A Medley of Maladies QI

APPLAUSE

Good evening, good evening,

good evening, good evening and welcome to QI,

where this week we're under doctor's orders

as we dissect a medley of maladies.

Joining me in the waiting room with

a 1984 edition of The People's Friend, we have Dr No, Lucy Porter!

APPLAUSE

Dr Strangelove, Matt Lucas.

APPLAUSE

Dr Zhivago, Ross Noble.

APPLAUSE

And Dr Snuggles, Alan Davies.

APPLAUSE

So buzzers, please, nurse.

Lucy goes...

DOCTOR ZHIVAGO THEME

For the ignorant nonsenses amongst you,

that was Dr Zhivago's theme music.

Matt goes...

DR FINLAY'S CASEBOOK THEME

For those under 80, that was Dr Finlay's Casebook.

Ross Noble, he goes...

DOCTOR WHO THEME

No, I don't know what that was. LAUGHTER

And Alan goes...

# Oh, doctor, I'm in trouble

# Well, goodness, gracious me. #

-Oh, more of that.

-Yeah, goodness, gracious me, there you are.

So, come in, lie down, pop your feet in the stirrups

and let's see what the trouble is.

LAUGHTER

What did Typhoid Mary die of?

Oh, don't start.

LAUGHTER

DOCTOR WHO THEME Yes, Ross?

Was it lack of circulation to her toe?

LAUGHTER

Yes, it is a possibility.

Is it typhoid?

KLAXON Oh, no!

Her name, as the label around that toe said, was Mary Mallon.

And she was known as Typhoid Mary.

-What did she die of? It wasn't typhoid.

-Erm...

Why am I interrupting you? I don't even know.

LAUGHTER

That's QI!

-There was nothing wrong with her.

-Car crash.

Boredom, she died of boredom, waiting to get typhoid...

-That's what I was going to say.

-..and never getting it.

She had typhoid.

But she never had symptoms?

Yes! Thank you. Thank you, Lucy Porter.

You're welcome, Stephen Fry!

Typhoid Mary, round about the turn of the century,

was a cook in New York. An Irish immigrant.

-As the name would suggest.

-Yep.

And she had typhoid, but no symptoms. She wasn't ill.

She was immune to it, to all intents and purposes.

But she was able to give it to others. And she did.

30, 40, 50 people, possibly.

Must be freezing in that ward, with all that snow.

LAUGHTER

It's taken his mind off the fact that he's being

attacked by an octopus.

LAUGHTER

Something with trailing legs.

-LUCY:

-They're all lying there saying,

"Sorry, what did you say your name was? What Mary?

"Glad to be sharing a ward with you."

The sad thing is that she was not a nice person by any

-way of looking at it.

-All right, Stephen, she's dead, come on.

LAUGHTER

The thing is, she worked in households as a cook,

and people would die of typhoid in the household where she cooked.

And she would mysteriously leave and take up a job in another one.

-So she knew that she was a carrier.

-Oh, she was a carrier?

Because she was put into quarantine.

And then she could go free as long as she never worked in service again,

didn't cook. Within weeks, she got another job as a cook.

And she tried to hide from the authorities.

So she ended up, the last two decades of her life, in quarantine.

She died of pneumonia, in fact.

How did she pass it on? Saliva? Fluids, body fluids.

Because she... Yes, she had typhoid.

-She went...

-EXHALES

Yeah. LAUGHTER

-She actually coughed.

-She didn't have to wee in the soup or anything?

Until her name has become synonymous... LAUGHTER

Now, what's the most deadly thing you can find in a doctor's waiting room?

-And you can look at that picture...

-A copy of the Daily Telegraph.

LAUGHTER

-ROSS:

-I'm guessing, looking at that example, is it the tiny baby bear

which has crawled out from inside that plant there?

Is it going to be that lethal water carrier thing in the corner?

Hang on, right next to a lamp? Water, next to electricity?

-LAUGHTER

-That's a health and safety nightmare!

"These people are seconds from death, why?"

LAUGHTER

-You've got a fire engine there, you'll be fine.

-Oh, yeah, yeah.

LAUGHTER

On an electrical fire?! Are you mad?!

LAUGHTER

Come on!

-LUCY:

-Does she take the pen and stab everyone in the waiting room?

That WOULD be dangerous. Actually, Ross got it straight away.

-Shut your face.

-It's the bear.

-I knew it was the bear!

Aha! The murderer is in this very room!

LAUGHTER

You can't trust bears, bears are shifty.

LAUGHTER

-Can I say, that isn't actually a bear.

