May 27, 2009

"Is Karl's bewilderment with the world endearing?"

Ricky Gervais responds to a question about Karl Pilkington:
It is, because you know there is no malice. He says ridiculous things like, the Chinese don't age well, and gays should have their own toilets. But even though on the face of it that could be incredibly offensive, you can't get offended because you can't get offended when a toddler says something either. He doesn't really understand what he is saying. Everything is in the form of a question.

Sometimes there is an arrogance in his ignorance. For example, I explained to him on "Natural History" that we're 98.6 percent genetically identical to a chimpanzee. And I said we're closer to a chimp than the chimp is to a gorilla. Karl went "no way," I said, yes it's true. He said "no, if I look at them, I'd think the gorilla is more like us." I said "You'd be wrong. The chimpanzee is 98.6 percent genetically identical to a human. That's only 1.4 percent difference." And Karl went, "well that's gotta be the arse then."

5 comments:

Rialby said...

Love Ricky and Karl together. Sometimes you cannot believe it's real.

Big Mike said...

I was a lot more interested in the link to the "Shrek-themed wedding."

Dust Bunny Queen said...

Ha ha....hmmmmm. Upon reading the article, my first thoughts about the chimpanzees arguing were also...what do chimpanzees argue about? food? and how does anyone know what the topic was? and who started the argument?

Crimso said...

It's worth noting that a single base pair change in the billions of the human genome can result in fatal disease. Presumably there are some such that are never identified because they are lethal in utero.

It's also interesting that supposedly (don't know if it's true or not as I'm not a phylogenticist, but believe I heard this from one) budding yeast (Saccharomyces cerevsisae) and fission yeast (Schizosaccharomyces pombe) are about as evolutionarily distant from each other as either is human.

I'll stop with the science geekery now...

TJ said...

Bob's right. Long live Karl. His diary entries are legendary.