Happiness QI

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, and welcome.

It's happy hour at QI, because tonight we're all about H for happiness.

Get them in quickly while you can, ladies and gentlemen,

because you've got four guests for the price of two.

The happy-go-lucky Andy Hamilton...

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

..the irresistibly chirpy Rich Hall...

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

..that cheerful charlie Phill Jupitus...

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

..and someone who doesn't even know the meaning of the word lugubrious,

Alan Davies!

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

So, your instruments of pleasure, if you please. Andy goes...

MANIC LAUGH

And Rich goes...

-CRAZY FEMALE LAUGH

-Phill goes...

-COMICALLY MENACING LAUGH

-And Alan goes...

SNORTING LAUGH

Oh, dear.

Right. Well, before we start,

I want to test your own contribution to the sum of human happiness,

the QI Audience Pleasure Gauge.

Every time the pointer enters the red happy zone

as a result of something the audience likes,

I will award one or more of you a bonus, all right? For example...

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

So, now to questions. What would make Britain a happier place?

No more penalty shoot-outs.

Hope.

-The Pope?

-Hope.

-Not the Pope!

-Not the Pope, no.

I was going to say, that seemed odd.

I thought you said a grope.

-A grope or the Pope...

-I'll work on my diction!

I think moving Britain slightly south to improve the climate slightly would make us happier.

-Could you do that just by putting an outboard motor on Aberdeen?

-Yeah.

Probably more than one. I reckon you'd need a few, but if you had enough you'd get it going.

Britain never wakes up in the same latitude.

Yeah, you'd never know where you are. You're just cruising the globe.

Right, yeah.

-Like Somali pirates, but...

-Can we concentrate....?

LAUGHTER

-Yeah. If we went back to pillaging and looting and raping.

-Right.

I'm not sure what pillaging is, but looting and raping...

-Fine...

-All right, looting, no rape.

-Yeah.

-Pillage.

A minor pillage.

-Minor pillaging.

-Yeah.

-What is pillaging?

It's kind of sacking, ransacking, stealing from,

pilfering and taking things.

Burgling, taking, I think, pillaging.

-So it's the same as looting?

-Yeah.

-Kind of is, really, isn't it?

Give everyone a mental age of six, that would make Britain happier.

-We'd be very easily pleased. Sweets...

-Well, the media are working on that, aren't they?

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Oh, yeah!

I think you've hit...

I think you've hit the Happiness Gauge there.

-That was very good, well done.

-The last dumbing-down.

-Yeah.

But of course, six-year-olds probably cry 70 or 80 times a day,

-which you... Do you?

-Cos they can't go up and down stairs without falling.

Which I can.

70 or 80 times...?

Where is this six-year-old?

-Well, I'm just saying...

-What does Uncle Stephen do?

LAUGHTER

I try and teach them Latin.

They just don't seem to be able to like it!

"Not the British Museum again!"

Oh, don't!

"I don't like foie gras, Uncle Stephen!"

LAUGHING AND APPLAUSE

Oh, boo and boo.

"This is prosecco, and this is real champagne..."

"I'm not telling you again!"

Otters.

-Otters.

-I'd vote, yeah.

-Otters lying on their backs, playing with stones.

Sea otters.

It makes me happy.

Yeah, if you see an otter, you just feel happy.

I think if every home had an otter...

"An otter in every house. I promise!"

If one's empirical about this, and said "Which do we think might be the happiest country on Earth?"

Do you think there's ever been any agreement?

The Otter-man Empire?

LAUGHTER AND CHEERING

Up it goes.

Very good.

That was good.

One of the things that appears to be a great index of happiness

is not wealth itself, but a lack of huge disparity between rich and poor.

In countries where really there isn't much of a gap of that sort of nature...

That's a famous sketch, you may remember, from TW3

with John Cleese and Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett.

But where there isn't that kind of differential,

it seems people are happier.

Even in the last 13 or 14 years in Britain,

the gap has widened considerably, 10% since '97 when John Major's government ended.

The gap between rich and poor has widened.

It's very difficult. How do you measure happiness?

Do you ask people if they're happy?

And are they reliable guides of their own happiness?

-The things they do to each other will tell you whether they're happy or not.

-That's a very good...

Happy people are less inclined to glass people in pubs.

-Yeah.

-There's no unit of happiness, is there? That's the problem.

No international unit of...

No feliciton, no.

There are apparently ways of measuring happiness, but none of them is particularly reliable.

