Funny Trivia
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132 free Funny trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
95 free funny trivia questions with answers, and every one of them is true. Australia really did lose a war to emus. A pope really was dug up and put on trial. A Colorado chicken really did live 18 months without a head, a Polish army bear really did hold the rank of corporal, and a German city really did offer a million euros to anyone who could prove it does not exist. The questions are multiple choice with four options and they range across history, sport, animals, science, food, technology, language, geography and pop culture, so no single subject dominates. Most sit at an easy-to-medium level: the fun is in the answer, not in how hard it is to get. A few are properly obscure and will split a room. Every answer was checked against an encyclopaedic or primary source and each question shows the sentence it came from once you have answered, so when someone refuses to believe that Coca-Cola once contained cocaine or that Amazon was almost called Cadabra, the receipt is right there. Use it for a pub quiz round, a party icebreaker, a work meeting warm-up or a family night when you want the funniest trivia questions rather than the hardest.
30 of 132 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In 1932 the Australian military went to war against which animal, and lost?
Emus
Emus beat the army: soldiers with Lewis guns were sent to cull the birds in Western Australia's Wheatbelt, but the flocks scattered and the commander compared them to tanks.
Q 02Which Mexican general lost a leg fighting the French in the 1838 Pastry War and had it buried with military honours?
Santa Anna
Santa Anna lost Veracruz to the French yet came home a hero, and the wound helped him win back the standing he had lost over Texas.
Q 03Which tiny country abolished its army in 1868, two years after its soldiers saw no fighting in the Austro-Prussian War?
Liechtenstein
Liechtenstein's contingent only guarded the Stelvio Pass for Austria, and once its parliament stopped paying for the soldiers, Prince Johann II abolished the army.
Q 04Tsar Peter the Great of Russia introduced a tax on what?
Beards
Beards had to be paid for because Peter wanted Russians to look like Western Europeans; payers carried a copper token as proof, and the tax lasted until 1772.
Q 05In January 1943 the US government briefly banned the sale of what?
Sliced bread
Sliced bread went off sale in January 1943 as a wartime saving, but the ban proved unpopular, drawing a reader's letter to the New York Times, and was lifted that March.
Q 06Astronomer Tycho Brahe lost part of his nose in a duel sparked by an argument over what?
Who was the better mathematician
Tycho argued over who was the better mathematician, or over a formula in some tellings, and tests reported in 2012 showed his famous 'silver' nose was really brass.
Q 07The first man across the line in the 1904 Olympic marathon was disqualified because he had done what?
Hitched a ride in a car
Fred Lorz hitched a ride in a car after cramps struck at nine miles, waving to runners as he passed; he called it a joke, but officials banned him.
Q 08Trainers kept 1904 Olympic marathon winner Thomas Hicks going with brandy, egg whites and what?
Strychnine
Strychnine, a rat poison that acts as a stimulant in small doses, kept him moving, but he hallucinated and his trainers had to carry him over the line.
Q 09Which sport did Alan Shepard play on the Moon during Apollo 14?
Golf
Golf on the Moon took a Wilson six-iron head fitted to a sample-scoop handle; swinging one-handed in a stiff suit, Shepard hit two balls in 1971.
Q 10The World Bog Snorkelling Championship is held each August in which country?
Wales
Wales hosts it in a peat bog near Llanwrtyd Wells: two lengths of a trench using flipper power only, since conventional strokes are banned.
Q 11The sport of wife-carrying, which has its own world championship, began in which country?
Finland
Finland's village of Sonkajärvi hosts the championship, which is said to recall 19th-century brigands who carried off women or heavy sacks.
Q 12Toe wrestling was invented at a Staffordshire pub in the 1970s by people who wanted what?
A sport Britain could dominate
They wanted a sport Britain could dominate, yet a visitor from overseas took the title in only the contest's second year.
Q 13At the annual Cooper's Hill event in Gloucestershire, competitors hurl themselves down a steep hill chasing what?
