89 Fun Facts About Funny

In 1932 the Australian military went to war against which animal, and lost?

Emus beat the army: soldiers with Lewis guns were sent to cull the birds in Western Australia's Wheatbelt, but the flocks scattered and the commander compared them to tanks.

The only shot fired in a 1784 Dutch-Habsburg naval standoff hit what, giving the conflict its name?

The one Dutch shot struck a soup kettle aboard the Habsburg ship Le Louis, which promptly surrendered; the bloodless 1784 clash on the Scheldt is remembered as the Kettle War.

The 1838 France-Mexico war is nicknamed after the profession of a Frenchman whose shop was looted. What was he?

A pastry chef named Remontel claimed Mexican officers had looted his shop in Tacubaya and demanded 60,000 pesos for a business worth under 1,000; France went to war over it.

Legend says Liechtenstein sent 80 soldiers to the 1866 Austro-Prussian War and how many came back?

All 80 men came home plus a friend they had made along the way, so 81 returned. Liechtenstein disbanded its army for good in 1868.

According to legend, Caligula planned to give which political office to his horse Incitatus?

Suetonius wrote that Caligula intended to make Incitatus consul, Rome's top magistracy; it never happened, and many historians read the plan as a joke at the Senate's expense.

In 1698 Tsar Peter I of Russia introduced a tax on what?

Those who paid carried a copper or silver token showing a nose, mouth and whiskers as proof. Catherine the Great repealed the tax in 1772.

In January 1943 the US government briefly banned the sale of what?

The sliced bread ban began on 18 January 1943 to conserve wax-paper wrapping and was lifted on 8 March after a housewife told the New York Times sliced bread was vital to household 'morale and saneness'.

The astronomer Tycho Brahe lost part of his nose in a duel that started as an argument over what?

Brahe duelled fellow student Manderup Parsberg in 1566 after they quarrelled over who was the better mathematician; a 2012 analysis of his exhumed remains showed the prosthetic nose was brass, not silver.

The first man across the line in the 1904 Olympic marathon was disqualified for doing what for part of the race?

Fred Lorz dropped out with cramps after nine miles, was driven back to the stadium, waved to the crowd and nearly received the gold from Alice Roosevelt.

Trainers kept 1904 Olympic marathon winner Thomas Hicks going with brandy, raw eggs and what?

Hicks's handlers dosed him with strychnine sulphate, a rat poison used in tiny amounts as a stimulant, washed down with brandy and raw eggs; he was hallucinating and near collapse at the finish.

Which sport did astronaut Alan Shepard play on the Moon during Apollo 14?

Golf on the Moon took a Wilson six-iron head fitted to a sample-scoop handle; swinging one-handed in a stiff suit, Shepard hit two balls in 1971.

The World Bog Snorkelling Championship is held each August in which country?

Wales hosts it in a peat bog near Llanwrtyd Wells: two lengths of a trench using flipper power only, since conventional strokes are banned.

Wife-carrying, which has its own world championship, began in 1992 in which country?

Wife-carrying began in 1992 in Sonkajärvi, Finland, which hosts the world championship; the winner's traditional prize is the wife's weight in beer.

Toe wrestling was invented in a Staffordshire pub in the 1970s by drinkers who wanted what?

Regulars at Ye Olde Royal Oak in Wetton, Staffordshire, invented it as a sport Britain could dominate after watching the country lose at everything else; the world championship later moved to Derbyshire.

At the annual Cooper's Hill event in Gloucestershire, competitors hurl themselves down a steep hill chasing what?

A wheel of cheese, a 7-to-9-pound Double Gloucester, is sent down Cooper's Hill, which is 1-in-1 in places; the first chaser to the bottom wins the cheese.

Which of these was an official Olympic event at every Games from 1900 to 1920?

Tug of war was part of the athletics programme at every Games from 1900 to 1920; in Paris 1900 a combined Danish-Swedish team took first place.

How did Eric 'the Eel' Moussambani win his 2000 Olympic 100 m freestyle heat despite the slowest time ever?