An interesting thing is that if you take someone

who's got enormous reason, apparently, to be very happy,

say they've just won the pools or the lottery -

this was a test that was done in 1978 -

and someone who'd had a catastrophic car crash that might have paralysed them.

Obviously, at the time, one is extremely happy and the other unbelievably unhappy,

but within a very short time they both level out and return to the same state they were in before.

-So people have a bedrock level of...

-They kind of do.

Yeah. Bhutan was the first country to have a gross measure of happiness, the GNH.

-Gross National Happiness.

-No television there, do they?

They didn't for a very long time, or traffic lights.

The king declared happiness of the people the guiding goal of development,

and he banned unhappy TV shows, amongst other things.

-Traffic lights never make you happy, do they?

-No, they don't.

-And they tried it in Slough.

-No traffic lights and no television?

No, they tried... It was called Making Slough Happy,

including such things as doing good turns, laughing daily and watching less television,

which resulted in a 33% upswing in their Life Satisfaction Index.

I think one of the important things would be to get rid of the name Slough.

I fear you're right. It's not a very happy name, is it?

They should change it to Yippee!

The weird thing is, that would probably work.

"Where are you from?" "Yippee!"

"Where do you live?" "Yippee!" It would be fantastic. What a brilliant idea.

-Yippee, Berks.

-Yeah.

Brilliant. Staines is quite close. Staines...

LAUGHTER

-It's not right.

-We call Staines Woo-hoo!

Yeah. Yippee and Woo-hoo!

-Hull. Bad...

-Hull?

Yeah.

-Hot-Diggedy would be a good name for it.

-Hot-Diggedy for Hull.

Brilliant! This is a superb movement.

This really could make a difference, because we're human beings.

We respond emotionally to things.

It may seem trivial, but wouldn't that be great if you lived in Hot-Diggedy?

Hot Diggedy, right outside of Zippedy-Do-Dah.

LAUGHTER

The only trouble is when there's an accident there,

-and the newsreader has to say...

-LAUGHTER

"The bus turned over in Hot-Diggedy, and..."

It's like a headline I saw in Ireland. "Cork man drowns."

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

Oh, happiness, happiness!

You know what?

You guys are bending the needle.

His name was Bob. Come on!

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

Well, well.

Wow. I think I've won this. I'm not going to answer another question.

All the surveys indicate that economic equality

is what promotes the greatest good for the greatest number.

The other things that make us happy, of course, are friends.

But how many real friends do you have?

RICH: Just one. James Taylor.

LAUGHTER

One friend you have in him, yeah.

-ANDY: I've got to four.

-Four friends. You've counted, have you?

Actually, I'm not sure about him.

He once spiked my drinks and stole my trousers when I was...

-Definitely cross him out.

-He's coming off the list.

-Which did he do first?

LAUGHTER

Drinks first, Phill.

I don't know, maybe he's agile.

We say that a friend will come over to your house and help you move,

and a good friend will help you move a body.

That's good.

I have two good friends.

LAUGHTER

Oh! Rich!

That's disturbing. There is this thing called a Dunbar number. Does that mean anything to you?

Yeah, it's about 100 and something.

You're right. There was a professor of evolutionary anthropology at Oxford University called Dunbar,

who calculated, if calculation is the right word,

that we can't have more than 150 friends.

-And obviously some of us have a very high doctrine of friends...

-150?

-Yeah. He defines it this way.

-I don't even know 150 people.

It's a network.

-I thought he was going to say five.

-Well, I know what you mean.

He defines this friendly network

as "containing the people you wouldn't feel embarrassed to join at the bar

"in the transit lounge of Hong Kong airport at 3am."

LAUGHTER

Ah, there are thousands of them(!)

I was going to say, I've never been embarrassed to join anyone at a bar in my life.

It's a peculiar definition. It's an odd one.

-Is there something about this particular transit lounge?

-I don't know!

But 150 does turn out to be quite a special number amongst peoples and groups.

It's the average size of traditional hunter-gatherer communities,

religious groups such as the Amish, and English villages at the time of the Domesday Book.

It also occurs all over the modern world.

It's the number of Christmas cards the average person sends, apparently, 150.

The size of a company in all modern armies is 150, as opposed to a battalion or platoon.

And it's also close to the average number of friends people have on Facebook, which is 130-odd.

So it is a strangely... It seems to be the number beyond which it's too many,

and any less than that is a closer friend.

-When we say friend we mean someone, as you say...

-We like.

-Who'll bury a body for you.

