For many postgraduate students, a Ph.D. thesis will be their magnum
opus – the zenith of their academic achievement. And with such a
significant amount of time and effort being invested, it’s important
that study topics are chosen wisely. Hence, it’s comforting to know that
the world of academic research is a far more inclusive, eclectic and
remarkably unusual place than one might first assume. However left-field
a particular subject might seem, there are almost certainly countless
other research papers that wipe the floor with it in the weirdness
stakes. Here are 30 of the very strangest.
30. Ovulation: A Lap Dancer’s Secret Weapon
Image Source
To investigate the theory that estrus – the interval of amplified
fertility and sexual awareness often referred to as “heat” in mammals –
is no longer present in human females, researchers turned to an unlikely
source: lap dancers. A team from the University of New Mexico
led by evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller enlisted the help of
18 professional dancers. These dancers documented their ovulatory
cycles, shift patterns and the amount of tips they received over the
course of 60 days. Published in 2007 in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior,
“Ovulatory cycle effects on tip earnings by lap dancers: economic
evidence for human estrus?” noted a distinct correlation between estrus
and greater income from gratuities, representing what the researchers
called “the first direct economic evidence for the existence and
importance of estrus in contemporary human females.”
29. Which Can Jump Higher, the Dog Flea or the Cat Flea?
Image Source
Froghoppers aside, fleas are the overachieving long jumpers of the
animal kingdom. Fleas have body lengths of between 0.06 and 0.13 inches
but can leap horizontal distances more than a hundred times those
figures. But were all fleas created equal in the jumping stakes? To find
out which would triumph between the dog- and cat-dwelling varieties,
researchers from the Ecole Nationale Vétérinaire de Toulouse,
France meticulously recorded the leaping efforts of a collection of
both species of flea. Published in 2000, the resulting paper, “A
comparison of jump performances of the dog flea, Ctenocephalides canis, and the cat flea, Ctenocephalides felis felis,”
declared the dog flea the winner. Yes, the canine-inclined insect jumps
both higher and further than its feline-partial opponent. In 2008 the
research team scooped the Annals of Improbable Research’s Ig
Nobel Prize in the biology category – the Ig Nobel Prizes being awards
that recognize the feats of those who “make people laugh… and then
think.”
28. On Ethicists and Theft
Image Source
Death row pardons, lottery wins and rain on your wedding day – all
(arguably non-ironic) subjects referenced by Alanis Morissette in her
1996 single “Ironic.” One topic that would probably merit inclusion –
despite the research not being published until 2009 (in Philosophical Psychology)
– is the revelation that books on ethics are more liable to be absent
from the shelves of university libraries than comparable books on other
philosophical subjects. “Do Ethicists Steal More Books?” by University of California, Riverside
professor of philosophy Eric Schwitzgebel revealed that the more
recent, esoteric ethics books “of the sort likely to be borrowed mainly
by professors and advanced students of philosophy” were “about 50
percent more likely to be missing” than their non-ethics counterparts.
However, Professor Schwitzgebel believes this is a good thing, as “the
demand that ethicists live as moral models would create distortive
pressures on the field.”
27. Wet Underwear: Not Comfortable
Image Source
Even babies know it: wet underwear is uncomfortable. Yet precisely
why this is so is a question that went unanswered by hard science until
1994, when the journal Ergonomics published “Impact of wet
underwear on thermoregulatory responses and thermal comfort in the
cold.” The authors were Martha Kold Bakkevig of SINTEF Unimed in Trondheim, Norway and Ruth Nielson at Kongens Lyngby’s Technical University of Denmark.
Bakkevig and Nielson had investigated “the significance of wet
underwear” by monitoring the skin and intestinal warmth, as well as
weight loss, of eight adult male subjects wearing wet or dry underwear
in controlled cold conditions. Apart from the obvious “significant
cooling effect of wet underwear on thermoregulatory responses and
thermal comfort,” the research also discovered that the thickness of the
underwear exerted a greater effect on these factors than the material
used to make the garment. So now you know.
