I don't know how we came to be talking about it, but we were on the subject of the social gaffes made by Prince Philip. Here are some, courtesy of Wikipedia.
The Duke is well-known in Britain for cracking jokes during public visits that can come across as blunt, insensitive, and racist:
* Speaking to a driving instructor in Scotland, he asked: “How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them through the test?”
* When visiting China in 1986, he told a group of British students, “If you stay here much longer, you'll all be slitty-eyed”.
* “If it has four legs and is not a chair, has wings and is not an aeroplane, or swims and is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it.” (1986)
* To a British student in Papua New Guinea: “You managed not to get eaten then?”
* In 2002, he asked an Indigenous Australian businessman, “Do you still throw spears at each other?”
* Seeing a shoddily installed fuse box in a high-tech Edinburgh factory, HRH remarked that it looked “like it was put in by an Indian”.
* In 1987, he wrote in his book If I Were an Animal that “In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.”
I sort of love HRH Prince Philip. Particularly since I heard the apocryphal story of his refusal to visit Russia on the grounds that “Those bastards killed half my family.” Meaning the Tsar and the rest.
Whenever I need to think of a British arch-stereotype, I think of Prince Phillip.
(http://livejournal.com/users/pretentiousgit)