So…does anyone actually like Johnny Vegas?
-Joe
Doesn’t it feel like Stephen is always ready to punch Vegas in the face?
I’ve not enjoyed Johnny Vegas on any quiz show I’ve seen him on. I do, however, like the sitcom he’s in called Ideal. However, I always tell people I like that show DESPITE Johnny Vegas.
Most accurate misspelling ever.
Believe it or not, I was actually being clever on that one. Stopped clocks and all that.
-Joe
if you actually meant Ross Noble…he is very, very English. From the North-East and with a thick accent but most definitely not Scottish.
Look, pal, I’m an American. Just be happy I didn’t refer to him as a non-US and leave it at that! Or maybe I was being really clever and I found a way to make a clever pun.
-Joe
Agree with all the QI love and particular panelist love stated thus far, esp. Alan, Bill, Jo, David and Rob. And I also have some trouble feeling the love for Johnny Vegas.
Another regular panelist I like who I think hasn’t been mentioned yet is Sandi Toksvig.
One quibble: I don’t want to go all PC on the wonderful QI folks, but it sometimes grates on me a bit that the whole panelist atmosphere is whiter than an albino swan in a snowstorm. Yes, I understand that the show’s theme is sort of a grown-up Monty-Python-ish parody of a Victorian or Edwardian public school (in American, private school) classroom with Fry in the role of dotty old form master, and you just can’t get any more traditional-white-British than that unless you’re Prince fricking Charles. And naturally, the panelists who get into that groove most readily are the white middle-class over-35 males who’ve actually done time in a British public school. So I get where they’re coming from with that, I really do.
But would it really kill the buzz to move the show’s ambience just a little closer to the reality of 21st-century multiracial Britain? I mean, jeez, AFAICT Rich Hall (who is part Cherokee) is the closest thing to a non-white regular panelist that QI has ever had. Reginald D. Hunter was on once, I believe, and none of the other panelists really seemed comfortable with him. I think the Indo-British comedians (and spouses) Meera Syal and Sanjeev Bhaskar have also made maybe one or two appearances each. That’s not a lot of diversity, especially considering that Britons of South Asian and/or African/Caribbean origins are like ten percent of the country’s population now.
All right, I’ll shut up now before anybody gets the idea that I want to impose quotas or something, which I don’t (neither for ethnic diversity nor for gender balance, which unlike the former is an issue that’s actually been discussed on the show itself). Let’s just say that I wish QI would have Sanjeev Bhaskar on more often, and leave it at that.
Oh, and as long as I’m being a quibbling PITA bitch: When it comes to factual accuracy and getting subtle distinctions right, the QI elves are pretty damn good but they are NOT Straight Dope calibre. I have found myself yelling “CITE?!!??” at the screen more than once when QI is on, and have looked up some of the statements afterwards and found them, well, let’s just call it “not up to SDMB standards”.
As Dara O’ Briain (ooh! another one of the excellent regulars who hasn’t been mentioned yet!) imagined the nitpickers’ reasoning after he had been retroactively penalized with lost points for saying (in a previous season’s episode (!)) that the triple point of water was 0 instead of 0.01 degrees Celsius:
“I know it’s just a comedy show but I’m not letting the feckers get away with that!!”
Now there is the proper attitude towards getting quiz trivia right. 
Okay, I’m back on my happy meds and no more quibbling. Meanwhile, if you have an idea for who should sing the role of your favorite QI panelist in the chorus of my hypothetical opera buffa version of Stephen Fry’s autobiography, swing by my recent “The Fry Chronicles: The Opera” thread and let me know! 
At least Jo Brand is a woman. I assume. 
And Toksvig is a Danish woman. Can’t get less whi…no, that should be “you can’t get MORE white,” except she’s a woman, which knocks her down to the level of a…no, I can’t find a level for her that is higher than a guy of any ancestry. 
So is Sandi. I think.
I edited it. Still doesn’t count. 
Yes, Jo and Sandi are both female, and AFAIK both married (Jo to a man and Sandi to a woman).
Those two seem to be far and away the most frequently appearing female comedians on the QI panel. Which is fine by me, because I find pretty much all the other female QI semi-regular panelists pretty boring.
(I’m female myself btw and like to see a funny female comedy act, but IMHO at present there just don’t happen to be anywhere near as many funny female comedians in the business as male ones. Not on the QI-and-similar-panel-show circuit, at any rate.)
Ronni Ancona, on the other hand, is all woman. She’s a scream, too. She can knit me a cake any day.
Actually, TBH and IMHO, Ronni Ancona’s laboriously absurdist whimsy is some of the most boring stuff I’ve ever seen on QI.
I like her conversational style with the other panelists, but when she embarks on one of her dippy little monologue flights of fancy about how an abstract noun was abused by its father or how there are zoos for female comedians in some London suburb, I just get all :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:.
I freely admit that this is probably just a random humor blind-spot on my part rather than an intrinsic problem with Ancona’s humor itself.
I also admit that I’m probably prejudiced by the fact that one of her shticks is to pretend to be the stereotypical airheaded bored-by-science girl who moans and complains whenever Stephen starts talking about something involving physics, and I simply LOATHE that stereotype, so doubtless it interferes with my appreciation of her performance.
Hmm…definitely a treat when she shows up.
Or, maybe it’s actually true. Not to reinforce the stereotype of a boorish beer and bourbon drinking guy named Joe, but I couldn’t give less of a damn about ballet, poetry, and classic literature if it was performed by busty nude women.
(thinks about double and triple negatives)
The nudity would make it less of not a damn, but I still don’t give a damn.
Have I mentioned that I don’t give a damn about ballet, poetry, and classic literature but I consider busty nude women a plus? And really, the busty is optional.
What was I talking about again?
-Joe
Well, Fry’s half-Hungarian Jew…
I don’t watch it with any regularity, but this is awesome and hilarious.
I love the phrase ‘The Scot with the Dread Lochs’. That should be a dopername.
No love for Sue Perkins?
Contrary to what she might think, she totally rocks the coquettish goth librarian look.
I like Sue Perkins. I also likes me some Doon Mackichan, thank you very much.
I actually discovered QI several years ago after somebody here on the SDMB linked to them on YouTube, and I was instantly addicted. I have all the DVDs, all the episodes acquired by other means, both regular and XL, one of the books, and the all the Annuals.
I believe the next series, about the letter “I,” will begin in September, which is the usual start date (except for one anomaly year amidst the transition to BBC1).