26. Do Woodpeckers Get Headaches?
Image Source
In much the same way that we’d presume dragons don’t get sore
throats, it would be a reasonable assumption that woodpeckers don’t
suffer from headaches – but assumptions are a poor substitute for the
authoritative grip of scientific fact. Published in 2002 in the British Journal of Ophthalmology, “Cure for a headache” came courtesy of Ivan Schwab, an ophthalmologist at the University of California, Davis.
Schwab’s paper details the raft of physiological traits that
woodpeckers have developed to avoid brain damage and bleeding or
detached eyes when hammering their beaks into trees at up to 20 times a
second, 12,000 times a day. In addition to a very broad but surprisingly
squishy skull and sturdy jaw muscles, the woodpecker has a “relatively
small” brain – which probably explains a lot.
25. Booty Calls: the Best of Both Worlds?
Image Source
Compromise, according to U.S. poet and author Phyllis McGinley at
least, is what “makes nations great and marriages happy.” It’s also the
backbone of the booty call, if research published in 2009 is anything to
go by. Appearing in The Journal of Sex Research, “The ‘booty
call’: a compromise between men’s and women’s ideal mating strategies,”
was written by researchers from the department of psychology at New Mexico State University. The study analyzed the booty-calling behavior of 61 students from the University of Texas at Austin.
What’s more, it confirmed its central thesis that “the booty call may
represent a compromise between the short-term sexual nature of men’s
ideal relationships and the long-term commitment ideally favored by
women.” Lead researcher Dr. Peter K. Jonason, now working at the University of Western Sydney, shared follow-up papers in 2011 and 2013, for The Journal of Sex Research and Archives of Sexual Behavior, respectively.
24. Mosquitoes Like Cheese
Image Source
The mosquito is a formidable and destructive pest. And while it’s
known that exhalation of carbon dioxide by its victims acts as a highly
compelling invitation to dinner, other smelly signals have been less
well documented. Published in The Lancet, Bart Knols’ 1996
research, “On human odor, malaria mosquitoes, and Limburger cheese,”
changed that. The entomologist described how Anopheles gambiae,
Africa’s most prolific malaria-spreading mosquito, exhibited a keen
partiality for biting human feet and ankles. Crucially, the research
also showed that these mosquitoes can be attracted to Limburger cheese, a
stinky fromage that shares many characteristics with the whiff of human
feet, offering potential use as a synthetic bait for traps.
Interestingly, Knols is one of the few people to have won an Ig Nobel
(for entomology in 2006) and a Nobel Peace Prize (shared in 2005 as part
of the International Atomic Energy Agency).
23. Weighing Up Lead and Feathers
Image Source
It doesn’t require a degree in physics – or philosophy – to
understand that a pound of lead and a pound of feathers weigh the same.
Yet the question of whether or not they feel the same is rather less straightforward. To examine this, researchers from the department of psychology at Illinois State University
enlisted the help of 23 blindfolded volunteers, recording their
perceptions of the weight of either a pound of lead or a pound of
feathers contained within boxes of precisely the same shape and size.
Published in 2007, the paper – “‘Which feels heavier – a pound of lead
or a pound of feathers?’ A potential perceptual basis of a cognitive
riddle” – discovered that participants rated the pound of lead as
seeming weightier with an “above chance” frequency. The suggestion is
that factors such as the “muscular forces” required to handle an object
could also play a role in perceptions of weight.
22. Cat Food – Yummy?
Image Source
Despite their notorious penchant for fully, or sometimes partially,
dead rodents in their mouths, cats are surprisingly fussy eaters. What’s
more, the pet food industry has found that kitties themselves represent
unreliable and expensive test subjects in the pursuit of more appealing
cat food flavors. Professor Gary Pickering of the department of
biological sciences at Brock University
in Ontario, Canada detailed a better option in 2009: the human palate.
