi, I'm Wednesday.

Change the day?

Friday.

No, you're not.

You're Friday.

You're pretty much that.

Who's to meet Friday?

Okay, I'm going to give it you.

So he says, Dad, I'm thirsty.

Dad says, pleased to meet you Thursday.

I'm Friday, and he's Robinson Crusoe.

Oh, I see.

Wow, that's a really good well-red kid.

Do you want to hear one of the first ever your mum jokes?

Yeah, go on.

Yeah.

Is it like Babylonian?

Is it like as far as?

There are.

There is one, and it's from a...

There's one which is from a partial bit of text.

So it's not really clear what the entire joke is.

But there is another one from 100 AD, which is Rabbi Eliezer

was said to have gone and interrupted a man who had been reading a banned text, which was Ezekiel 23, by asking him, why don't you go out and proclaim the abominations of your mother?

Is that a your mum joke?

It's a prototype.

Yeah, absolutely a mum joke.

You seem to be funny, extremely funny, judging by the look on your face.

Yeah.

The sad thing is, I'm afraid, for the listeners, is that you'll all now remember all of these really bad jokes that we've told more than you remember a good joke because studies show that you remember bad jokes more than good jokes because of the way they work, because they are predictable.

You know, the reason that we can kind of guess the endings to the dad jokes that James asked for is that they are formulae good for teaching kids how these patterns work.

But the definition of good humour that makes you actually laugh is that you subvert that, like pull the rug out from under someone's feet.

It's unexpected.

So you never remember them.

So it's so annoying.

You'll only ever remember shit jokes.

So it's like, are you all right, dad?

No, I have a terrible, incurable disease, and I won't be with you in a week's time.

Right.

You got that from the new Ricocher special, didn't you?

That subverts the norm.

It does.

I think it does still have to be funny.

All right, okay.

They exist in other languages.

In France, as a child, if you say, what, what, what, what, they wouldn't understand you because they're French.

But if they say it in French, they say, qua.

And any self-respecting dad will reply, fur, qua, fur, qua, fur, which means hairdresser, quoi faur.

And in Spain, if a dad sees some soy milk, he might say, hola milk, soy papi.

Lovely.

Because soy means I am, so it means, hi milk.

I'm dad.

Nice.

Very nice.

Very nice.

That's the I'm hungry.

Hi, hungry.

I'm dad is in nine states of America the most ticked as used dad joke.

Oh nice.

That's a proper dad joke.

So is that like the parenting test you get after your kids won or something, you're back to the GP?

Please check this box.

Can they walk?

Can they talk?

How many times have you told us?

I nearly got got researching this fact.

It was a report on NPR, obviously really well-respected radio station and great source of lots of stuff.

And it was about a list of Roman jokes, ancient Roman jokes, that had been found.

And

it was a scroll found in an amphitheater, and they'd done some amazing analysis.

You know, they x-ray a scroll and they managed, without unrolling it, to scan what's inside.

And it was all these phrases found in Latin.

And like a translation was, did you hear the rumor about butter?

Oh, well, I'm not going to spread it.

Oh, yeah.

I thought you were going to say butter.

I hardly knew I

was a bit, it was a bit more PG than that, the scroll.

And then I got really far into this article.

And then eventually I got to the claim that Caesar had turned up and addressed a crowd of senators who were angry with him by asking them, what did the cucumber say to the pickle?

And I realized, I looked at the date, it was an April the first article.

And what did he say?

You mean a great deal to me.

Oh, good.

Why are you getting your knives out?

So he did deserve it, after all.

It is weird that these exist all around the world though, this stereotype, or in so many different countries.

Like Japan has old man jokes, which are oyaji, old man, then giagu joke.

Gagu, like gag.

Yeah.

Like gag.

That's how they make a lot of words in Japanese, don't they?

They take an English word and add a U at the end because

in Japanese every word has to end with a vowel or an N.

Like very new, yeah, so it's like a new word they've nicked it for.

T-shirtu.

It's t-shirt.

There you go.

Very Very easy to guess.

This is like an extremely easy test.

It's not much of a quiz, is it?

Korea, they have middle-aged man jokes, literally middle-aged man jokes.

Danish has various different versions.

They've got uncle humour, unkelhumour.

I'll say, we've been advertising babble for quite a long time, and it seems like you could just say words slightly in an accent, and that works.

What's the Danish one, though?

Because my step-grandfather's Danish and he always used to do whatever their version is.

Oh, well, uncle humour is uncle humour, but for him, I think he would be more far wittigede, which is grandfather humour.

Grandfather humour.

So at the end of every meal, whenever the waiter came over to get our plates, they'd say, Are you finished?

And he'd say, No, I'm Danish.

Every single time

every time.

That is good.

Would you like some water?

No, fish fucking it.

You know, I was a bit younger for that.

I was age.

That's a WC Fields joke, isn't it?

Yeah.

Yeah, that's all right.

Guys, do you know what a BJ joke is?

I do, yeah.

I do.

I don't think you do.

BJ joke.

So what could it be?

BJ joke.

I don't think you're going to guess this just before.

Boris Johnson.

Yeah, I mean, it is technically one of those as well, I suppose.

Just shot for bad joke?

It's one of those.

No, it's none of those.

This is in one study, at least, which seemed to use the officially accepted academic terms for jokes.

This is a 2016 study, because I was looking at whether men and women do find different jokes funny, because, you know, it's such a gender-based concept the dad joke yeah and so there's a study that looked at whether they did and they divided jokes into ejs a js and bjs which are excellent adequate and bad

it should be that it's exaggeration jokes ambiguity jokes and bridging inference jokes and so bjs are the bridging inference and that basically means that they require you to actually get the joke so when you listen to the joke you have to like attribute an intention to another.

So an example would be Jack's dream of becoming a writer comes true when his books finally publish.

He asks his friend, have you read my book yet?

His friend said, yes, and I bought one.

And Jack happily responded, oh, that was you.

Oh, yeah.

Thanks.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it's a kind of bad joke that we've sort of all made about our various books.

That's how you tell them.

You really didn't sell that one at all.

I think even Wilf would have been like, I'm sorry, Auntie Anna.

It wasn't good, was it?

Why is that a BJ?

Because we're inferring from the joke that he doesn't sell many of his books.

But he's only sold one.

And you're so thankful he gave him a blowjob.

You did that with every book that you sold, didn't you?

10,000 blowjobs, a bit like George Washington Johnson.

You could do five at the same time.

That was the affair of the thing.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our various social media accounts.

I'm on Instagram at Schreiberland.

James.

My Instagram is no such thing as James Harkin.

Andy.

I don't have Instagram, but I'm on Twitter at Andreaunduram.

Yeah, or if you want to get to us as a group, where do they go, Anna?

You can email podcast at qi.com or you can tweet at no such thing.

That's right.

Yep.

Or you can just go to our website, no such thingasafish.com.

All of the previous episodes are up there.

A link to the gateway to the portal that is Club Fish is up there as well.

Do check it out.

Lots of really fun bonus episodes are pumped out every fortnight.

Otherwise, just come back here because we'll be back with another episode and we'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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