The swimmer from Equatorial Guinea had never seen a 50-metre pool before Sydney and had trained in a hotel pool between 5 and 6 am.

Why was the last 'timeless' cricket Test, Durban 1939, abandoned as a draw after nine days?

England were 654 for 5 chasing 696 when they left Durban to catch the ship, and timeless Tests were never played again.

An Olympic 'gold' medal is actually made mostly of which metal?

IOC rules require at least 92.5 percent silver plated with just 6 grams of gold, so its metal was worth around $494 in 2010.

Wombats are the only known animals to produce droppings of what shape?

The shape stops them rolling away when stacked to mark territory; the discovery won the 2019 Ig Nobel Prize for Physics.

What do sea otters keep in the loose skin pouch under each foreleg?

The pouch holds food gathered on a dive plus a favourite rock, which the otter uses at the surface as an anvil for cracking open clams and other shellfish.

Mike, a Colorado chicken, became famous in 1945 for living 18 months after what happened to him?

The axe missed the jugular and left most of the brain stem, so he could still walk and perch; Fruita holds a Mike the Headless Chicken Day every May.

When the first preserved platypus reached Europe in 1799, scientists concluded that it was what?

The prevailing suspicion was that someone had stitched a duck's beak onto a beaver-like body.

How often does a three-toed sloth climb down from its tree to use the toilet?

A three-toed sloth descends about once a week, digs a small hole, defecates, covers it and climbs back up; the trip is risky since grounded sloths are easy prey, and its purpose is debated.

What was the favourite drink of Wojtek, the bear drafted into the Polish Army in WWII?

Beer was Wojtek's reward of choice; the bear held the rank of corporal, had his own paybook and serial number, and carried ammunition crates at Monte Cassino.

What kind of animal was Stubbs, honorary mayor of Talkeetna, Alaska, from 1997 to 2017?

Stubbs was a cat, honorary mayor of a town that has no real mayor; the story that he won a write-in election is a myth, but he drew dozens of tourists a day until his death in 2017.

In Switzerland it is illegal to keep just one of which pet?

Switzerland's 2008 animal welfare ordinance classes guinea pigs as social animals, so keeping a lone guinea pig counts as mistreatment and owners must keep at least two.

The bird we call a turkey got its English name because of a mix-up with which other bird?

The name first referred to guineafowl, an African bird imported to Europe via Turkey; the French instead named the American bird after India.

Botanically speaking, which of these fruits is a true berry?

Cucumber is a true berry (a pepo, with a firm rind), like grapes, tomatoes and bananas; a cherry is a drupe, an apple a pome, and the strawberry an accessory fruit.

The 'banana equivalent dose' is an informal unit used to explain what?

Bananas contain naturally radioactive potassium-40, so eating one is roughly one percent of an average day's background dose.

When William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus in 1781, what did he want to call it?

George's Star, or Georgium Sidus, flattered his patron King George III; the rest of Europe declined, and Uranus did not become the universal name until 1850.

Andre Geim, later a Nobel laureate for graphene, won a 2000 Ig Nobel for which feat?

Levitating a frog with magnets won Geim the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with Michael Berry; in 2010 the Nobel Prize in Physics for graphene made him the first person to win both.

The word 'muscle' comes from a Latin word meaning what?

Latin musculus means 'little mouse', a diminutive of mus; the Romans thought a flexing biceps looked like a mouse moving under the skin.

Point Nemo in the South Pacific is so remote that the nearest humans are often who?

Point Nemo lies about 2,700 km from the nearest land, while the International Space Station orbits only about 400 km up, so astronauts passing overhead are often the closest people to it.

On the Gemini 3 flight in 1965, astronaut John Young smuggled what into orbit in his spacesuit pocket?

Young pulled the corned beef sandwich, bought at a Cocoa Beach deli, from his suit pocket; commander Gus Grissom took a bite before floating crumbs ended the snack, and Congress later scolded NASA over it.

Kinder Surprise eggs cannot legally be sold in the United States because of a law passed in which decade?

The 1938 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act bans confectionery with a non-nutritive object inside; Kinder Joy, with the toy kept separate, arrived in 2017.