“Optimizing the sensory characteristics and acceptance of canned cat
food: use of a human taste panel” describes the bizarre methodology for
human tasters to “profile the flavour and texture of a range of cat food
products” – including evaluating “meat chunk and gravy/gel
constituents.” The impact of this on the number of job applications to
the beer- and chocolate-tasting industries remains to be seen.
21. The Unhidden Dangers of Sword Swallowing
Image Source
While “cat food taster” is unlikely to appear on anybody’s dream job
list, at least that profession is unencumbered by the daily risk of
serious injury. Sword swallowing, on the other hand, though occupying a
similar position on the league table of tastiness, is a rather more
hazardous occupation. In order to establish just how hazardous,
radiologist Brian Witcombe and world champion sword swallower Dan Meyer
analyzed the “technique and complications” of 46 members of the Sword
Swallowers’ Association International. Published in 2009 in the British Medical Journal,
their research, “Sword swallowing and its side effects,” found that
performers had a heightened chance of injury when “distracted or adding
embellishments” – as in the case of one unfortunate swallower who
lacerated his throat after being disturbed by a “misbehaving macaw on
his shoulder.” In 2007 Witcombe and Meyer together received the Ig Nobel
Prize in medicine in view of the pair’s “penetrating medical report.”
20. Beer Bottle vs. Human Skull
Image Source
Common weekend warrior tales would suggest that a beer bottle makes a
good weapon in the event of a bar brawl. But would a full or an empty
bottle inflict the most damage, and would that damage include fracturing
a human skull? These important questions were answered in 2009 by a
team of researchers from the University of Bern
with their seminal paper, “Are full or empty beer bottles sturdier and
does their fracture-threshold suffice to break the human skull?” Dr.
Stephan Bolliger and his colleagues tested the breaking energy of full
and empty beer bottles using a drop tower. Moreover, they discovered
that a “full bottle will strike a target with almost 70 percent more
energy than an empty bottle,” but that either is capable of breaking a
human skull. Good to know. In a great twist of irony, Dr. Bolliger and
co. picked up a 2009 Ig Nobel Prize in the “Peace” category.
19. The Propulsion Parameters of Penguin Poop
Image Source
The titles of scientific research papers can sometimes be fairly
impenetrable to the layman; other times they may take a more direct
approach. Published in 2003, “Pressures produced when penguins pooh –
calculations on avian defecation” certainly belongs to the latter
category. The paper’s authors, Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow of the then
International University Bremen (now Jacobs University Bremen) and Eötvös Loránd University’s
Jozsef Gal, decided to address the question of how much internal
pressure penguins generate for poop-firing purposes. With knowledge of
just a few parameters – including the thickness of and distance covered
by the fecal matter – the researchers were able to calculate that the
birds employed pressures of up to 60 kPa (kilopascal) to eject their
bodily waste. The project was inspired by a blushing Japanese student
who, during a lecture, asked Dr. Meyer-Rochow how the penguins
“decorated” their nests.
18. Lady Gaga and Pop Art
Image Source
Lady Gaga clearly sees herself as something of an artist: her third album is called Artpop,
and last year she voiced her desire to “bring art culture into pop in a
reverse Warholian expedition.” But does anyone else agree? In 2012 University of Cambridge
student Amrou Al-Kadhi decided to write a few words – 10,000 to be
precise – on the subject for his final year undergraduate dissertation.
The paper, looking at Lady Gaga’s place in the history of pop art and
her role as a voice of cultural criticism, initially encountered some
resistance from the Cambridge history of art department. However, after
several meetings, the provision of a barrage of YouTube links to Gaga
videos such as “Telephone” (which apparently demonstrated her postmodern
aesthetic) and “a bit of work,” permission for Al-Kadhi to undertake
the research was granted.
17. Even Chickens Prefer Beautiful People
Image Source
A 2002 research paper by Stefano Ghirlanda, Liselotte Jansson and Magnus Enquist at Stockholm University
decided to make inroads into the question – most likely contemplated by
very, very few people – of whether “Chickens prefer beautiful humans.”