-Yes.

-Are you all on Facebook? No?

-I don't really go on the computer.

I read a prediction the other day that said, at the current rate,

in ten years' time, one in three marriages in America will be people who met on-line.

It's already one in eight.

-That's amazing, isn't it?

-Oh, God.

-Is that bad?

You just fill out a lot of forms, don't you?

-"Here's everything I like."

-No, they don't necessarily meet on dating sites. Some will be, I agree.

-ANDY: How do you meet if you're not on a dating site?

-Join a group.

You join a group?

-You join a Facebook group with like-minded people.

-Oh, right.

They send you witty remarks.

Eventually, you send them a photograph of your genitals.

Yes!

You know!

Whoa!

LAUGHING AND CHEERING

Well, Alan, that's the most popular so far, the genitals.

Photograph of the genitals.

-So it's just like a normal courtship, then? But done digitally?

-Yeah.

Yeah. Exactly.

I feel quite bad for the Amish in this situation,

because they're not going to meet people on Facebook, are they?

Unless we create an Amish Facebook where you write everything about yourself on a sheet of paper,

and put it in a barrel in the middle of the village.

Which people can just dip in and out of, you know.

"Ah, raised a barn today. LOL."

LAUGHTER

And they have AMG -

Ach, mein Gott!

LAUGHTER

Now, how can you tell if a friend is really pleased to see you?

Oh, well...

LAUGHTER

I would guess from the picture that your teeth expand.

LAUGHTER

Pupils dilating, something like that?

Or they let off a pheromone? Something happens?

Well, it's interpretation of the smile.

Oh. So if you're going...you're not?

Yeah. And it's become sort of almost a cliche for us to say that they don't smile with their eyes,

but this wasn't known about until the 19th century.

There was a Frenchman who had nothing better to do than to electrocute people's faces

in order to make their lips turn upwards without their eyes moving.

There we are.

LAUGHTER

That's what he liked to do.

-It's a job!

-He's only ten years old, that boy.

"As you can't have real sideburns, have these electric ones."

His name was Guillaume Duchenne, and he defined a true smile as having to involve the face and the eyes.

And what he discovered was that you can't control your eyes,

you can't make your eyes smile.

It's involuntary, whereas you can make your lips smile.

These are some rather horrifying attempts

to try and make people smile!

These are all the QI researchers,

-bending over backwards for the show.

-It's disturbing.

Couldn't he get a different volunteer?

LAUGHTER

Poor Barry! Day 60 - "Aaargh!"

Day 61 - "Gaarh!"

The second one from the bottom, it looks like the bloke's come at him from a different side.

He's been surprised as well.

Yeah, there is actually, Andy, a third probe you can't see.

LAUGHTER

Mr Duchenne actually gave them numbers. So 58 is,

"I forgot my mother's birthday."

"61, left the gas on."

That's not left the gas on,

that's "I've just trodden on a cat and it's died."

LAUGHTER

The real smile is called the Duchenne smile,

and with only the mouth smiling, it's known in the trade of happiness studies, gelotology,

-it's know as...

-A Gordon Brown.

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

No, a false smile is known in the trade as a Pan Am smile.

because that was the airline, since defunct, of course,

where it was considered they had the stewardesses who had the most plasticky false smiles,

-where the eyes are not smiling.

-Oh.

The Gordon Brown smile, the weird thing about it was you'd see the moment where he'd decide to smile,

and that is the... That kills any smile.

You actually see... You hear a "clunk", and then there's a smile.

-You know it's not natural.

-Yes, I agree.

-Meanwhile, the girl on the left.

-Yeah.

Is she wearing anything under her coat?

So, if somebody's really pleased to see you, you can see it in their eyes.

So, what would you do to a waiter who drew a smiley face on your bill?

-I'm not a fan of the smiley face.

-No?

-I don't mind them introducing themselves.

-Right.

The weird thing is, a waiter goes, "Hi, I'm Stephen, I'm your waiter."

If you call them Stephen for the rest of the night, "Stephen,"

and they come up, they get quite annoyed about halfway through the main course.

"Stephen, this meal is really good."

You tell them lots of things and use their name all the time,

then you get a sad face on your bill.

-LAUGHTER

-It's like personalised numberplates.

If you ever see a car go by and it's got REG on it and he gets out,

and you go, "All right, Reg?" they don't like it.

They're idiots, then, aren't they?

I have a friend who's a producer on Broadway, and when he's in Joe Allen's, an actors' restaurant,

and he wants attention at the table, he goes, "Oh, actor,"

which is very mean.

