we must probe deeply into our souls

You can always tell a really good inadvertently doubly entendresque web news headline by the speed with which it's retitled; luckily the pages linking to it sometimes take a bit longer to be updated. So here's this morning's post-crushing-Ashes-defeat headline from the BBC Sport website. As you can see the page itself was swiftly retitled; the link on the home page was left around a bit longer, though - long enough for me to capture it anyway.

It's not clear whether Alastair Cook actually said those exact words; if so maybe it was a subtle commentary on England's inexplicably pitiful performances in the series so far. They certainly have been playing like a bunch of "our souls".

This is not the first time this particular fnarr-fnarr combination of words has been used for comic effect, of course, whether intentionally or not. Steve Coogan's short-lived Latino crooner creation Tony Ferrino didn't have many properly funny moments, but the epic The Valley Of Our Souls was one of them. Don't imagine it's only the low-brow end of the cultural spectrum that does this stuff, though: here's Leo Tolstoy getting a cheap laugh in a very similar way.