The study saw six chickens trained to “react to” images of an ordinary
male or female face. They were then tested on a series of images ranging
from the average face to a face with exaggerated male or female
characteristics, and a group of 14 (human) students were given the same
test. Perhaps surprisingly, the chickens “showed preferences for faces
consistent with human sexual preferences.” The researchers claim this
offers evidence for the hypothesis that human preferences stem not from
“face-specific adaptations” but from “general properties of nervous
systems” – perhaps overlooking the possibility that their human test
group just had very unusual tastes.
16. Erase Bad Memories, Keep Good Ones
Image Source
Painful, embarrassing, or traumatic memories have an annoying habit
of accumulating over the course of an average lifetime. As Courtney
Miller, assistant professor at the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute,
puts it, “Our memories make us who we are, but some of these memories
can make life very difficult.” With that in mind, Miller led a team of
researchers to try and find out whether certain unwanted memories –
specifically, drug-related ones – could be erased without damaging other
memories. Published in 2013, “Selective, Retrieval-Independent
Disruption of Methamphetamine-Associated Memory by Actin
Depolymerization” found that, in mice at least, this kind of bespoke
amnesia is entirely possible. How? By means of inhibiting the formation
of a particular molecule in the brain. “The hope is,” said Miller, “that
our strategies may be applicable to other harmful memories, such as
those that perpetuate smoking or post-traumatic stress disorder.”
15. The Rectal Route to Curing Hiccups
Image Source
When beset by a flurry of hiccups, a few minutes of putting up with
the involuntary jolting is usually sufficient to get them to subside.
However, other times they can become a far more unmanageable problem,
beyond the healing scope of even the oldest of wives’ tales. In such
situations there’s a surprising but highly effective cure. Published in
1990, “Termination of intractable hiccups with digital rectal massage”
details the case of a 60-year-old patient whose seemingly non-stop
hiccups were brought to an immediate halt by a massaging finger in the
rectum. A second occurrence a few hours later was curbed in a similar
fashion. The research from the Bnai Zion Medical Center
in Israel notes that “no other recurrences were observed.” The
inspiration for the report was Dr. Francis Fesmire, who penned a medical
case report with the same title in 1988 and with whom the researchers
shared an Ig Nobel in 2006. Fesmire passed away in 2014, and one fitting
epitaph from an entertainment-oriented research magazine mused, “Dr.
Fesmire found joy and fame by putting his finger on – nay, in – the
pulse of his times.”
14. Can Pigeons Tell a Picasso From a Monet?
Image Source
Theirs is a list dominated by flying, pecking and defecating, and
pigeons can now add “appreciation of fine art” to their skill set.
Published in 1995, “Pigeons’ discrimination of paintings by Monet and
Picasso” came courtesy of Shigeru Watanabe, Junko Sakamoto and Masumi
Wakita at Keio University in Japan.
And sure enough, the paper presents evidence that pigeons are indeed
able to distinguish between works by the two artists. The birds were
trained to recognize pieces by either Monet or Picasso; and crucially
they then demonstrated the ability to identify works by either creator
that had not been shown to them during the training period. Not bad for
rats with wings. Professor Watanabe – who went on to explore paddy
birds’ appreciation of the spoken word – put the paper into context,
saying, “This research does not deal with advanced artistic judgments,
but it shows that pigeons are able to acquire the ability to judge
beauty similar to that of humans.”
13. The Nature of Navel Lint
Image Source
It’s a phenomenon that most people will be familiar with: small balls
of lint accumulating in the belly button. Still, until fairly recently
the mechanism behind this process lacked a satisfactory explanation from
the realm of science. Fortunately, that all changed in 2009 when Georg
Steinhauser, a chemist and researcher at the Vienna University of Technology,
published a research paper entitled “The nature of navel fluff.” After
gathering 503 samples of navel lint, Dr. Steinhauser concluded that the
culprit behind this common occurrence is hair on the abdomen, which
dislodges small fibers from clothing and channels them into the belly
button. As the Austrian himself has pointed out, “The question of the
nature of navel fluff seems to concern more people than one would think
at first glance.”