-How rude.

-Very rude, isn't it?

The stewardesses don't like that on planes when you go, "Nurse!"

LAUGHTER

Hate it.

I shouldn't have even said "stewardess". What are they now?

Is it cabin crew? Something?

ANDY: Attendants. RICH: Attendant.

-AUDIENCE MEMBER:

-Cabin crew!

-Cabin crew?

-Cabin crew!

You work out of Stansted, don't you? I'd recognise that accent anywhere.

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

Oh, we're pushing the needle!

We can't see the needle!

It's going up.

You've obviously commanded them to applaud in this way.

This must be what it was like in Soviet Russia.

Every time they went to anything, "Aaah! Yes! Clap! Laugh!

"I can see the guns!"

You weren't allowed to be the first one to stop clapping, were you?

That would get you sent to the gulag,

so they would just clap for hours and hours and hours!

A nation of people with bloody stumps!

Oi! Oi!

Does the smiley face mean the waiter's pleased with what you've done,

the way you've conducted yourself?

It's a way of getting a bigger tip.

-And weirdly, it works.

-It works?

-Yeah.

-ANDY: They should draw little otters, that would be better.

-On their backs, playing with stones.

-Yeah.

Does that really work? Are you saying that gets a bigger tip?

Yep. Drawing a smiley face, introducing your name, telling a joke, apparently.

How about decent service?

I don't think they've ever thought of that. Might work.

Is that a suitable tip? If it is, I'm going to change everything. That's fantastic. £1.30.

-Which is the nation of biggest tippers?

-America, is it?

America, yeah.

-What's considered the...

-20%.

20%?

But if it's bad service you take the tip and you put it in a glass of water and turn it upside down,

and leave it on the table.

But you still leave it. If you leave an American restaurant without tipping, the waiter will chase you.

-Oh, sure.

-They'll run down the street after you and say, "Sir, you didn't tip." They really will.

They take your money and say, "Will there be any change with that?"

Yes, I think you'll find that's a 100 bill and I've just had a cup of tea.

LAUGHTER

But what do we think in Britain is right?

-ANDY: 10%.

-10%.

But the average left in British restaurants is apparently 8.5%.

Tight bastards.

What's the matter with you people?

Out of the Welsh and the English in Britain who are the bigger tippers?

-I'll go Welsh.

-Yes, they are.

-The English are the worst tippers in the UK.

-I'm not surprised by that!

-No, I'm not either.

-The English resent tipping.

-They do, don't they?

I don't think it's that they resent tipping.

I think they can't be bothered to do the maths.

-LAUGHTER

-Probably right!

That's what they resent...

"10% of 80p, that's what?

"Er, 5p..."

Here's the thing that counts against national happiness,

-the process of splitting the bill with the bastard at the end.

-Yes.

"Oh, I only had a beer and a salad,"

with the drunk at the other end who's had nine white Russians.

LAUGHTER

-DRUNKENLY:

-"Let's just split it, yeah?"

LAUGHTER

It's true! It's so true.

One day, you'll be the one who's had the nine white Russians. It all comes around.

If a waiter draws a smiley face on your bill, you might well leave a bigger tip.

Where did Florence Nightingale do her most important work?

-Hospital.

-Where?

-In a hospital.

-In a hostel or a hospital?

-A hospital.

-Hospital.

-I think this was in her bed.

-Yes, you're right!

You know a bit about her, clearly.

I think Florence Nightingale came back from the Crimea

where she'd done a lot of good stuff, and then she took to her bed

in a rather sort of attention-seeking way,

and was a bit of a pain the arse I suspect, but she made

the great and the good come to her bedside.

She was such an icon and she founded...

I mean, British nursing was sort of founded by...

The odd thing is you said in the Crimea, having done a lot of good,

the strange thing is she felt she didn't do any good.

She's right, she didn't.

You were three times more likely to die in Scutari, the hospital she ran

than you were in a rough field hospital, because there was so much infection.

It was a disastrous place and there were reports that showed

that the outcome of all the patients under her care was terrible.

She thought this report would expose her and she was ashamed in fact,

and she kind of had a decline. It wasn't anything other than just

she thought her life, her career and her reputation was over.

Went home, went to bed and stayed in bed, but she lived, as you say, over 50 years in bed.

She would awaken and start work at five, writing letters

and campaigning and doing all the good that she then did

in laying down standards of cleanliness.

