Web Video / Map Men

Map Men, map men, map, map, map, men, men!^note men!

"Welcome to Map Men! We're the men, and here's the map!"

Map Men is an Edutainment web series by Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones, which first started in 2016, and is still ongoing. The series looks at unusual geographical phenomena such as unusual maps, geographic oddities, weird borders and trap streets. Sprinkle in some off-beat humor and some comedy skits, and you have a short but surprisingly funny and informative show.

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Map Men contains examples of:

• Accidental Misnaming:
  • Discussed in "Why are British place names so hard to pronounce?", where Jay and Mark note that the English language has influences from the Celtic languages, Roman and Anglo-Saxon invasions, and the Old Norse spoken by the Vikings, thus divorcing English spelling and pronunciation. They also noted that over time, pronunciation has been simplified while spelling has remained relatively constant.
  • In "The world's silliest time zones", Jay says the country name "Kiribati" as "Kieria-batty", which Mark corrects him on saying it's pronounced "Kirra-bass". This is followed by Jay talking about Samoa and Mark correcting him again, saying it's pronounced "Sah-moa"; this time Mark was just joking.
• Anti-Humor:
  Excuse me, could you mispronounce "Frome" for me?
  Portsmouth.
  That'll do!
• Added Alliterative Appeal:
  • In "How did triangles shrink France?":
    Mark: Napoleon milked the map for magnificent military manoeuvres.
    Jay: Bof.
  • In "The world's silliest time zones":
    Jay: And their time-travelling tactic triggered a trend.
    Mark: Bof.
  • In "How many continents are there?":
    Mark: But complicated culture can't be conveniently cut into clear categories.
  • The episode on the longitude problem showcases a humorous take on the pamphlet announcing the Longitude Prize, which includes the phrase "Solve the Longitude — And Stop Silly Sailors Sinking at Sea, Somehow".
  • In "Why British cities make no sense":
    Mark: The citizens insisted that the Synod slanted system that saw sensible cities for several consecutive centuries suddenly seemed silly.
    Jay: Well done.
• Air Quotes: Done by both Mark and Jay when they mention the story of Stuart Hill, "who, in February 2011, 'founded' the 'country' of Forvik."
• Anachronism Stew: Often done when historical events are being portrayed, also sometimes lampshaded.
  • Jay and Mark explain that Gerard Mercator came up with the Mercator projection in 1569 by imagining the Earth as a balloon and blowing it into a cardboard tube, which they say is impressive considering neither rubber balloons nor cardboard tubes existed during that time period.
  • The episode "How did triangles shrink France?" explains that in the olden days, the first thing Giovanni Cassini did when he set out to make his map of France was Googling "satellite photography" on his laptop, but he was disappointed to find out that it wouldn't be invented until 300 years later.
  • The story of John Snow and his map, as featured in "The map that saved the most lives", was set in a Purely Aesthetic Era version of the 1800s. John Snow is portrayed as a 2010s hipster using a modern smartphone to look up the top news, which includes the cholera outbreak and Oscar Wilde being born.
  • In "Where is America?", 16th-century mapmaker Martin Waldseemüller came up with the idea to name the newly-discovered continent "America" after hearing about Amerigo Vespucci on the radio (which, in reality, wouldn't be invented until almost four centuries later). Also in the episode is a BBC News webpage showing King George III crying, with the sidebar headlines mentioning Mozart's "latest music video" and 8-month-old John Constable's first painting.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking:
  • In the longitude problem episode, it's mentioned that other scientists who failed to solve the problem ended up discovering other things instead, such as the weight of the Earth, the speed of light, and cucumber sandwiches.
  • The "Maps with Gaps" episode showcases three examples where map makers didn't bother to fill in the details of areas of a map. The first three, West Berlin as shown on East German maps, a road atlas "showcasing" Paris, and North Korea as seen on Google Maps (until data was added starting in 2013) are all legitimate examples. A map of Greenland is also ridiculed, until Jay realizes it's not an example; Greenland's low population density and concentration of population near the coasts necessitates a mostly-blank map.
• Artistic License – Geography: Played for Laughs.