-It looks like a bear.

If it were a bear,

it would be far and away the most dangerous thing in the room.

I say to you, prove it.

It's a soft, cuddly toy.

-Covered in germs! It's a carrier of diseases.

-Yes.

It's Bear Mary.

LAUGHTER

-Bear's Bear, yes.

-Typhoid Bear.

-LUCY:

-Typhoid Beary, yeah.

Typhoid Bearer! Do you see what she did there!

Typhoid Bearer, eh!

Because a bear can't...

A bear can't shit in the woods...

LAUGHTER

I don't know if I can really say this, it sounds odd,

but the bear can't be wiped down.

You've tried!

LAUGHTER

Well, it CAN obviously be wiped down...

You've wiped a lot of bears down, come on, Stephen!

LAUGHTER

APPLAUSE

-You can chuck it in the machine, can't you? Your teddy bear?

-I do.

-Yeah.

-You can do what?

-Chuck it in the machine.

-On a hot wash, on a boil.

-You can.

There is something very eerie

when you put kids' toys in the machine and wash them

-and you just see their little faces pressed against the glass.

-Aw!

LAUGHTER

-Because you say to the kids, you next!

-LAUGHTER

Children sit there, watching them going round and round.

Now we know why it's called Winnie the Pooh.

Hey! You're right!

His real name is Winnie the Filthy Shit.

LAUGHTER

APPLAUSE

Thank you, thank you very much.

13.5% of hard toys in GP's waiting rooms...

Don't google that, whatever you do!

LAUGHTER

Don't google hard toys, don't google wiping down bears...

LAUGHTER

It's a nightmare.

Certainly not Winnie the Filthy Shit.

LAUGHTER

She's a lovely girl, but she should never have started that website.

Not while you're eating, anyway.

A shocking 90% of soft toys had serious,

moderate to heavy bacterial contamination.

That's what I want to leave you with.

LAUGHTER

Why do you think that the magazines in doctor's waiting rooms

are so dull, so uninteresting?

-Because people steal the good ones, presumably?

-Is the right answer!

APPLAUSE

Very good!

-It's as simple as that.

-Yeah?

-Yeah.

Then I'm not the only one then, that is good.

LAUGHTER

I would never buy Now or Chat, but if it's there...

Nobody steals New Statesman or The Economist.

You might be able to...

Where do we stand on the gentleman's literature in the booths

at a place of fluid deposits?

LAUGHTER

-Sperm banks?

-That's the word I'm looking for, yes.

Are they taken away?

What I'm saying is, when they provide the, ah-hem-hem,

where does that stand in the, you know?

On the filth scale, what are we...?

Because I have only done that once.

And there wasn't literature.

Strictly speaking, it wasn't a sperm bank, but...

LAUGHTER

Hang on, hang on, no. No, it was a regular doctor's...

It was a sperm building society.

LAUGHTER

It was a regular...? What?!

You went to the doctor's for a wank?

LAUGHTER

No, no.

What happened was, I used to live right out in the bush,

right out in the countryside.

-Miles away.

-Good!

LAUGHTER

-And I needed to do the...

-Were you on a register?

LAUGHTER

I am now. But we lived too far away...

By the time you've done the deposit in the beaker...

-Your sperm have died.

-Exactly! By the time you drove in.

So my wife said, "Hey, why don't we just go to the regular doctor's,

-"and you nip into the..."

-Oh...

And the only thing that was in there was,

you know on a ladies' sanitary bag,

they have a picture of a woman in Victorian costume?

LAUGHTER

There are very few things that I'm happy to admit in public,

but I can't look at Mary Poppins in the same way now.

LAUGHTER

-I, fully, to the, with the...

-You didn't do it in the bag?

LAUGHTER

So what I'm saying is, what I'm saying is,

when a gentleman goes to a sperm bank and they provide you with...

No gentleman goes to a sperm bank, sir.

LAUGHTER

They provide you with a copy of Smash Hits,

the One Direction special.

LAUGHTER

-Yes.

-Or whatever.

I believe that's why Harry Styles' hair goes like...

LAUGHTER

Something About Harry!

APPLAUSE

So there we are.

The most dangerous thing in a waiting room is a cuddly toy.

Which bits of your bodies could you do without?

I'm going to give you an example of a human body.

So that you can possibly... That's for you two.

Kidney, you can lose a kidney, can't you?

That is one of the most macabre bobble heads I've ever seen.

LAUGHTER

Whoohoo!

-LUCY:

-Should we take out the bits we think...?

Yeah, take out a bit that you think we can do without.

