July 12, 2013

Professor Brian Cox reduced an audience of celebrities to tears and wailing by saying something not very clever today.

Britain’s brainiest former pop star was explaining some of science’s most challenging concepts when he pointed to a picture of a chimpanzee and said: “Look at this monkey.” As everyone knows, chimpanzees are in fact great apes.

Top Gear’s James May, who was in the audience, said: “He’d just finished telling us about how we are the cosmos made conscious and life is the means by which the universe understands itself.

“And everyone was thinking, ‘Wow Brian, you’ve given meaning to life. It is wonderful despite all the misery and suffering and apparent futility. Thank you, Mr Science.’

“Then he came out with this shit. Fucking monkeys. Next he’ll be telling us we share an ancestor with them.”

Professor Cox said: “Actually the point I was getting around to making, before everyone started screaming, was that bats are very small monkeys wearing tiny capes.”