But it was really to expiate the failure of her work in the Crimea,

-which is quite surprising I think.

-Yeah.

But if ignorance is bliss, then prepare for a torrent of pleasure.

It's time for General Ignorance. Fingers on buzzers.

What is Africa's dominant animal predator?

By dominant, do we mean the one that kills the most things?

Kills the most other animals?

Yeah.

-I guess, as a predator.

-Hyena.

Is the right answer!

APPLAUSE

You're on fire!

No, because I watched something

where David Attenborough said, "The hyena is the biggest killer..."

Most people might think it was the lion as the most dominant.

Obviously mosquitoes kill more humans.

But lions are lazy buggers.

They are. It's much more likely that a lion will scavenge the kill of a hyena than the hyena that of a lion.

We think of hyenas as sloping away like jackals,

but they're very intelligent.

There they are - spotty.

You wouldn't want one round the house, necessarily.

-You wouldn't want to be chased by a pack of them.

-No, you wouldn't.

What's with the laughter - they laugh. What's that about? What does the laugh mean?

They're communicating.

It's a particular thing they're communicating.

They're watching Mr Bean. It's popular in every country in the world - why wouldn't they like it?

I think they're laughing cos they're remembering something that happened earlier.

Oh, yes. It's actually clan submissiveness, supposedly. Would you like to hear it?

Like to hear a hyena laugh?

Are you going to bring one in?

HYENA LAUGHS

It's a good noise.

Do you know as an acting trick - if you are asked to laugh, some people find it very difficult.

And it's terrible if it sounds false. Ha-ha!

But a simple physical technique is...

Holding your breath.

-No.

-No, it's the opposite. What you have to do is empty your lungs.

-What most people do is go...

-HE INHALES

..then ha-ha! and it sounds false. But if you empty your lungs...

HE LAUGHS BREATHLESSLY

When people are seriously laughing, their breath...

So what is the £5 note made from?

Paper.

Let's just get that one out the way.

Er, it's made out of money.

-No, cotton and linen.

-Oh.

-Not made from wood at all.

-Money isn't made of paper?

No tree had any part in the making of your £5 note.

Which is surprising. But it's not very funny.

But I thought you'd like to know.

I just find it extraordinary.

-Do you? Thank you.

-It sounds like paper when you tear it up and laugh in the waiter's face.

That's for the smiley face.

"Steven."

-Apparently called Steven, but you were saying it with a V, I could tell.

-Yeah, totally.

Well done, that's right. Nothing more to say. Bank notes are made

from cotton or linen, because wood-based paper is far too fragile.

But what happens to your general mood as you get older?

LAUGHTER

-You become more...sedated.

-Oh, there's Phill again, look.

-Um, I think...

-You don't get grumpier.

No, I think you get happier.

There was a thing in the paper a while back,

surprisingly showing people around the age of 81 were really happy.

Presumably, that's just smugness. You think, "I've made it to 81."

So, I don't know.

Nothing. No change.

Well, essentially, you just stay much as you were.

Your general disposition seems to be more or less fixed.

-Except you wear a newspaper on your head.

-Yes, the actual behaviour can be a little strange.

But the idea that men become grumpy or women become grumpy is nonsense.

I've read that, so I'll put that there.

There's been the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Ageing, which has been running since '58...

-It's one of my favourite studies of ageing.

-It's one of the best. And it's shattered a number of myths

about the ageing process, including the belief that people become more depressed and cranky

or withdrawn or rigid or bad-tempered as they age.

In fact, adults change little after 30 in those terms.

The grumpy old git probably used to be a grumpy young git.

Now it's time to separate the cheer from the gloom

as we consider the scores. Oh, good gracious me.

In the lead, with a magnificent four points, it's Phill Jupitus!

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Very happy score. And...

In second place with a very positive one point, Rich Hall!

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

And despite his brilliance, in third place with minus 15 - Andy Hamilton.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

-I know.

-Unhappily, at minus 35 - Alan Davies.

-Thank you.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

It only remains for me to thank Rich, Phill, Andy and Alan

and to leave you with this. At a dinner for Sir Harold and Lady MacMillan, hosted by the de Gaulles

at the Elysee Palace, Lady Dorothy asked Madame de Gaulle if,

after all her husband's many achievements, there was anything she still wanted.

"Yes," said the First Lady of France. "A penis."

At which, the General leaned over and whispered discreetly,

"No, my dear, in English, it is pronounced happiness."

Goodnight.

APPLAUSE

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