You know what’s really annoying? When you head over to YouTube on a Wednesday to check out the new episode of Mental Floss and discover, to your absolute horror, that there’s actually no new footage. Instead, there’s an outtakes episode which doesn’t include any random facts but instead compiles together behind the scenes moments from prior episodes.
Luckily, it turns out this particular non-episode, episode of Mental Floss is pretty damn amusing. Running at just over four and a half minutes, it offers a nice balance of word choice foul-ups and amusing stories shared or shouted during unused takes over the course of the prior twenty-one editions of arguably, the greatest show on YouTube.
It’s hard to choose a single favorite screw up from all the worthy choices, but if I had to pick one, I’d probably select host John Green belittling himself for reading anything that pops up on the prompter. At this worst moments, he’s apparently Ron Burgandy-esque, which, while a hilarious character, probably isn’t the first person a television personality would like to be confused with. Beyond that, I also love all the paper airplane failures. It would be one thing to waste all that energy on a really great joke, but amusingly, everyone involved knows it’s pretty groan-worthy to begin with, which makes the process of not quickly accomplishing it all the more infuriating.
As I said before, however, as awesome as Mental Floss’ outtakes episode might be, it’s still noticeably less awesome than a real episode that contains hot facts, amusing quips and an elitist and aggressive nerd-mentum. As such, I’ve decided to go ahead and embed an actual episode of the wonderful program below. The one you’re about to see contains a series of facts about 31 famous people from history who married their first cousins or first cousins once removed. From Samuel Morse to Albert Einstein to Carlo Gambino, numerous famous people went there, and considering the rate of birth defects (2% vs 4%) really isn’t that mich higher in children produced from cousin couplings, it might not be as horrifying as we’ve been lead to believe. Or at least that’s what George Michael from Arested Development would probably say. Enjoy…