You're taking out the entire intestines?

LAUGHTER

There goes the liver.

There goes one lung. And another.

Don't know what that is, but it's going.

Ulgh!

LAUGHTER

You got that right, that's one dead human.

Are you offering me a lung?

Half a brain?

No, I was just trying to make a pork pie.

LAUGHTER

Fine! Fine.

There it is!

-If you're...

-A kidney.

-A kidney. That's what I was looking for.

LAUGHTER

It's not good surgical practice to get rid of everything else

-between you and the kidney.

-I couldn't get to the kidney.

Now I can't get it back together again. Nurse!

I'm going to say if you're a man, you don't... Do you need a nipple?

It's a very good question, why men have nipples.

Well, because they look hot when they're pierced,

but apart from that...

I don't know why else you would need one.

The fact is there are lots of bits you can do without.

-Tonsils, obviously, you knew that.

-Appendix. You have those out.

Appendix, you knew that. What else have you come across?

-You've given me a kidney, which is good.

-I can't get it back together.

Gall bladder, you could give me. Sinuses.

-Head.

-Sinuses?

-You don't need a face.

-Testes.

I mean, obviously we like having testes.

Mine hasn't got any testes.

-You won't die if they're taken away. Uterus.

-Uterus, ovaries, all that.

-You can lose those.

-Basically, all you need is a neck.

Half your brain can go. In fact, there is an operation -

-a hemispherectomy.

-You've done very well with that.

-Thanks.

LAUGHTER

APPLAUSE

-If you remove...

-Oh, hang on. Hair. What about hair?

-Yes.

What do you reckon, Matt?

APPLAUSE

Well, I don't know why you're asking me.

-What happens if I were to remove four fifths of your liver?

-Yeah.

-It would grow back.

-Yes. That's the thing about livers.

-They do, they regenerate. You get that back.

-Teeth, obviously.

Bladders can also be regrown, amazingly.

The bones in your leg, fibula and tibia.

The fibula isn't load-bearing,

so you could lose that and still be able to walk.

Really? I'll have that out.

I'm going to do it.

Can you name one of the most famous people on earth who has gone

without a lung since he was a teenager?

He, it's a he.

Justin Bieber.

-Possibly more famous than Justin Bieber.

-Barack Obama. No, I can't.

Hang on a minute. More famous than Justin Bieber. Harry Styles.

Argentinian.

I don't know foreign people. What's all this about?

There's only one truly famous Argentinian.

-I don't know!

-LUCY:

-Pele.

-I don't watch that show.

Diego Maradona is the only one I know.

No, the Pope!

-LUCY:

-Oh, yes! He is quite famous.

Pope Francis, There he is.

-Oh, yes.

-He's gone happily without a lung for a long time.

So what happened when they were picking him

and all that smoke's coming out the top...? Oh, I bet he was wheezing.

"Yeah, you're the Pope!"

"Oh, my lung. Oh, my lung. My lung's playing up, mate."

Was he born with one lung?

No, as a teenager he had one removed. So, good.

Can you pop your bodies away? Did I just say that? Put your bodies away.

-We just reacted as if that was normal.

-There's a kidney.

OK, who might be having sex on your face right now?

Kim and Kanye?

-In your dreams.

-They love it.

Who is having sex on your face right now?

Bacteria. It's usually bacteria so go with me on this one.

-LUCY:

-Mites.

-You said mites, mites was the right answer. Mites.

-Mites.

-MITE be.

LAUGHTER

Let's consider this.

There are mites that live on the human face.

AUDIENCE GROAN

-They unfortunately...

-They're disgusted already.

Don't go any further.

Only 14% of them are visible to the human eye, most of them are not.

14%?! Visible?!

"I like your moustache," and then it starts curling up...

Not that visible.

They're very, very small.

-They have no anuses.

-Oh, thank God for that!

No.

I don't mind the intercourse, it shitting I can't stand.

APPLAUSE

Unfortunately, Alan, unfortunately the fact they have no anuses

means that when they die,

a whole lifetime's waste is deposited on your face.

-That's what happens.

-Is this 14% waste you can see?

-No.

-But what percentage...?

-That's a lovely tan you've got there.

LAUGHTER

APPLAUSE

You may be right.

But what percentage, using tracking that waste voided at the death

of the mite on account of its having no anus, what percentage

of human beings has been calculated to have mites on their face?

-Oh, I know this.

-Yes?

-But I'm not going to tell you.

I'll guess at either 12 or 86.

-Any other thoughts?

-0.1 of a percent.