  • Sometimes when a location is mentioned, the episode cuts to a scene of Mark and/or Jay in a completely different location, pretending as if they're really in the location they mentioned.
    • Mark goes to "China" to talk about why the country cares so much about the sea, when it's very obviously filmed in London's Chinatown, as shown by the London parking sign directly behind Mark, as well as the "Orient London" sign on the left of the video.
    • Jay drives in "Australia" while wearing a silly cork hat and talking about tectonic plate shifting, as a snowy blizzard rains down in what is clearly an English street.
    • In "What will the world look like in 250 million years?", the scene of Mark as Alfred Wegener examining rocks in South America and Africa uses the same footage in the same beach for both continents, with one of them merely mirrored from the other. The trope is later averted in the same episode, where Mark pre-recorded himself saying "Here, in India" on an unrelated trip to the country. They did this prior to COVID-19 restrictions being put in place, and partially did it just in case they ever got to use it.
  • In the "north/south divide" episode, when the north/south divide of France was mentioned, a map of Sudan and South Sudan was shown instead.
  • In "English counties explained", Mark shows various things with "Yorkshire" in their names that come from different parts of Yorkshire. The last of which is Yorkshire Tea, which he shows as being from Kenya (which he still says is part of Yorkshire).
• Audience Participation:
  • Used in the "north/south divide" episode to determine where the eponymous divide was, much to Mark's exasperation. The line people placed were all over the shop, with one example drawing the line directly above London.
  • Defied in "Why do maps show places that don't exist?"
    Jay: If you can think of any trap streets that we've missed, and want to mention it in the comments section below...
    Mark and Jay: Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't.
    Mark: Thanks.
    Jay: Don't.
• The Backwards Я:
  • "The world's oldest border" shows a Russian headline that says, "MOЯE IMPOЯTAИT STUꟻꟻ IS HAPPEИING ЯIGHT ИOW."^note The backwards "F" isn't even a real Cyrillic letter. Averted with the newspaper's title, which is "Russian Newspaper" in genuine Russian.
  • Played with in "Why every world map is wrong". Upset at the Gall-Peters map projection reducing its size on the maps, Russia exclaims, "Зис из булшит!" If you replace every Cyrillic letter in the quote with their Latin equivalents (without translating the sentence), it reads, "Zis iz bulshit!"
  • In the Antarctica episode, the country of Norway signs the Antarctic treaty by writing "Nöøo̊rway" on the bottom of the page.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • The Mappa Mundi doesn't look like the map we're all used to, but if you turn it 90 degrees...it still doesn't look like the map we're all used to.
  • In "The world's worst border", Mark starts eating the map of the enclave-ridden India and Bangladesh territories. Jay shouts at him, seemingly in disapproval, but actually wants him to leave some for him to eat too.
  • Mark's announcement at the start of the north/south divide episode:
    "For the purposes of this episode, Jay is from the south of England, and I am from the south of England, because we both are."
• Batman Can Breathe in Space: Subverted. One skit in "Why is North up?" shows Jay taking a selfie on the Moon without wearing a spacesuit. It is only after he sent the selfie that he immediately starts to suffocate.
• Berserk Button: Mark getting upset at the "various princes" in the "World's worst border" episode for not making a map with a clear border. Later, Jay getting upset at Mark in "maps with gaps" for attempting to draw on a map.
• Big "WHAT?!": Jay lets out a really weird and distorted one, after Mark points out that the England-Scotland border possibly goes back 400 million years.
• Bilingual Bonus:
  • Mark speaking German in response to various maps used to portray Berlin in the "Maps with Gaps" episode.
  • Played With in "The world's oldest border", as Mark (portraying a Russian person in their kitchen) is reading the newspaper, with the phrase: "More important stuff is happening right now" in faux Russian lettering. The newspaper title; "Российская газета" is genuine Russian, meaning "Russian Newspaper".
  • Jay speaks both Polish and Russian in the episode about Soviet-era maps.
  • "The mystery of the squarest country":
    • The Japanese text translates as follows: "Dear volunteer, can you please translate this text? Thank you very much! Map Men."
    • Czechia exclaims a Czech swear when Poland tries invading it.
