I need to talk to you guys about something that's really important. All of civilization
depends on this one lesson. This lesson is about gingers. Not ginger, not the ginger
tea that you drink, or the Ginger Restaurant down the street that serves delicious Thai
or Vietnamese food, not the ginger that you guys eat with your sushi, but the ginger that
is me. I am a proud ginger. Do you know what a ginger is? We have been bullied, plagued,
tortured, killed, made fun of, mistreated, and downright bullied for centuries because
of three things: red hair, pale skin, and freckles. That's a ginger. I am a ginger.
I'm going to tell you a story about my name, Ronnie. Guess what? Guess where that name
came from? You guys know the clown in McDonalds? Mm-hmm. What's the clown's name? Ronald McDonald.
Guess how, in grade 7, I got to be called Ronnie? Mm-hmm, yep, when I was in grade 7,
somebody said: "You have red hair and red shoes. You are Ronald McDonald. Hahaha." And
I said: "Yeah, that's cool." So, from then on, my name has been Ronnie.
So I'm going to teach you, tell you all the interesting facts about gingers. Are you a
ginger? Are there gingers around you? Watch out. We are vicious people. We're going to
come and... Do nothing, really. Maybe give you a cuddle or something. So let's learn
about these things.
Let's learn some famous people. Nicole Kidman, beautiful. Ewan McGregor, kind of sexy guy.
Lucille Ball. She was a really, really old actress in I Love Lucy. Ariel in The Little
Mermaid. Vincent Van Gogh who is a really famous artist. The beautiful, the wonderful
old-school beauty Katherine Hepburn. Julia Roberts. And Merida, the 11th Disney princess
who has since slimmed down for her Disney debut. All of these people have one thing
in common: they're all gingers. They all have no souls and they're all very evil people.
No, they're not actually. They're just regular kind of people, but they're gingers.
So, gingers are people that have really pale skin. "Pale" means white. Look at how white
I am. Woo, I'm really white. Freckles. "Freckles" are these dots or skin pigmentations that
I have. I got them all over my face. See, when I go in the sun, I burn, and then when
I come out of the sun, I get more spots or more freckles. Everyone else goes a beautiful
tanned brown colour. Gingers, we get red, then we get more freckles. Then we go back
to being paley and pasty. And of course, gingers have to have red hair.
Now, we can have different spectrums of red hair. My hair is very, very light. It's actually
called strawberry blonde. I was called Strawberry Shortcake as a child. Cool, that's like I
love strawberry shortcake. But people have been teased incessantly about their hair.
It can be a very, very dark, dark, dark red; it can be a bright fire engine red; or it
can be a very light blonde red, like I have. Do you have red hair? What about down there?
Mm-hmm. Maybe a lot of guys when their beard grows in or their moustache, it becomes red.
Uh-oh, you've got it somewhere. You've got the ginger in ya.
Interesting facts about this ginger population. A lot of people associate gingers with Ireland.
Misguided, are we? The biggest population of ginger people reside in Scotland. Thanks,
Gran. My grandmother was a ginger. My brother's a ginger. My dad was a ginger. And my other
grandmothers were gingers. I come from a long line of gingers. In America, 2.5% of the population
are ginger. There are interestingly no statistics for Canada. I have no idea. And other countries,
they don't even talk about gingers from other countries. But I know you're out there. Germany,
Austria, even Afghanistan, Middle East, Asia. I know there's gingers around. I've seen you.
As of now, 1 to 2% of the world's population are gingers. That's not a lot. We're really
cool. The rarest kind of ginger is me. Oh yeah, right here. And you guys thought I was
weird. Now you know for sure why I'm weird. The rarest combination of ginger: blue eyes,
red hair. I'm the only one in the world. No, I'm not. There's probably more.
And what are the good points of gingers? Are there any? Yeah, we're amazing. First of all,
we are known to be highly artistic. We're more artistic than you are. We're more sexual
than you are. That means we have sex more than you do. [Laughs] Oh, okay. And we have
a higher pain tolerance. This means if you punch a ginger or kick a ginger, like Kick
a Ginger Day, they don't really feel it as much as you do. So we are stronger, more powerful
than you. We are also less susceptible to pain killers and anaesthetic. So, "susceptible"
means it does not affect us. This is bad for Ronnie, because when Ronnie gets a headache
or when Ronnie has cramps, I take some painkillers, nothing happens. So I take more painkillers,
and finally it works. So less susceptible to pain killers means that I have to take
more medicine to relieve my pain. Anaesthetic, anaesthetic, anaesthetic, that's a hard word.