-High.

The answer is 100%. We all have these mites on our faces. All of us.

And you can't wash them out. They are perfectly happy to have water...

Her Majesty the Queen?

-Her Majesty the Queen...

-Royal mites.

..has anusless mites wandering about willy-nilly on her face?

-Ja wohl! German mites!

-Unbelievable. Her Royal Highness?!

Hard to believe, isn't it?

But there it is, we all have mites on our face but there are also,

some people believe, two thirds,

and other scientists believe 98% of us have eyebrow mites. Although...

one of us here won't have eyebrow mites.

Matt might not have eyebrows.

-So he doesn't. So he doesn't.

-I don't got no eyebrows cos...

Mum says it's cos I'm special.

-You are special.

-I am.

-You are.

-I lost my hair when I was six.

-Was it traumatic?

Did you bang your head or something?

-Well, you know, cos Duncan Goodhew fell out of a tree.

-Yeah.

Well, it was my head he landed on.

I think it's an overactive immune system, that something happened

and then something inside me said, "Right, we don't need no hair."

It treated your hair as a foreign invader.

Yeah, maybe it was just a warm day and we didn't have the window open.

I don't know.

Maybe you're just a super-evolved human,

cos we don't really need hair.

No, we do. This country's cold.

LAUGHTER

We do. We do. I suffer. I do suffer.

Now, which of your organs most resembles an elephant's trunk?

LAUGHTER

Come on.

-Who wants it? Alan, Ross, me? Who wants it?

-Go on. You. Go on.

I'm just trying to think of the most humorous way to phrase it.

-Yeah, well, no, it's not. It is not penis. It isn't the penis.

-Isn't it?

-Can your penis do that?

-It may...

Maybe it's a dangling, pendulous appendage, your penis,

and so is a trunk, but really, truly resembling in structure.

That not one there, is it, down at the bottom?

He's got tusks down there.

Stephen, move out the way.

-Yeah, no, the elephant can...

-Oh!

Good God.

Yes, all right. All right. Very amusing.

There's an animal that has organs of generation.

Let's laugh at that for a long time.

Yeah, but it is quite funny.

LAUGHTER

ALAN SNIGGERING

What is it about the trunk? We have an organ that is like the trunk.

Is it the prehensility? Is that a word?

African elephants have... The end have almost like lips which can

pick up a blade of grass. Prehensile kind of little bits there.

But that's... The actual tongue itself is interesting, it's a muscle.

-ROSS:

-Hang on.

-I mean, the lips.

-LUCY:

-Have you given us the answer?

-The tongue.

Our tongue is the same. Our tongue is also a muscle.

It's a muscular hydrostat.

The reason the trunk can take on any shape is

because it's all muscle and mostly, therefore, water,

which you wouldn't think of a muscle but it's true.

And water can't be compressed, of course. Liquids cannot be compressed.

It can. I've had a Capri Sun and they've got that packet.

You can put them under pressure, but they will burst out.

So that means like, you can pull a muscle,

so does that mean that sometimes an elephant will be flicking away

and it'll go, "Oh, God! Oh! I've got a cramp up my trunk."?

-It's a horrible thought.

-And they have to rub a bit of...

You have to go some to pull a muscle in your tongue though, don't you?

While on the subject of muscles,

which of us here has the strongest muscle?

-ROSS:

-Well, it's bound to be the lady, isn't it?

-LUCY:

-I don't look like that.

-For the birthing.

-Yes, so which muscle would it be?

-Pelvic floor?

They're always going on about the pelvic floor.

-It's the uterus.

-Oh, the uterus.

-It's a muscle.

And of all the muscles in the human body,

it exerts the most pressure, pound for pound.

The amount of force it exerts is equivalent to a longbow.

-So if you imagine...

-Good God.

Pray God, I'm looking under the desk going,

"Don't have a longbow under there, please."

-ROSS:

-Is that why when my wife went into labour,

she put an apple on my head?

Well, the jaw can exert pressure which is extremely high -

500 lbs per square inch, roughly, which is enormous.

The gluteus maximus is the largest muscle, the buttock muscle.

But it is the uterus that wins the prize.

Now, you mentioned the gluteus maximus, the arse muscles there.

This is a true thing, right?

It is physically impossible for the human buttocks to break an egg.

LAUGHTER

That's true.

That is absolutely 100% true and I've tried it.

And the beautiful thing...

-You mean you put it in the crack, in the cleavage?

-As much as you want.

He's not allowed to work in kitchens any more.

But he keeps going back like Typhoid Mary.