  • "How many continents are there?" briefly shows a short paragraph written in Turkish, which is actually the Turkish translation of Moe's "Million Dollar Birthday Fries Song" from The Simpsons.
• Blatant Lies: In the end-roll ad in the "How do you start a new country?" episode, Mark tries to avoid having to watch Countdown with Jay by saying that he's in Hawaii... while he's sitting outside during a snowfall, and nowhere near Hawaii.
• Blinded by the Sun: "The world's silliest time zones" has a short skit of two cavemen who attempted to tell the time using the sun by staring at it. When one of the cavemen asks the other what time it is, the other says that he's gone blind.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall:
  • In "Why every world map is wrong", Jay and Mark tried to sail the ocean, but their boat goes off-course and swerves out of the video and right into the YouTube comments section. Later, the two tried again, but their compass broke and they end up crashing into the "History" menu on the Safari browser that the video is being watched on.
  • Seen in "The world's silliest time zones", where a time loop effect turns out to be Mark copying and pasting a clip into the episode over and over.
• Brick Joke:
  • A few in the "north/south divide" episode, which sets up stereotypes of British northerners and southerners. Southerners apparently speak with evil accents, go to Eton, and say mahogany twice a day, while Northerners apparently all appear in Coronation Street and refuse to wind up VHS tapes that they've borrowed. The end screen music for the episode is the theme tune for Coronation Street, and Mark says Mahogany three times in the episode (twice at the end).
  • In "Maps with Gaps", Jay scolds Mark for attempting to draw on a deliberately blank portion of a map. At the end of the episode Mark exclaims that he drew a wizard in the blank space.
  • In "Why do maps show places that don't exist?", Jay comments that a map he created for the "world's worst border" episode was 'stolen' by Geography Now. At the end of the video, they parody Geography Now's credits music.
  • In "Where is America?", Mark mentions the weirdness of naming the continent "America" after Amerigo Vespucci's first name, by saying that it'd be like if he found a continent and it was named Markland instead of Cooperworld-Jonesania. Later in the episode, "Cooperworld-Jonesania" is one of the suggested alternative names for the USA. Cooperworld-Jonesania is also mentioned in the next episode, "How do you start a new country?"
• Broken Record:
  • "The world's oldest border?", "The map that saved the most lives", and "Why is North up?" use the series' opening theme for their end theme, except the "men" part at the end repeats ad nauseam.
  • "Why do maps show places that don't exist?" has Jay and Mark repeatedly saying "Don't," as in don't mention any other trap streets that the video hasn't mentioned.
  • "The world's silliest time zones" concludes with Mark saying, "It is not time that controls us humans, but rather us humans who control time." Jay replies, "Well...", and then the video loops back to Mark saying "us humans who control time." Repeatedly. It turns out that Mark was pasting the same clip over and over while editing the video, prompting Jay (from inside the clip Mark was editing) to tell Mark to stop.
• Call-Back:
  • In "The world's silliest time zones", there's a joke where Mark corrects Jay's (correct) pronunciation of Samoa to "Sah-moa", then admits he doesn't actually know. When they get to Samoa in "The mystery of the squarest country", Mark pronounces it Sah-moa again.
  • The episode "Why is North up?" contains a snippet of the Mappa Mundi episode, where Jay explains the etymology of the words "orientated" and "Orient".
  • In "Why British cities make no sense", it's mentioned that the lord Salisbury that redefined city status also rewrote the definition on counties, upon which a thumbnail of their "English counties explained" video shows up before an annoyed Mark shoos it away.
• The Cameo: Roger Tilling (the announcer in University Challenge) appears as the announcer for a brief skit parodying the show in "Why British Cities make no sense."
• Captain Obvious: The props they use, most often books, are labelled by their use (a Scottish newspaper has a piece of paper with a large "SCOTTISH NEWSPAPER" font and the Scottish flag on it). Also, some of the shows' humor comes from pointing obvious map-related quirks things out.
• Clue from Ed.: Jay is fond of adding these to the video, such as in "Mappa Mundi", where Mark struggles to open a book, with a label pointing this out, while in "The worlds worst border", Jay points out a history book Mark holds as "expensive prop".