12. The Effects of Cocaine on Bees
Image Source
The effects of cocaine on human body movement can be observed in
nightclubs the world over on just about any given weekend. And as it
turns out, the tediously familiar overestimation of dancing prowess is
not just limited to humans. In a 2009 paper entitled “Effects of cocaine
on honey bee dance behavior,” a team of researchers led by Gene
Robinson, entomology and neuroscience professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
analyzed how honey bees are affected by low doses of cocaine. Honey
bees are known to perform dances when they locate an abundant food
source; and the team found that administering the drug prompted bees to
circle about 25 percent quicker as well as dance more exuberantly and
for longer. The bees also exaggerated the scale of their bounty. No
surprise there then.
11. Fruit Bat Fellatio
Image Source
Though its contents are difficult at first to make out, the grainy
black and white image above actually depicts two bats engaged in some
X-rated nocturnal activity. And that’s precisely the topic that a group
of researchers from China and the U.K. chose to explore in their 2009
paper, “Fellatio by fruit bats prolongs copulation time.” The group
looked at the copulatory behavior of the short-nosed fruit bat and
observed that “females were not passive during copulation but performed
oral sex.” More interestingly, the researchers also discovered that the
longer the bats spent engaged in fellatio, the longer the copulation
itself lasted – and that when fellatio was absent, pairs spent much less
time mating.
10. The Possibility of Unicorns
Image Source
It’s a question that has plagued the internet for decades: could
unicorns really exist? The short answer, at least, is no. Still, King’s College London
philosophy undergraduate Rachael Patterson decided to investigate
whether a full dissertation on the more theoretical aspects of the
subject would yield the same conclusion. Her paper, “The Possibility of
Unicorns: Kripke v Dummett,” picks up on previous theses by British
philosopher Michael Dummett and American logician and philosopher Saul
Kripke. Why? In order to see if any more rainbow-hued light could be
shed on this important question, of course. Reassuringly, perhaps,
neither Kripke nor Dummett claim that these mythical creatures live in
reality – although Dummett does posit the idea that in another world
they might.
9. Does Country Music Make You Suicidal?
Image Source
Country music is one of the most popular genres of music in the
United States, with a huge audience that encompasses all age ranges. Yet
given its recurrent themes of wedded disharmony and excessive drinking,
Steven Stack of Wayne State University and Auburn University’s
Jim Gundlach decided to probe whether country music might have an
influence on municipal suicide rates in America. Published in 1992,
their research paper, “The Effect of Country Music on Suicide,” actually
discovered a strong link between the amount of country music radio
airplay in any particular city and the suicide rate among the white
population in that area. The reaction was mixed: Stack and Gundlach
initially received hate mail, but in 2004 they won the Ig Nobel Prize
for medicine.
8. Do Cabbies Have Bigger Brains?
Image Source
The notoriously demanding exam that London’s black cab drivers must
pass is called the “Knowledge” – and with good reason. Covering around
25,000 streets inside a six-mile radius of central London, the test
generally requires three to four years of preparation and multiple
attempts at the final exam before success is achieved. University College London
neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire was inspired to take a closer look at
this feat of memory after researching similar examples in the animal
kingdom. Published in 2000, the resulting study, “Navigation-related
structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers,” discovered that
“cabbies” had physically larger posterior hippocampi – the areas of the
brain responsible for spatial memory – than their non-cabbie
counterparts. Professor Maguire’s follow-up study (with Dr. Katherine
Woollett) in 2011 confirmed that trained cabbies were better at
remembering London landmarks but not as good at recalling complex visual
information compared to the unsuccessful trainees.
7. Shrews: To Chew or Not to Chew?
Image Source
Ever felt so hungry that you could eat a horse? How about a shrew?
While such scenarios are never likely to present themselves to the
average person, scientists can be an altogether more experimental bunch.
