50 Of The Silliest Events That Happened Throughout History

The South African parliament was in sitting and as a guest speaker a prominent author and poet would speak to the parliamentarians.

During his presentation he stated that he understands that language is a difficult concept for some of them to understand, because half of parliamentarians are donkeys.

The were very upset and stated that he needs to retract the statement, he then stated ok, half of parliamentarians are not donkeys.

They accepted the apology.

In 1866 when going to war, Liechtenstein's army of 80 men came back with 81 men after making a friend from the enemies side.

In WWII the Germans built a fake airfield (with wooden fake planes) as a decoy in Holland.

When they'd finally finished it, the British dropped a wooden b**b on it.

In 1945 the Americans were pushing through Germany.

General Eisenhower sent General Patton a message, instructing him not to take the city of Trier because it would require 4 divisions to seize the city.

Patton sent a message back saying "Have taken Trier with two divisions… what do you want me to do, give it back?".

In British India there was a little problem with cobras. The obvious solution was to put a bounty on them. The only problem was that the price for each cobra the British were offering was greater than the cost of breeding and raising a cobra. The result was people breeding tons of snakes to claim the bounty. When the government realized what was happening they scrapped the whole program. People raising the now worthless cobras set them loose.
The end result was a big cobra problem.

Dwight D Eisenhower's wife Mary was known as "Mamie", a nickname that she's acquired when younger. She was called this by everyone she met and insisted on it.

Well, not with everyone.

The Eisenhowers loathed Senator McCarthy and his famous witch-hunts. So this led to a situation when McCarthy was presented to the First Lady at the White House and referred to her as 'Mamie', to which she replied:

"Senator McCarthy, my maid calls me 'Mamie'. The cop in the street calls me 'Mamie', as does the garbageman. You will call me 'Mrs. Eisenhower'".

Rudy Giuliani at the Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

GloomyCamel6050:

The best part is that a worker at Four Seasons Total Landscaping received a call from the Republicans asking to book a podium and media backdrop for a press conference and the worker just smiled and agreed. He knew what was happening and allowed it to unfold.

Potatoes were not very popular as a food in France. Like they were seen as fit only for animals. A pharmacist named Parmentier knew they were good food and wanted to popularize them among the working class. He got a 2 acre farm to grow potatoes and placed armed guards around it. People assumed armed guards meant something very valuable was growing there so they began to steal the potatoes.

That's how potatoes became popular in France's working class.

Ancient Korea had special recording officials, whose job was to record everything. They were considered separate from the government, so the emperor of the time wasn’t allowed to give them orders or tell them not to record something.

Of course, some emperors would try anyway.

On one occasion, King Taejong (15th century) fell off his horse while hunting. The recorder nearby wrote it down. The emperor insisted that it be removed from the record, and even tried to have the report destroyed.

This lead to some nonsense as the emperor kept destroying their work, but the recorders kept copying it and hiding it in increasingly obscure places. And of course, recorded the whole thing as it happened.

A few hundred years later, and the only thing that emperor is famous for is trying to hide the fact he fell off his horse.

The Whisky War will never not make me smile. Hans Island is a tiny rock between Canada and Greenland. When I say tiny I mean like 0.5 square miles. The Danes and Canadians both laid claim to the island because of a weird loophole in a treaty sometime in the 70s, but seeing as how it is literally just a rock sticking up out of the ocean neither really cared. The militaries of the countries took turns showing up, planting a flag and a funny note, and leaving their "enemies" a bottle of liquor (usually Canadian whisky or Danish schnapps). They even took out Google ads good naturedly claiming the island and poking fun at their "enemy". In 2022 they signed a treaty splitting the island between each other, thus technically making the two countries land neighbors.

In 1982 cartoonist Gary Larson drew a cartoon of a caveman giving a classroom lecture, pointing to the spikes of a stegasaurus dinosaur tail and calling that the thagomizer "after the late Thag Simmons."

That particular arrangement of tail spikes had no name at the time, so scientists who were fans of Larson unofficially named it the thagomizer.

During the Song dynasty, there was a poet and government official named Su Dongpo. One day he sent to his friend Chan Master Foyin, a Daoist priest on the other side of the lake he lived near, this poem:

>Bowing, Heaven within Heaven, I am the light that illuminates the boundless universe. The eight winds cannot move me, who am seated mindfully upon the purple golden lotus.

Foyin sent a response message:

>FART [yes, just the one word, written in massive font that took up the whole page]

Naturally, Dongpo was furious, and immdiately dashed to to Foyin demanding he explain himself. Foyin answered thusly:

>Oh, so the eight winds cannot move you, but one fart sends you across the lake?

#DaoBurn.

One game where Michael Jordan scored 69 points and Stacey King scored 1, a reporter asked Stacey what he thought of playing in that game and he stated “I will always remember this as the night that Michael Jordan and I combined to score seventy points.”.

Maybe not strictly funny, but I love the idea of professional incompetence resulting in the reunification of a nation: Gunther Schabowski was tasked with informing media of plans to open the border between east and West Berlin. Instead of explaining that this would be a slow gradual response, he said it would be with immediate affect as he hadn’t read the full briefing. Berliners rush the Berlin Wall, border guards can’t reasonably stop them, wall begins to fall, nation reunified. All because a mid level bureaucrat could not pay attention.

When Belgium broke the record of "days without a government", they celebrated, had a beer and carried on with their lives.
No chaos, disruption or rioting.

When Persian king Xerxes punished the sea for ruining his bridge.

He tried to build a bridge across the Dardanelles to get to Greece faster but storm destroyed the bridge.

>Infuriated with the sea, Xerxes ordered his soldiers to punish it by whipping it with chains 300 times and poking it with red-hot irons. Handcuffs were also tossed into the water to symbolize the sea’s submission to his authority.

The King of France annulled his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine because she failed to give him a male heir. The official reason given was consanguinity (they were too closely related.)

She promptly married Henry, Duke of Normandy (future King of England) 8 weeks after the annulment.

Over the following 13 years, they had 8 children together - including 5 boys.

The King of France, meanwhile, only had 1 son by his third marriage.

I will never not find it funny that she popped out 5 boys to her new husband straight after her being cast aside for being unable to have a boy.

The Kettle war. it was the 8th of october 1784.the Dutch kingdom and then Holy Roman Empire had a short naval battle and the only casualty was a kettle full of soup that got hit by a cannonball and that was the only shot that was fired.

The 1904 Olympics Marathon in St Louis. It reads as a mockumentary.

The winner was later disqualified when it was discovered he ended up getting a ride from someone. Only 14 of the participants actually finished as the road they ran on was dusty and dust was causing many of them to not be able to breathe. One of the finishers took a nap. The eventual winner drank a concoction of strychnine, raw egg, and brandy. The designer of the course decided to test a theory he called “purposeful dehydration” so the course lacked water for the participants. The Cuban representative showed up in a long sleeve shirt and pants. Someone assisted him in cutting his pants into shorts. He raised money to make it to St Louis but when he reached New Orleans he gambled it all away and had to hitchhike the rest of the way. He was the one to take a nap after eating rotten fruit during the race and had stomach cramps. One of the racers collapsed and coughed up blood due to dehydration and had to have surgery for a dust lined esophagus. 4th place finisher got chased off course by a dog.

In the 1800s Rough and Ready, California voted to secede from the United States. It was short-lived as they voted to rejoin the union because they wanted to celebrate the 4th of July and the nearby city refused to sell alcohol to foreigners.