• Comically Missing the Point: In "Bir Tawil", Mark points out that many have tried to claim Bir Tawil for themselves, and then focuses on a Google Maps screenshot featuring the Google copyright stamp, and remarks "Including, worryingly, Google."
• Contrived Coincidence: Parodied. Mark notes that the number 36 has come up three times in the episode: "Why do maps show places that don't exist?", and Jay mentions that he used to live at a No. 36, and Mark is also thinking about the number. An editor's note points out the coincidence was only meant to appear twice, but the above bit had already been filmed, so they kept it in. The number does appear again when the two go on a Trap Street hunt. Amusingly, the note also points out that they had unintentionally created their own Trap street, which was the theme of the episode.
• Couch Gag: Changing the number of times "men" is echoed at the end of the opening is the regular one, but other means of changing the opening song exist, such as turning it French, having Jay sing out of sync or off-key, or awkwardly changing the lyrics to "Map Thing Men" when the "map" they reveal is a picture of John Harrison's H4 chronometer rather than a literal map.
• Department of Redundancy Department:
  • A subtle one at the end of this line from "Where is the north/south divide?"
    Jay: What's noteworthy is that the [north/south divider] line goes up at an angle, which puts Leicester which is further north than Coventry in the south, and Coventry which is further south than Leicester in the north, and vice versa.
  • In "The world's silliest time zones", Jay explains that some English towns in the 1800's used both "Railway Time" (to synchronise time between train stations) and "Local Time" (for the time in the town you were in). As expected, this was confusing for everyone involved, and so it was dropped when Greenwich Mean Time (or GMT) came into being.
• Disproportionate Restitution: Played for laughs in "Bir Tawil". The person responsible for drawing the original border between Egypt and Sudan was "shamed". Cut to a scene where his moustache was torn off.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Apparently, if foreigners mispronounce British place names, they can face "ridicule, imprisonment, or death."
• Dissimile: A visual one in "The world's oldest border?", which helpfully explains how continental collisions between tectonic plates work by comparing it to a violin and a plate of pasta being smashed into each other.
• "Do It Yourself" Theme Tune: The lyrics for the opening only consists of two words repeated: "map" and "men". The amount of times the words are repeated varies from episode to episode.
• The Elevator from Ipanema: A guitar rendition is used at the end of "Mappa Mundi".
• Epic Fail: The Mappa Mundi is a map that only shows three continents (Europe, Asia and Africa), no oceans, and as Mark points out, no country looks like it should, picking out the UK as an example of this. Jay tries to defend the map that proper mapping equipment didn't exist, which Mark refutes as Greek Scholar Ptolemy managed to do a rather impressive map with very rudimentary tools. The actual use for the Mappa Mundi is to chart the end of the world, and the way to the Christian afterlife, hence its liberties with country shapes.
• The Face of the Sun: "Why is North up?" contains a scene of a rising Sun with Jay's face on it.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • Almost every time Jay and Mark reference a historical document, what's shown on screen is instead a humorous rewrite of said document. Since they only appear briefly, you have to pause the videos to read them in their entirety.
  • In "Why every world map is wrong", we very briefly see what appears to be Jay's Embarrassing Browser History, which is filled with terms such as "naked trains" and "trains with their clothes off".
  • In "How do you start a new country?", Jay mentions that even unofficially designated countries are featured on other allied maps, and lists three examples in the form of top trump cards with wording one has to pause the video to read; Palestine (Jay and Mark not wanting to fill out the description), Taiwan (suggesting they should do a whole Map Men episode on the country) and Kosovo (which explains its... complicated relationship with the rest of the world).
  • Shortly before these three cards, a few more containing unofficial countries are shown. These are mostly genuine but include Cooperwold Jonesania, which has no actual land but does have a flag consisting of Mark's head in front of a full English breakfast, and Canada, because Mark once forgot it while listing countries off by heart during a geography class he was teaching and tried insisting it wasn't a real country to save face.
  • In "How many continents are there?", there's a brief showcase of the dictionary definition of the word "conversation", which includes a dialogue between two people, one of them standing on top of the other person's dog without realizing, and the dog going quiet and unresponsive afterward.
  • In "English counties explained", the video uses a screenshot from the Wallace & Gromit short A Matter of Loaf and Death to illustrate the one-way rivalry Yorkshire has with Lancashire. There's a caption that describes the animation as a documentary.
• Funetik Aksent: In the episode about a map of East Berlin, the blank space where West Berlin would be is labeled, "Zer ist nothing to sie hier!" This is after a long scene of Mark speaking in Gratuitous German.
• Fun with Acronyms: One of the alternative names suggested for the USA in "Where is America?" is The United States of Sub-par Railways, or The USSR for short.
• Grave Humor: In "You'll never guess the most popular internet country code", Jon Postel's gravestone reads "www.hereliesjonpostelsuchalovelyandclevermanmissedbymany1943-1998.com/rest/in/peace".
• Hard-Work Montage:
  • The end-roll advertisement in "The world's oldest border?" sees a montage of Mark attempting to draw a decorative map. The result is not as impressive as Mark had hoped.
  • "English counties explained" has Jay and Mark declare they're going to research what counties are, followed by a time-lapse of a plate of assorted biscuits disappearing with typical montage music over it. Subverted when it turns out Mark had done the research already and they were just eating the biscuits.
• Heh Heh, You Said "X": When explaining the name origin of English counties, and reaching the three that take their name from the Saxons...
  Jay: These ones, that end in -sex...
  Jay and Mark: tehehehehehe
• Hurricane of Puns: This exchange from "Why is North up?", which liberally uses the word 'top':
  Jay: Hi.
  Mark: Top of the morning.
  Jay: Are you feeling tip-top?
  Mark: On top of the world.
  Jay: Did you watch Top of the Pops?
  Mark: I watched it on my laptop.
  Jay: That one doesn't work.
  Mark: Oh.
• Insignia Rip-Off Ritual: Parodied: The man who drew the lines that created Bir Tawil has his mustache ripped off.
• Irony: As explained in "The world's worst border", anyone in an Indian or Bangladesh enclave who wanted to leave said enclave needed to get a visa, which would involve getting to an embassy or consulate, which wasn't located in their enclave. This means they couldn't get permission to leave their enclave without leaving their enclave.
• It Kind of Looks Like a Face: Throughout most of "The mystery of the squarest country", Jay and Mark make comments on the shapes of various countries and what they remind them of. For example, they mention Burundi looks like a heart, Malawi looks like a seahorse, Kazakhstan looks like "a turtle with a leaf stuck in its mouth", Thailand looks like an elephant's head, Chad looks like Jay Leno, Mongolia looks like a bat, Azerbaijan looks like "a bird that's been run over by a truck", Laos looks like a shooting star, the UK looks like "an old witch sitting sideways on a pig", and "some parts of Tuvalu look rude".
• Killed Mid-Sentence: At the end of the Mappa Mundi episode, both Jay and Mark were caught in a laser explosion caused by the titular map going rogue, right when Jay was saying, "It's just a map! What harm could it-"
• Lame Pun Reaction: In "Why British cities make no sense", Mark's reaction to Jay's "city/chairy" pun is to smack him in the face with an atlas hard enough that Jay's head falls off. It grows back, however.
• Lampshade Hanging: Mark points out in "Why do maps show places that don't exist?" that if Jay can teleport everywhere, why does he teleport to a car?
• Laughing Mad: During the end-roll ad of "Where is America?", Mark tells a joke about honey, which prompts him and Jay to laugh. The laughs start off as benign giggles, but gradually transform into this trope, both Mark and Jay laughing louder and angrier while shoving honey down their mouths.
• Logging onto the Fourth Wall: In "You'll never guess the most popular internet country code", Mark starts the video with "www.welcometomapmen.com". It's a real, currently active site that he and Jay made for the sake of the joke.
• Metaphorgotten: In the "World's worst border" episode, Jay initially explains enclaves by comparing them to putting sweets inside one other; putting a tic-tac inside of a polo mint. Mark turns the explanation into this trope a few moments later, when explaining that third-order enclaves are akin to a tic-tac inside a polo, inside a bagel, inside Bangladesh.
• Musical Episode: "The mystery of the squarest country" is done almost entirely in song, listening off every country in the world as they try to search for the country whose borders most resemble a square. It's Egypt.
  • Double-subverted in "English counties explained", which ends with Jay starting a musical number about all the names of different counties before Mark smashes his ukelele. He gets to sing the whole thing over the Patreon credits after all.
• Musicalis Interruptus: At the end of the episode explaining English counties, Jay picks up an ukulele and starts to sing a song listing all the counties, but Mark wants none of it and takes Jay's ukulele before smashing it against the table.^note The song can still be heard in full in the episode's credits.
• Mythology Gag: In "Where is America?", a scene plays over a fan-made 8-bit arrangement of one of Jay's older songs, "Skin Sofa".
• Nerds Are Virgins: Played for laughs in "Why do maps show places that don't exist?". One nerd accuses another nerd of stealing his map as it contains a trap street — a town called "My Girlfriend" — and when the second nerd admits it has that town, the first nerd exclaims, "My girlfriend doesn't exist, it never has, and never will!", and then both nerds start hissing at each other.
• Noodle Incident: Implied in the episode "Why is North up?":
  Jay: If you've ever used a compass on a year 5 geography trip where you got lost in the woods and wet yourself in front of Mr. Dugdale [...]
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer: The video about the India/Bangladesh border covered the plight of the enclaves it created, such as how people in those enclaves were often cut off from various services. Jay and Mark pretended to be EMTs rushing to help a man with a heart attack only to stop at a white line drawn on the ground and turn around. On the bottom of the video was the caption: "Based on a harrowing true story".
• Perfectly Cromulent Word: From "What will the world look like in 250 million years?":
  Jay: It was thunderingly unlikely that this unique Triassic animal could have evolved on three separate occasions. The more logical explanation was that these landmasses must once have been connected.
  Mark: "Thunderingly"?
• Planet of Steves: The Normans are depicted as this in the episode about English counties. They all have the name "Norman" and speak in an overly formal, almost artificial manner.
• Precision F-Strike: Mark dressed up as Ptolemy remarking: "I'm very f***ing clever", in response to his map he made during Greek times with nothing but rudimentary tools.
• Rimshot: In the Antarctica episode, Mark mentions that claimed Antarctic territories can no longer be changed or added without breaking the Antarctic Treaty, meaning that the map of the region is effectively frozen. Cue Jay on the drum set doing the rimshot.
• Running Gag:
  • The episode title, more often that not, has the names of Jay and Mark swapped around, so that Jay's name appears under Mark's head, and vice versa.
  • The theme song is often changed episode to episode; sometimes adding or removing one "men" or "map" around, or singing the tune out of sync or in an off-beat manner.
  • Official historical documents and papers are almost never presented as is; instead, the episodes would show rewritten parodies of them, with freeze frame bonuses galore.
  • In "Bir Tawil", Jay explains a lot of the borders being weird were down to British colonists not really caring about cultural differences, which caused a lot of problems down the road for other countries.
  • In "Mappa Mundi", Mark uses the Mappa Mundi to get to Babylon in a London taxi cab, with a clip of him being confused as to where the driver is going in the cab being used later. Mark tries to do with the London Tube map, also to no avail.
  • In "Internet vs. Ocean", several early forms of long-distance communication networks are detailed. After describing each one, Jay remarks that "It was the beginning of the internet."
• Sarcasm Mode:
  • Frome's "lovely river" in "Why are English place names so hard to pronounce?", said over images of the river being polluted.
  • A section of "Where is America?" has Jay and Mark sarcastically teaching about the fact that Columbus "discovered" America in 1492, while also pointing out all the correct information, such as the fact that it was already inhabited, that Vikings got to it centuries before Columbus did, and that Columbus actually landed in the Caribbean.
• Serial Escalation: Happens often.
  • Mark and Jay saying "Hala'ib Triangle", and then twisting it to make the "Hala'ib" part last as long as possible every time they say the place again.
  • Basically how the two describe enclaves. A first-order enclave is a country surrounded by another country, while a second-order enclave is when a country is surrounded by another country, which is inside the first country, and a third-order enclave is when a country is surrounded by a second country, which is inside the first country, which itself is surrounded by the second country. Or as Jay puts it:
    "A piece of India inside Bangladesh, which is in India, which is in Bangladesh, which is insane."
  • The episode on what the world would look like in 250 million years has Jay and Mark presenting the continental drift like a weather news broadcast, with both of their eyebrows getting increasingly larger every time the video cuts.
  • "Who Owns Antarctica?":
    • In a short slideshow on famous explorers with mustaches, said mustaches are edited to get larger and larger with each next photo, eventually ending with a man whose mustache is edited to be 8 times larger than his head.
    • The end-roll ad has Mark washing dishes on the sink before he ends up washing increasingly ridiculous objects, like a hand saw, a vinyl record, a book, a chair, and finally someone else's face.
• Shaped Like Itself:
  • A lot of the props, such as newspapers and books, are given large fonts and titles that point out what they are, such as a history book being called "History Book".
  • In "Why every world map is wrong":
    Mark: This has the naughty effect of making Greenland look about the same size as all of Africa, when in real life, it's about the size of Greenland.
  • In the episode on Antarctica, Mark mentions that the temperature in the continent can reach -60 degrees Celsius, "which is the same as -60 degrees centigrade".^note "Celsius" and "centigrade" being synonyms of each other.
  • The episode on the longitude problem mentions that the award for solving the Longitude Prize was £20,000, "which in today's money is £20,000 plus inflation."
• Shout-Out:
  • The end-roll advertisement for "The world's oldest border" uses the theme tune for Art Attack, appropriately as Mark attempts to draw France (and fails).
  • In "Why are British place names so hard to pronounce?", Mark attempts to reenact the famous clip of Liam Dutton announcing the weather for the Welsh village of Llanfair­pwllgwyngyll­gogery­chwyrn­drobwll­llan­tysilio­gogo­goch, only to promptly give up.
  • Two of the eleven supercontinent shapes shown in "What will the world look like in 250 million years?" are just the logos for Batman and the band Jamiroquai.
  • The end theme for "How do you start a new country?" is an accordion rendition of the theme for Countdown.
  • In "How many continents are there?":
    • The episode shows the dictionary definition of Constantine ("the bad guy from the second Muppet Movie"; "the bad guy who sort of turns into a good guy in Killing Eve") and Constantinople (which is just a few lyrics from the song "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)").
    • The episode briefly features the lyrics to the "Million Dollar Birthday Fries Song" from The Simpsons, translated into Turkish.
  • In "Why British cities make no sense":
    • A segment spoofs the quiz show University Challenge, with Jay and Mark standing in as the contestants.
    • The video talks about Rochester, a city that "lost" its city status, and makes a mention of the Tom Scott video where he talked about just that.
• Stop Copying Me: In the episode about map copying and copyright traps (errors added to maps to detect copying), Mark demonstrates how annoying copying is by copying Jay. After telling him to stop, Jay tries to trick Mark into saying "I'm an idiot", but Mark was paying attention and says "you're an idiot" instead.
• Stylistic Suck: In the "north/south divide" episode, Jay draws a pretty accurate map of the United Kingdom to demonstrate the line where north meets south. When Mark tries to draw a map, he draws a tiny triangle-shaped map of the UK, and concedes that they should use Jay's map instead. The end of the episode shows Mark drawing a more accurate map, minus Wales.
• Suddenly Shouting:
  • Mark shouting "So how did we end up in this ludicrous situation?!" in response to the Indian-Bangladesh enclave-dwellers troubles of getting visas to leave their enclaves.
  • Jay shouting "Blank!" in the blank spot that once covered West Berlin. Mark does the same when introducing the section about blank spots in other maps.
• Take a Third Option: Jay uses this to humorous effect in "Where is the North/ South Divide". In order to determine whether he's a northerner or a southerner, Mark holds up the worth "BATH", expecting Jay to pronounce it either as [bɑθ] (vowel as in "car"; the southern pronunciation) or as [bæθ] (vowel as in "hat"; the northern pronunciation). He instead pronounces it [bɪð] ("bith", rhyming with "with").
• Take That!:
  • In "Why do maps show places that don't exist?", Mark mentions that working on something and it getting stolen is pretty saddening, and Jay gives an example of his map of the enclaves appearing in an episode of Geography Now. The description clarifies that the theft wasn't intentional, and in a Q&A video, Paul explains that he found the map on Twitter that itself was dredged up from elsewhere, and assumed it was a real map, not one made by Jay.
  • "Why every world map is wrong" takes a few jabs at Arno Peters of the Gall–Peters projection fame. Mark says Arno "tried, tried, to make a better map", and Jay's costume of Arno Peters includes a giant inflatable penis, a silly headband, and an "L" taped onto his chest (specifically, the "L" UK car drivers are required to display while learning, before they have passed the Driver's test).
  • In "How did triangles shrink France?", Jay explains that France long ago was rural, poverty-stricken, and not particularly accepting toward strangers. Mark quips, "Plus ça change!"^note French for "The more things change!" while winking.
  • "The mystery of the squarest country" has the lyric, "Luxembourgers are all squares, which their borders don't reflect..."
• Take That, Audience!: Jay and Mark praises the impressive commitment of four generations of Cassini family taking 120 years to produce a painstakingly accurate map, and then mentions that in today's terms, that act is comparable to someone watching a YouTube video all the way to the end. Jay and Mark then laugh uncomfortably.
• Tempting Fate: Mark closes the Mappa Mundi episode by quoting cartographic historian Jerry Brotton, "The Mappa Mundi looks forward to the moment of Christian judgement, [...] where there will be no need for geographers or maps." Jay and Mark stare at the map, and then Jay dismisses the quote saying that it's just a map and won't do any harm, just before the map shoots both of them with a laser that ends in an explosion.
• Too Desperate to Be Picky: Played for laughs in "The map that saved the most lives", with Mark playing a poor townsfolk who picks up an apple covered in poop and happily eats it.
• The Triple: Four items rather than three, but: the "Maps with Gaps" episode showcases three examples where map makers didn't bother to fill in the details of areas of a map. The first three, West Berlin as shown on East German maps, a road atlas "showcasing" Paris (the roads there being too dense for the map-makers to bother with), and North Korea as seen on Google Maps (until data was added starting in 2013) are all legitimate examples. A map of Greenland is also ridiculed, until Jay realises it's not an example; Greenland's low population density and concentration of population near the coasts necessitates a mostly-blank map.
• Understatement:
  • In "Who Owns the South China Sea?", which covers the conflicting territorial claims of six countries surrounding said sea, Mark tells us, "Analysts agree that this sticky sea situation is set to continue for at least hours."
  • "What will the world look like in 250 million years?" showcased a map of the Earth from 180 million years ago, "before the second and first world wars."
• Unreadably Fast Text: The rules of the agreement signed by India and Bangladesh shown in the India/Bangladesh border video is definitely not the real agreement, and is instead a 70-entry long list of humorous jokes and shout-outs that scrolls by too quickly for anyone to read without pausing.
• Visual Pun:
  • Jay's costume of Arno Peters has him holding a giant inflatable penis, or a peter as it's known in some slangs.
  • In "How many continents are there?", Jay mentions that a continent can be defined by its culture, while holding a cup of yogurt (a dairy product derived from fermenting milk with bacteria cultures).
  • The longitude problem episode:
    • Admiral Sir Cloudesly Shovell is depicted as a shovel with googly eyes. The disclaimer text at the bottom helpfully points out that Shovell didn't actually look like that in real life.
    • It's mentioned that Nevil Maskelyne, who had become the new head of the Board of Longitude by the time John Harrison finished his H4 chronometer, decided that the clock needed to be put through several more tests. This was accompanied by the visual of Jay and Mark lifting up a soccer goal and then carrying it a few meters away — literally Moving the Goalposts.
  • In "You'll never guess the most popular internet country code", Mark tells the viewers to "strap in" for the explanation on some internet jargon. Quick cut to him or Jay trying to buckle up in his car seat.
• Your Mom: One of the fake websites in "You'll never guess the most popular internet country code" is called "YourMum.gov".

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