Prince Philip jokes about the blind and the anorexic
Thu May 2, 2:36 PM ET
By JANE WARDELL, Associated Press Writer
LONDON - Gaffe-prone Prince Philip, the husband of Queen Elizabeth II, told a joke about people with eating disorders and the blind on Thursday that seemed to surprise a crowd at a public appearance.
Philip was visiting Exeter Cathedral with his wife as part of her Golden Jubilee tour of Britain when he spotted blind woman Susan Edwards and her guide dog in the crowd waiting for the royal visitors.
"Do you know they have eating dogs for the anorexic now?" he asked Edwards. Although she didn't seem to react, people standing nearby raised their eyebrows without saying anything.
Philip is renowned for his quips and forthright opinions. He has generated newspaper headlines several times by making unguarded comments while accompanying the queen on official royal tours around the world.
Earlier this year, he asked Australian aborigines if they still threw spears at each other.
Again in Australia, in 1998, he suggested that tribes in Papua New Guinea were still cannibals. "You managed not to get eaten, then?" he asked a student who had just returned from walking the Kokoda trail.
In the Cayman Islands, in 1994, he asked a wealthy islander: "Aren't most of you descended from pirates?"
And in China, during the 1986 state visit, he described Peking as "ghastly" and told British students: "If you stay here much longer, you'll all be slitty-eyed."
Back home, Philip sparked controversy on a 1999 trip to a factory near Edinburgh, Scotland. Pointing to an old-fashioned fusebox, he said it looked as if it had been "put in by an Indian."
More eyebrows were raised after he compared a cricket bat to a gun amid calls to ban firearms after the 1996 shooting of 16 children at an elementary school in Dunblane, Scotland.
"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?" Philip asked.
I like his humor
