General Ignorance Is Bliss

QI is a British game/panel show in which the host (Stephen Fry for the first 13 seasons*) asks the four guests questions which seem to have a simple, direct answer but never do: they get demerits (and a humiliating klaxon) for blurting out the obvious answer, and points for being hilarious and for eventually coming up with the correct answer.

You’re going to need an example, so here goes: How many senses do you have? The obvious response, which everyone knows, is five, but that will get you klaxoned, because the real answer is somewhere between nine and twentyish: heat, cold, pain, and proprioception (the sense of where all your body parts are in relation to one another and the reason you can tie your shoes with your eyes closed) all convey information about the world to your body through different neural pathways — why shouldn’t they be considered senses?

QI: The Book of General Ignorance is a collection of hundreds of these deceptively easy questions coupled with the unexpected answers, and it is wonderful. The deeper into it you get, the stronger your sense that the world is huge and mysterious and infinitely full of things to be learned and understood, or, better, things to be not understood but just marvelled at. It’s not a trivia book: it’s the opposite of trivia, because it plays on the idea that so many of the things we think we know, all the commonplaces of our life, are not only wrong but far more complicated than we ever dreamed.

(* Not going to lie: I started to lose interest in the show around the tenth or eleventh season, and stopped watching altogether sometime in the middle of the thirteenth. Maybe it’s still great. Maybe it’s better than ever. But I’ll always have fond memories of the first decade. Many episodes are on YouTube: you really ought to watch them.)