Hawaiian pizza, topped with pineapple and ham, was invented in which country?

Greek-born Sam Panopoulos created it in Chatham, Ontario in 1962 and named it after the brand of canned pineapple he used.

The Caesar salad was invented in 1924 in which city?

Tijuana, not Rome: Caesar Cardini ran a restaurant across the border to serve Americans dodging Prohibition and threw the salad together during a holiday rush.

Fortune cookies served in Chinese restaurants most likely originated with immigrants from which country?

Japanese tsujiura senbei, a similar cracker, were made around Kyoto in the 19th century, and Makoto Hagiwara of San Francisco's Japanese Tea Garden is usually credited with first serving the modern version.

Kopi luwak, one of the world's most expensive coffees, is made from beans that have been what?

The cherries ferment in the animal's gut and are collected from its droppings; the farming methods involved have drawn ethical criticism.

The durian fruit is banned on public transport in Singapore and Bangkok for what reason?

Its smell, often likened to rotten onions or old gym socks, lingers for hours, so Singapore's MRT posts 'No durians' signs; Alfred Russel Wallace still called eating one 'worth a voyage to the East'.

When it launched in the 1880s, Coca-Cola's two key ingredients were caffeine and what?

Cocaine came from the coca leaf that gives Coca-Cola half its name, while kola nut supplied the caffeine; cocaine was removed from the recipe in 1903 in favour of a decocainized coca extract.

Bubble wrap was invented in 1957 by two men who were trying to make what?

Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes' three-dimensional plastic wallpaper flopped, and it took a few years to reposition it as packaging.

Play-Doh was first sold in the 1930s as what?

Kutol Products of Cincinnati sold it as a wallpaper cleaner that lifted coal soot off walls; once homes switched to gas heating and washable wallpaper, it was reborn as a toy in the mid-1950s.

The Slinky was invented after a naval engineer watched what happen?

Richard James watched a torsion spring fall off a shelf and 'walk' end over end in 1943, spent a year finding the right steel, and sold the first 400 Slinkys in 90 minutes at Gimbels in 1945.

The Frisbee got its name from a Connecticut company that made what?

Yale students tossed the empty Frisbie Pie Company tins around campus, and Wham-O borrowed the name for its Pluto Platter in 1957.

Nintendo was founded in 1889 to make what?

Fusajiro Yamauchi's hand-painted hanafuda flower cards were popular with Kyoto's yakuza-run gambling parlours.

The world's first webcam, set up at Cambridge University in 1991, was pointed at what?

Researchers wanted to see whether the Trojan Room coffee pot was empty before walking over; the feed went on the web in 1993 and the pot later sold on eBay for £3,350.

The first item ever sold on eBay, for $14.83, was what?

When founder Pierre Omidyar checked that the buyer knew it was broken, the man replied that he collected broken laser pointers.

Amazon was founded in 1994 under which original name?

Bezos incorporated the company as Cadabra, Inc. in July 1994 but dropped the name after a lawyer misheard it as 'cadaver'; the Bellevue, Washington, online bookstore opened as Amazon in 1995.

Bluetooth wireless technology is named after a tenth-century what?

Harald Bluetooth united the Danish tribes; the codename stuck when a trademark search on 'RadioWire' could not be finished in time, and the logo merges his runic initials.

The Michelin guide has been published since 1900 by a company that makes what?

Tyres are the point of the Michelin guide: the brothers gave it away free so motorists would drive further, wear their tyres out faster, and buy more.

The Guinness Book of Records was created in the 1950s to settle what?

Guinness boss Sir Hugh Beaver missed a shot at a golden plover, argued about the fastest game bird, and could find no book to settle it.

Nokia, the Finnish company famous for mobile phones, was founded in 1865 as what?

Fredrik Idestam opened a wood-pulp mill at Tampere in 1865; the name comes from the town of Nokia, where he built a second mill, and the company later spent decades making rubber boots and cables.

Samsung began in 1938 as a small trading company dealing in what?