A wheel of cheese
Q 21When the first preserved platypus reached Europe in 1799, scientists suspected it was what?
A fake sewn together from other animals
A fake sewn together from other animals was the fear, since it had come via the Indian Ocean, where sailors were suspected of stitching hybrid creatures as pranks.
Q 22How often does a three-toed sloth climb down from its tree to use the toilet?
About once a week
About once a week a three-toed sloth climbs down to relieve itself on the ground, a risky trip because it moves slowly there and predators can reach it.
Q 23What was the favourite drink of Wojtek, the bear drafted into the Polish Army in WWII?
Beer
A wheel of cheese, a 7-9lb Double Gloucester, races down a slope so steep the first person over the line wins it, though the cheese usually outruns everyone.
Q 14Which event was part of every Summer Olympics from 1900 to 1920?
Tug of war
Tug of war counted as Olympic athletics then, but the IOC dropped it after 1920 while trimming the programme, and it has never returned.
Q 15How did Eric 'the Eel' Moussambani win his 2000 Olympic swimming heat?
Both rivals were disqualified for false starts
Both rivals were disqualified for false starts, so he swam alone and finished in 1:52.72, the slowest time in Olympic history, having taught himself in a hotel pool.
Q 16Why did cricket's last timeless Test end in a draw?
The visitors had to catch their ship home
The visitors had to catch their ship home, so England walked off at 654 for 5, just 42 runs short of their 696 target.
Q 17An Olympic 'gold' medal is actually made mostly of which metal?
Silver
IOC rules require at least 92.5 percent silver plated with just 6 grams of gold, so its metal was worth around $494 in 2010.
Q 18Wombats are the only known animals to produce droppings of what shape?
Cubes
Cubes are thought to stay put when wombats pile droppings on rocks and logs to mark territory; the study of how they form won a 2019 Ig Nobel Prize.
Q 19What do sea otters keep in the loose skin pouch under each foreleg?
Food and a favourite rock
Food and a favourite rock go in the pouches: the otter carries prey up from a dive, then cracks shells against the rock on its chest.
Q 20Mike, a Colorado chicken, became famous in 1945 for living 18 months after what happened to him?
He was beheaded
He was beheaded by an axe that spared enough of his brain stem to keep him alive, and his hometown of Fruita, Colorado, later began a yearly festival for him.
Beer was his favourite, and Wojtek, enlisted with a name, rank and number so he could travel with the unit, is said to have carried shells at Monte Cassino.
Q 24What kind of animal was Stubbs, the long-serving honorary mayor of Talkeetna, Alaska?
A cat
A cat: Stubbs drew tourists to a town with no human mayor, lived to 20, and left one of his owners' kittens lined up as a possible successor.
Q 25In Switzerland it is illegal to keep just one of which pet?
Guinea pig
Guinea pigs are social animals, so Swiss animal welfare law treats keeping one without a companion as harmful to its well-being.
Q 26The bird we call a turkey got its English name because of a mix-up with which other bird?
Guineafowl
The name first referred to guineafowl, an African bird imported to Europe via Turkey; the French instead named the American bird after India.
Q 27Botanically speaking, which of these fruits counts as a berry?
Cucumber
Cucumber is a pepo, a firm-rinded type of berry, and by the same botanical rule bananas and tomatoes count as berries too.
Q 28The 'banana equivalent dose' is an informal unit used to explain what?
Radiation exposure
Radiation exposure from one banana's naturally radioactive potassium-40 is so tiny that safety experts use it to put small doses in perspective.
Q 29When William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus in 1781, what did he want to call it?
George's Star
George's Star honoured his patron, King George III, but astronomers abroad balked, and Johann Bode's suggestion, Uranus, won out instead.
Q 30Physicist Andre Geim won a 2000 Ig Nobel Prize for which feat?
Levitating a frog with magnets
Levitating a frog with magnets earned him and Michael Berry that prize, and ten years later Geim won a real Nobel Prize in Physics for graphene.