Prince Philip's 'Gaffes'
Whilst on a tour of a factory in northern England, Prince Philip pointed out a fuse box that looked quite old. He said "It looks like it was made by an Indian"
When talking to some British students in China, he joked with them "you shouldn't stay here too long, or you'll turn slitty-eyed"
During the 1981 recession he said, "Everybody was saying we must have more leisure. Now they're complaining they're unemployed."
On being introduced to the chairman of Britain's Channel 4, HRH said, "So YOU'RE responsible for the kind of crap channel 4 produces."
On Sarah Ferguson he said, "Her behavior was a bit odd. I don't see her because I do not see much point."
In 1967, he was asked to go to Russia to improve diplomatic relations with Britain and the USSR. He said, "Are you bloody mad? The bastards murdered half my family."
Whilst speaking to the World Wildlife Fund he said, "If it has four legs and it's not a chair, if it has two wings and it flies but it's not an airplane, and if it swims and it's not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it."
In Canada, someone asked him why he had bothered to come, HRH said "We don't come here for our health. We can think of other ways of enjoying ourselves."
He then said, "British women can't cook"
He asked Sir Tom Jones, "What do you gargle with - pebbles" after the Royal Variety Performance.
In Budapest in 1993, he said to a Briton, "You can't have been here that long - you haven't got a pot belly."
In Scotland in 1995 at a Driving School he said, "How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them through the test?"
When it was suggested all guns were banned after the Dunblane shooting he said, "If a cricketer, for instance, suddenly decided to go into a school and batter a lot of people to death with a cricket bat, which he could do very easily, I mean, are you going to ban cricket bats?"
At a reception in 1998, a student told Prince Philip that he had been trekking in Papua New Guinea. The Prince replied, "You managed not to get eaten, then?"
In Australia in 2002, he said to an Aboriginee, "Do you still throw spears at each other?"
On the Jubilee tour in 2002 he said, "If you travel as much as we do you appreciate how much more comfortable aircraft have become. Unless you travel in something called economy class, which sounds ghastly.."
He also said, "The problem with London is the tourists. They cause the congestion. If we could just stop tourism we could stop the congestion.."
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Now, I find all of the above amusing or actually intelligent. I think that the British find him amusing. Our humour is quite select and we find him funny. But foreigners don't and it's usually the foreigners who make the biggest deal out of what he says. His comments aren't racist, sexist or cruel - they are funny and I think that's how he intends them to be taken.