Lee Byung-chul's Samsung Trading Company in Daegu sold dried fish, local groceries and its own noodles; the group only moved into electronics in 1969 with Samsung Electronics.

Before he built supercars to compete with Ferrari, what did Ferruccio Lamborghini manufacture?

Lamborghini Trattori, founded in 1948, began by building tractors from surplus military engines; Ferruccio sold the tractor firm to SAME in 1973, a decade after launching the car company.

In 1947 operators of the Harvard Mark II computer traced a fault to what, and taped it into the logbook?

The moth, pulled from a relay on 9 September 1947, was taped in with the note 'First actual case of bug being found'; 'bug' was already engineering slang, so the entry was a joke.

The first YouTube video, from April 2005, shows Jawed Karim standing in front of what?

The 19-second clip 'Me at the zoo' shows Karim in front of the elephants at San Diego Zoo remarking on their 'really, really, really long trunks'; it has drawn hundreds of millions of views.

The word 'spam' for junk email comes from a sketch by which comedy troupe?

Monty Python's 1970 café sketch has nearly every menu item containing Spam while a chorus of Vikings drowns out conversation by chanting the word, hence 'spam' for messages that crowd out everything else.

The word 'nerd' first appeared in print in 1950, in a children's book by which author?

Dr. Seuss put it in If I Ran the Zoo, where Gerald McGrew plans to collect 'a Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker too'.

'Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo' is famous for being what?

It uses the city, the animal and the verb meaning to bully; the sentence works with any number of buffalos.

The 85-letter place name Taumatawhakatangihanga... belongs to a hill in which country?

The Māori name, on a hill in New Zealand's Hawke's Bay, commemorates the explorer Tamatea playing his flute for a loved one; 92- and 105-letter versions also exist.

The 58-letter name Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch was supposedly invented in 1869 as what?

The aim was to give the station the longest name in Britain; it now pulls in around 200,000 visitors a year to photograph the sign.

The 45-letter pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis was coined in 1935 to be what?

Everett Smith, president of the National Puzzlers' League, coined it as the longest word in English to top 'electrophotomicrographically'; it entered the Oxford dictionary as a lung disease caused by fine silica dust.

Dr. Seuss wrote Green Eggs and Ham on a bet to use how many distinct words?

Publisher Bennett Cerf bet Seuss $50 that he could not write a book with only 50 different words, after The Cat in the Hat had used 236; Green Eggs and Ham won the bet.

What single item did William Shakespeare leave his wife Anne Hathaway in his will?

The bequest was added less than a month before he died; scholars still argue about whether it was an insult or a tender gesture.

What is the grouping of Boring, Oregon, Dull, Scotland and Bland, Australia nicknamed?

The 'Trinity of Tedium' grew from Dull and Boring pairing up in 2012 after a Scottish cyclist from Dull visited Boring; Bland Shire in New South Wales later joined the club.

Bir Tawil, a patch of desert between Egypt and Sudan, is unusual because it is what?

Bir Tawil is claimed by neither country because each side's preferred border hands it to the other; claiming it would mean giving up the far more valuable Halaib Triangle.

In 2019 the German city of Bielefeld offered one million euros for incontrovertible proof of what?

That the place is imaginary is the 'Bielefeld conspiracy', a Usenet joke from 1994 that Angela Merkel has referenced and the city's own marketing embraced.

The New Mexico town of Truth or Consequences renamed itself in 1950 after what?

Host Ralph Edwards of the radio quiz show Truth or Consequences promised to broadcast its tenth-anniversary episode from the first town to take its name; Hot Springs, New Mexico, did so in 1950.

What happened after mapmakers invented Agloe, New York, in the 1930s as a copyright trap to catch rivals?

A real store opened there using the name, so when the rival map company was accused of copying, it could point out that a business called Agloe now existed.

Mister Splashy Pants, winner of a 2007 Greenpeace naming poll with about 75 percent, is what?

Mister Splashy Pants was a humpback whale satellite-tagged by Greenpeace's Great Whale Trail campaign against Japanese whaling; Reddit and other sites piled in once the name took a lead, and it won by a landslide.