Take 1995 paper, “Human digestive effects on a micromammalian
skeleton,” by Brian Crandall and Peter Stahl, anthropologists working at
the State University of New York.
Said paper investigated what would happen to a shrew – which was first
skinned, disemboweled, parboiled and cut into segments – if it was
swallowed, sans chewing, by a human. Interestingly, many of the rodent’s
smaller bones “disappeared” on their transit through the human
digestive system, while other portions of the skeleton showed
“significant damage” despite the lack of chewing – a promising result to
those studying human and animal remains. Following this peculiar paper,
Brian Crandall became a science educator hoping to motivate future
generations of (hungry) scientists.
6. Gay Dead Duck Sex
Image Source
In 1935 Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger tried to highlight the
absurdity of newly developed aspects of quantum theory. In his thought
experiment, the strange quantum properties of a system are drawn on to
suspend a hypothetical cat in a state of being simultaneously dead and
alive. Sixty-six years later, a new piece of research saw the cat
replaced by two ducks, in far less paradoxical though no less opposing
states of life and death – but now with the crucial addition of gay sex.
Published in 2001, “The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the
mallard Anas platyrhynchos” describes Kees Moeliker’s bizarre
experience. The Dutch ornithologist witnessed a male duck administering a
75-minute raping of the corpse of another male duck, freshly deceased
after flying into a window. More recently, Moeliker has presided over an
annual commemorative event and public conversation on how to make sure
birds stop flying into windows. The event’s name? Dead Duck Day.
5. Love and Sex With Robots
Image Source
“Intimate Relationships With Artificial Partners” – ludicrous science
fiction, or serious science fact? According to the paper’s author, and
British International Master of chess, Daniel Levy, “It may sound a
little weird, but it isn’t.” Levy earned a Ph.D. from Maastricht University
for his thesis, which covered sociology, psychology, artificial
intelligence and robotics, among other fields. He conjectured that
human-robot love, marriage and even consummation are “inevitable” by
2050. Roboticist Ronald Arkin from Atlanta’s Georgia Institute of Technology
points out, “Humans are very unusual creatures. If you ask me if every
human will want to marry a robot, my answer is probably not. But will
there be a subset of people? There are people ready right now to marry
sex toys.”
4. A Better Approach to Penile Zipper Entrapment
Image Source
Unfortunately, the horror injury that befalls Ben Stiller’s character Ted, in 1998’s There’s Something About Mary,
often traverses the realm of fiction to bestow real-world agony upon
boys and men who wish they’d opted for a button fly. A 2005 paper by Dr.
Satish Chandra Mishra from Charak Palika Hospital in New Delhi, India
looked at reported methods of intervention for this most unpleasant of
problems and found that many common approaches either take too long or
can actually make the circumstances worse. The researchers’ paper, “Safe
and painless manipulation of penile zipper entrapment,” details instead
a “quick, simple and non-traumatic” method using wire cutters and a
pair of pliers – though “painless” does seem a highly ambitious
adjective in this particular context.
3. Flatulence As Self-Defense
Image Source
The idea of a correlation between fear and bodily emissions of one
variety or another is not surprising, but a 1996 paper by author Mara
Sidoli detailed a much more extreme example of this relationship. In
“Farting as a defence against unspeakable dread,” Sidoli described the
miserable tale of Peter, a “severely disturbed adopted latency boy” who
endured a difficult and traumatic early life. Despite various setbacks
in his later growth, Peter demonstrated “considerable innate
resilience.” However, he also developed what Sidoli called a “defensive
olfactive container,” using his flatulence “to envelop himself in a
protective cloud of familiarity against the dread of falling apart, and
to hold his personality together.” With such a vivid and prose-rich
approach to scientific research, it should come as no surprise that
SIdoli scooped the Ig Nobel for literature in 1998.
2. Harry Potter = Jesus Christ
Image Source
Putting an end, once and for all, to the notion that literary theory
sometimes lacks real-world application, “Jesus Potter Harry Christ” is a
thesis by Ph.D. student Derek Murphy that looks at “the fascinating
parallels between two of the world’s most popular literary characters.”