"Anaesthetic" is something that you take or doctors give you if you're going in for surgery
or an operation, and it knocks you out. I'm going to knock you out. So, redheads have
to be given more anaesthetics before surgery.
In history, like I told you, redheads have been known or gingers have been known to be
fierce warriors or fierce fighters. Apparently, now I don't know if this is true, Romans sold
ginger slaves at a higher price than other slaves. So you're thinking Romans. Hey, Romans
were in like Europe, and like Italy, and Rome... There's redheads in Europe, there's redheads
in Italy? Oh yeah, all the Romans.
And then we get into some really bad things. As I told you at the top of the lesson, when
I was a kid, people tried to bully me and call me names like "Carrot Top". And I said...
Well, let's see. What colour, really, are the tops of carrots? Green. Okay? Is my hair
green? No. Okay? So, again, I don't care, call me whatever you want. But some gingers
are more susceptible to bullying and it's just not cool.
There's a famous Kick a Ginger Day, November 20th. Started on Facebook where people were
actually encouraged to find a ginger and kick them. That's cool. And did you realize that
we have a higher pain tolerance? You can kick gingers as much as you want. We'll kick you
back. We'll kick your ass. We are gingers.
We have beautiful nicknames like "Fire Crotch". "Crotch" is the part where your stuff is down
there. Down there. It's like a fire. Then we have, like I told you, "Carrot Top". Yeah,
see? Don't understand that. The tops of carrots are green. "Ginga" is more popular in Australia
or the UK. And then we... There's this trend called "Gingerphobia". "Phobia" means the
fear of something. "Gingerphobia" means the fear of gingers. Are you afraid of me yet?
No, it's not working, is it?
Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why do you...? Why do people hate gingers?
Gingers apparently have no souls. That's cool. "Souls" means the inner aspects of your aura,
your personality. And, oh yeah, this is true. So, gingers actually have souls, so this is
a myth. It started on a very famous show called South Park and I think you should watch it.
If you go... I'm sure if you went on YouTube, you could find a South Park ginger episode.
This is very true. Gingers have very bad or firey temper. That means we get mad really
quickly and it is hell for you. Don't piss a ginger off, because our fire... Our tempers
are like fires. We explode.
And a long time ago, if you had red hair, you were considered a witch, then you were
burned at the stake, killed, exterminated. Bye-bye. Legend has it that gingers are evil.
Mm-hmm. And they are mistrusted, which means you cannot trust a ginger. I'll leave that
up to your own opinion. And we're also sometimes... People refer to us as vampires, because we
can't really go in the sun because we get sunburnt and turn red. It's really not cool.
But the cool thing is that we don't actually need as much sunlight as other people, because
somehow through the magic of science, we can produce our own vitamin D. We are vitamin
D producing machines. If you need some vitamin D, call me up, I'll email you some in the
post. $1,000 per quart of my ginger vitamin C.
There are good things that happen with gingers as well. I told you about the Kick a Ginger
Day. In the UK, which means England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, there's a very famous
supermarket called Tesco. Do you know that? If you've ever been to the UK, you've probably
been in a Tesco. They've got beer. In 2009, apparently they made a Christmas card. The
Christmas card said: "Santa loves all kids. Even gingers." Oh, damn, I don't even like
Santa. So what happened was this: Tesco had to remove the card because gingers got upset.
People thought that it was bad that they made a card making fun of gingers.
If you are a redhead like me and you feel like hanging out with other crazy, evil, wild
redheads, you can go to Ireland for the National Irish Redhead Convention. They do lots of
fun things, like they name a King and Queen of the redheads, there's a person that wins
the most freckle contest. This is in August somewhere in Ireland. Follow the redheads.
And also, there's Redhead Day, which is the first weekend in September in the Netherlands.
So, if you're a ginger like me, I've just let out some of our secrets.
The world is going to know more about us.
Until then, see you November 20th when you try and catch me and kick me.
Bye-bye.