In a 2004 song, Cookie Monster revealed that before he ate his first cookie his name was what?

In the 2004 song 'The First Time Me Eat Cookie', Cookie Monster sings that his name was Sid before he ate his first cookie; the Muppet has been on Sesame Street since its 1969 debut.

According to a series of 1960s novels, what is Barbie's full name?

The Random House novels of the early 1960s gave her the full name Barbara Millicent Roberts, daughter of George and Margaret Roberts of the fictional town of Willows, Wisconsin.

When Mr. Potato Head launched in 1952, what did children have to supply themselves?

The kit was just pushpin parts; complaints about rotting vegetables and new safety rules led to a plastic potato body in 1964.

The mechanical shark in Jaws was nicknamed Bruce by the crew, after whom?

Three pneumatic sharks were built and malfunctioned so often that Spielberg mostly hinted at the shark instead, helped by John Williams' two-note theme.

Elliott lures E.T. with Reese's Pieces because the maker of which sweet turned the film down?

Mars declined to let M&M's appear, so Hershey's Reese's Pieces got the part in return for a $1 million promotional tie-in; Reese's Pieces sales soared in the weeks after the 1982 release.

When Elvis Presley met President Nixon at the White House in 1970, what did he ask for?

Elvis wanted the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs badge to signal official backing for his campaign against drug culture among the young.

Painter Bob Ross decided never to raise his voice on television after 20 years doing what job?

As a US Air Force master sergeant he was 'the guy who screams at you for being late to work'; stationed in Alaska, he made its mountains his favourite subject.

John Cage's 1952 composition 4′33″ instructs the performers to do what for its three movements?

The score marks each of the three movements tacet, so the performers do not play their instruments; the 'silence' is ambient noise, which Cage called the real music. David Tudor premiered it in Woodstock, NY, in 1952.

Until a 2015 court ruling, a music publisher was collecting licence fees on which song?

Warner/Chappell had claimed copyright in 'Happy Birthday to You' would run to 2030; after a 2015 federal ruling found its claim invalid, it agreed to repay $14 million in licence fees.

Which city's 1518 'dancing plague' saw dozens of people dance for days on end?

In July 1518 a woman known as Frau Troffea began dancing in a Strasbourg street; within a month dozens had joined, and the authorities at first prescribed more dancing, hiring musicians and opening halls.

Which of 28,800 bath toys spilled into the Pacific in 1992 famously washed up worldwide?

The yellow rubber ducks were the stars of the Friendly Floatees spill, which also included red beavers, blue turtles and green frogs; oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer used their landfalls to map ocean currents.

The Air Guitar Championships in Oulu, Finland, state their purpose as promoting what?

The contest began in 1996 as part of the Oulu Music Video Festival; its stated ideology is that wars would end and all bad things vanish if everyone played air guitar, hence world peace.

A 1919 wave that tore through Boston's North End at 35 mph was made of what?

A 50-foot tank holding about 2.3 million gallons of molasses burst on 15 January 1919, killing 21 people; residents claimed the North End smelled sweet on hot days for decades afterwards.

In 1962 a girls' school in Tanganyika had to close because of an outbreak of what?

Laughing fits spread from three girls to 95 of the school's 159 pupils, then to nearby villages, and the epidemic took 18 months to fade.

Britain fought Spain from 1739 in a war named after which body part of a sea captain?

Captain Robert Jenkins claimed Spanish coastguards had sliced off his ear when they boarded his ship in 1731; MPs used the tale to whip up war fever, and the 1739 conflict became the War of Jenkins' Ear.

Which secondary title did San Francisco's self-declared Emperor Norton add in the 1860s?

Joshua Norton proclaimed himself 'Emperor of these United States' in 1859 after going bankrupt and later styled himself 'Protector of Mexico' as well; San Franciscans played along until his death in 1880.

New York's eight-day Straw Hat Riot of 1922 targeted men who wore straw hats after which date?

September 15 was 'Felt Hat Day', after which straw boaters were considered out of season; youths who snatched and stomped late-season hats started the brawls on 13 September 1922, two days early.