If you put the egg between the buttocks

then it doesn't matter how hard you squeeze,

impossible to crack the egg.

Now, here's the thing. I know that to be true,

but there might be people watching this who question that.

-I like to think, all over the country...

-People are now...

-introducing eggs into the area.

-Is Noble lying or not?

I mean, if you've got somebody lying there, you put an egg there,

if someone else is there to go like that...

-Then that's not the muscle doing it.

-OK, yeah.

-That's the point.

Can you by a twitch, a pulling in? I'm doing it now.

-The worry would be...

-Oh, that Cadbury's Creme Egg is gone.

-That's the worry.

-That's probably melting rather than...

I think the worry is that you do it, the egg could go right up.

-That's a worry?

-That's interesting...

LAUGHTER

APPLAUSE

So, yes, your tongue is a muscular hydrostat,

like an elephant's trunk.

Who has the best teeth in the world?

-I really like this question.

-The Bee Gees.

-The Bee Gees, they had good teeth. ROSS:

-John Bishop.

I'm looking for a nation.

-Americans.

-A people. KLAXON

-Did you say Americans?

-No, I didn't say it.

Is it Scandin...?

-It must be the Scandinavians.

-No.

-Oh, no...

-The English.

-Yes!

-The British!

-Yes!

-The British have the best teeth in the world.

CHEERING

APPLAUSE It's true.

-According to...

-We win again!

According to the OECD,

the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development,

-the international body...

-Well remembered.

..they looked at all the different nations of the Earth

and they found that, according to fillings and decay and so on,

that British children had the best teeth on planet Earth.

Did they just go to one particular school in the Nottingham?

-I don't think so.

-They said that's cos we've got less fillings.

Maybe it cos we don't go to the dentist at all?

-Fewer fillings.

-Fewer fillings.

-AUDIENCE:

-Oh!

-Knock, knock.

-Who's there?

-To.

-To who?

No, it's "to whom?".

LAUGHTER

APPLAUSE Yes! Touche! Tou-bloody-che!

And now, as is our general practice,

it's time to prescribe a dose of General Ignorance.

Fingers on buzzers. What did Gabriele Falloppio call these?

DOCTOR ZHIVAGO THEME Yes, Lucy?

-ATTEMPTS ITALIAN ACCENT:

-My bloody tubes.

My bloody tubes. He didn't call them tubes.

-DR FINLAY'S CASEBOOK THEME

-Are they those...?

What do they call it? Beats, those headphones, Beats?

-Fallopians by Dre.

-Yeah.

Fallopian tubes, we think of, but Falloppio...

He called them something else.

He thought, when he identified these shapes inside the lady person...

-A lady's pipes.

-Yeah.

He thought they reminded him of what were in those days

rather long musical instruments with an end like a trumpet's bell.

These were tubas. So he called them tubas.

And if you have a tuba, if you have a word ending in A in Italian,

how do you pluralise it? What is two tuba?

-Tu-be.

-Tub-e.

With an E on the end, spelt T-U-B-E.

So it went around the world as his "tub-e", his tubas,

people saw the world tube but in fact he called them tubas.

So now when a lady breaks wind, she can say,

-"I'm sorry, it's just my fallopian tubas."

-It's the old tuba.

Exactly. Here's a quick, easy question. What's a hip fracture?

-A crack in the hip bone?

-Is it not really a fracture

-and that's why you're asking us?

-KLAXON

-A hip fracture is not a fracture of the hip.

-Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's weird to say this, but it's true.

A hip fracture is a fracture of the femur, of the long thighbone, there.

OK, but what if you actually fracture your hip?

That's a pelvic fracture.

All right, but what if you actually fracture your pelvis?

We could go on and then...

No, it does seem mad.

It's a question that was designed simply to get points

-out of Alan and it worked.

-Well, no wonder the doctors are going mad.

It is a bit peculiar, I grant you.

And we now come coughing and spluttering

to the most heavily doctored part of the whole evening - the scores.

Oh, my.

Well, in first place, with not a cough, not a tickle,

clear skin, free of mites, on nine points,

it's Lucy Porter.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Thank you.

In second place, almost as healthy,

it's Ross Noble on seven points.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

On minus five, with a tickly throat and not looking too well,

it's Matt Lucas.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

And groaning and wheezing at death's door

on minus 44,

-Alan Davies.

-What?

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

So, it only remains for me to thank Matt, Ross, Lucy and Alan.

I'll leave you with the words of Rodney Dangerfield.

When I was born, I was so ugly,

the doctor slapped my mother.

Good night.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE