My role, and one for which I was entirely qualified, was to be an extremely ignorant non-zoologist to whom everything that happened would come as a complete surprise.

Douglas Adams wryly describes his own unsuitability for a task, casting his total lack of expertise as an odd sort of qualification. The joke rests on the idea that genuine astonishment requires genuine ignorance, so his cluelessness became strangely useful.

Context reviewed 23 September 2026