Free The World of Karl Pilkington by Karl Pilkington, Stephen Merchant, Ricky Gervais Page A

philosophy isn’t it?
    Karl: No, there is someone for everyone no matter what condition you’re in or whatever. I read an old Chinese proverb … It’s something about everyone, everything, no matter what it is, has got one talent. And that’s the same way in a relationship – there’s always someone out there, and that. I like the Chinese. There’s another Chinese proverb that I learned – ‘He who cuts the wood up, warms himself twice.’
    Ricky: Yeah, that’s good.

    Karl: That’s good, and then there’s that one about too many Chinese cooks spoil the broth.
    Ricky: Well I don’t know who slipped the word ‘Chinese’ in there but I heard it as ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’.
    Karl: Well it was just all sort of Chinese proverbs and that.
    Ricky: One of my favourites on the same subject is ‘a camel is a horse designed by committee’.
    Karl: What d’you mean?
    Ricky: It’s just a metaphor. If you wanted to design a horse and you had that vision but you let twelve people in a room have their say, it wouldn’t come out as you wanted it to and it wouldn’t be as good. A single vision is more perfect than a committee vision because with everyone having their say, it becomes compromised.
    Steve: Rick, can I just say now – I can tell from Karl’s look that he’s thinking, ‘Which committee designed the camel?’
    Karl: Well I’d just say – why would you request the hump bit? ’Cos that’s just gonna get in the way innit? I mean I’ve always said that about a lot of animals. It’s like we’ve doubled up on a lot of ’em. We’ve chatted about elephants and mammoths. One or the other! And it’s the same with a camel. I’d have that up there as ‘what are they doing?’ They were good years ago in the Jesus times and that. Don’t need ’em now. D’you know what I mean? We’ve moved on.
    Ricky: ‘We’ve moved on.’

     
    Steve: Not the people who use camels to cross deserts.
    Ricky: I am going to throw some animals at you and you tell how you would have improved them if you’d been designing them. Okay. The octopus.
    Karl: So I can now go back? I can look at ’em and go, ‘What are they doing?’
    Ricky: And where they’ve gone wrong. How could you improve it? Like the camel – you’d go, ‘Lose the hump.’
    Karl: With the jellyfish, I’d probably give it a bit more of a body, cut down on the arms and give it some bones, because I don’t understand all this ‘getting in a jar is good’. When does it want to get in a jar?

    Steve: It only wants to get into a jar according to your stories.
    Karl: No, but there’s something that says it can get in a jar, ’cos it hasn’t got any bones. But I don’t know why it would want to do that in the first place.
    Steve: I can’t even begin to answer that. Once again, you claim that you’ve read that they like to get in jars. I mean, how do they know that octopuses like to get in jars?
    Ricky: Okay, another animal for you then, Karl.
    Steve: Giraffe?
    Karl: What are they adding to the world? What are they doing?
    Ricky: It’s not about what they add to the world.
    Karl: No, but I thought that’s what everything’s about. It’s about ‘things are here for a reason’.
    Ricky: The only reason is that they survived. They passed on their genetic material and evolved and were chosen by nature.
    Karl: But there seems to be a lot of …
    Ricky: The reason they are here is because they didn’t die. That’s it.
    Karl: I’m just saying there seems to be a lot of doubling up. If I was Noah I would have gone, ‘Hang on a minute, I’ve just seen something that looks a bit like this.’ Let it drown and have a clear out. But he didn’t – he was messing about saving everything.

    Steve: He was instructed by God to save everything, to be fair to him.
    Karl: Yeah, but if he’s been given that job, for me, he’s sort of manager of that job.
    Ricky: So you believe Noah happened as well? And he built a boat big enough to cater for two of