What’s more, after successfully exceeding his Kickstarter funding goal
of $888, Murphy’s thesis has been transformed into a commercially
available book, published in 2011, which won the Next Gen Indie Book
Award for Best Religious Non-Fiction that same year. Though the idea of
analyzing the similarities between J.K. Rowling’s boy wizard creation
and the Son of God might seem like a frivolous endeavor, Murphy – who is
currently doing his Ph.D. at Taiwan’s National Cheng Kung University – assures his public that the book’s contents are “academic and heavily researched.” Now, where’s the fun in that?
1. Rectal Foreign Bodies
Image Source
Published in the journal Surgery in 1986, “Rectal foreign
bodies: case reports and a comprehensive review of the world’s
literature” does exactly what it says on the tin. The research, by
doctors David B. Busch and James R. Starling, based in Madison,
Wisconsin, looked at two cases of patients with “apparently
self-inserted” anal objects, as well as available documentation on the
subject.
Other factors taken into account included the patient’s age and history
and the number and type of objects removed. The resulting list of 182
foreign bodies makes for an eye-watering read: of particular note are
the dull knife (“patient complained of ‘knife-like pain’”) and the toolbox
(“inside a convict; contained saws and other items usable in escape
attempts”). The doctors’ paper was recognized for its literary value
with an Ig Nobel Prize in 1995. One person’s pain is clearly another’s
pleasure.
Broadcaster Paul Mason tore into Boris Johnson, in an epic rant about the ex-Mayor's 'debasement' of the debate around the EU referendum.
The
ex-Newsnight economics editor, sure to become a darling of Corbyn
supporters everywhere with his new freewheeling style, free of the
shackles of broadcasting 'impartiality' regulations, laid into the
bumbling blonde Brexit backer on the BBC's Question Time programme.
He warned that Brexit was too much of a risk with a right-wing Conservative government in power.
He
said: "Let me be clear about what I'm saying about the Conservatives.
We now know what a £35,000 a year education at Eton buys you.
"It's
the ability to stand up, slag off your opponents, if you're not winning
the argument start raising ludicrous arguments about the EU banning banana bunches more than three.
"And if that doesn't work you tussle your hair and you grin in a sort of inane manner.
Have your say in the comments below
"If I'd paid £35,000 a year to Eton and they came out doing that, I'd be disgusted."
Tory minister Amber Rudd hit back, asking for "less personal insults."
And host David Dimbleby asked who he was talking about.
Mason
responded: "I'm talking about Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson who is
debasing the rationality of this debate, and you [Rudd] should be very,
very worried that this guy could be leading your party if he wins the
referendum."
Ms Rudd said she wasn't worried about that, but she was worried about "personal insults".
She
said: "Here you are, a brilliant man, and you're focusing on someone's
education rather than the arguments for or against the EU."
PA
Boris Johnson
Mason retorted: "This is what John Major was saying.
He was saying the Tory right is adopting Ukip's argument, because this
is what the Tories will become if this right-wing faction within it gets
their way after the 23rd of June. It's this that frightens above more
than anything else.
He suggested that a right-lurching Tory party could be more terrifying than Ukip.
He added: "Ukip is a known factor. We don't know what these guys will do if they take control of your party."
Addressing
Amber Rudd's complaints of personal attacks, he said: "There's a reason
you're straying away from talking about Boris Johnson as an individual,
and that's because he could be your leader in six weeks time." Read more:Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley among hundreds of stars calling for Britain to remain in the EU
Mr
Mason, who recently quit as Channel 4 News Economics Editor so he could
engage in 'radical' left-wing politics, is clearly enjoying his
retirement.
As well as ripping into Boris, he turned his fire on
Jeremy Hunt, tax cheats and Tory MPs under investigation for alleged
electoral fraud.
In one rant, after a question on the prison
system, he said Britain paid too much attention to punishing crimes
committed by the poor, and not enough to those committed by the rich.
