Taskmaster (NZ) / Funny

Taskmaster Funny Index
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Season 1

In General

Angella and Paul have a strange dynamic throughout the show which veers into uncomfortable and anti-romantic territory. When she was a guest on Taskmaster: The People's Podcast, Angella explains that behind the scenes, she and Paul were attempting to out-awkward one another.
[after Paul gives birth to Angella and the initial applause dies down]
Jeremy: I have no words for that.
Angella: What you didn't see is that I did get nursed— (starts cracking up)
[nervous laughter from the cast and audience]
Guy Williams: (hesitantly) ...by—
Madeleine: ...by Paul? Do we not have a reel of this?
Jeremy: I don't think we should see that. The interactions between these two during this series have become more and more disturbing for me. Now you are giving birth to Angella.
Guy's desperate, and usually ineffectual, attempts to be the 'People's Champion' and get the audience cheering for him.
Brynley being mocked for her task outfit making her look like a member of the Hitler Youth.
Brynley: I'm a Girl Scout, not a Nazi!
Madeleine is given an unusual score of 1.5 points on one of her prize entries early on, so it carries over whenever there are season-wide score updates.

Gluten Free

The fact that the very first task entry of the whole NZ series is Angella bringing in her anti-anxiety medication as a prize.
- The prompt is ‘best thing you couldn’t live without’. Brynley Stent brings in her boyfriend. Then, after Leigh objects to Madeleine’s entry of dental floss being underwhelming:
  Leigh: Brynley’s giving up her boyfriend!
  Angella: I think he gave up first.
An amusing parallel: like the UK version, the NZ Taskmaster also includes someone smashing a melon on a table in the lab and eating it in its first filmed task.
The sculpture task, where you have to make a sculpture out of things beginning with the same letter as the thing being sculpted:
- Angella chooses ‘T’ and decides to make ‘Tina’s torso’, with a big ‘3’ as the thighs. When Paul asks who Tina is, Angella claims she’s in witness protection and doesn’t want to be talked about.
- Leigh chooses ‘M’ but ends up making a sculpture containing no items beginning with M at all, claiming a hat stand as a ‘makeshift pole’ and various instruments as ‘musical’ things, such as a ‘musical tambourine’. Paul lists off the items he uses in the studio.
  Paul: Have you heard of an instrument called a marimba?
  Jeremy: Yep…
  Paul: Well he didn’t use that, he used a xylophone.
- There’s also this fantastic Verbal Backspacing after Leigh decides not to mess with his sculpture any further:
  Leigh: Da Vinci didn’t keep fiddling with the Mona Lisa every morning, did he? I don’t mean that - that - I don’t - not the model - the work, once he’d - once he’d painted it.
The contestants have to make a cocktail out of rhyming ingredients.
- Several of the random items they order, like Brynley ordering a picture of Whoopi Goldberg in Sister Act (as ‘nunny’ to rhyme with ‘honey’) and Guy Williams ordering a ‘German car’ to rhyme with ‘caviar’.
- Everything about Angella’s attempt. She starts by brainstorming:
  Angella: What do you normally put in a cocktail? Rum… and… I just got rude words.
- Then this awkward banter with Paul, after she eventually goes for pineapple syrup:
  Angella: Do you like pineapple?
  Paul: Second favourite fruit.
  Angella (as though Paul asked her the question): Pineapple? No.
  Paul: …yes it is.
  Angella: Oh, your second… wait, mine or yours?
- To make her cocktail fancier, Angella asks for some fancy slo-mo camera shots. We get a couple of glossy slo-mo shots of her shaking the cocktail with music underneath… then cut straight to a long shot of Angella just pouring her cocktail slowly into the glass for some time, with no music or fancy cinematography whatsoever.
  Paul: Really sounds like someone’s pissing.
- Which leads to:
  Paul: It’s delicious.
  Angella: Is it because it reminds you of piss?
  Paul: I’ve never drunk piss.
  Angella (quietly): I have.
- Jeremy questions Angella on having drunk piss in the studio. Angella then claims she’s never drunk piss and tries to explain what she meant, though as Paul notes, her explanation consists of just retelling what the VT just showed and stopping before the bit where she mentioned she’d drunk piss. It then turns out Angella wasn’t paying attention and just completely forgot she’d ever claimed to drink piss, though she reckons it was probably a joke. Then Guy chimes in with a story about having drunk his own piss live on the radio.
  Jeremy: I think we need to move on.
- Leigh using a leafblower to blow his cocktail - made of cream and Jim Beam - directly into Paul’s mouth, and indeed over most of his face.
In the last task, the contestants are presented with a spread of different fruits and breads. Leigh picks up a slice of bread, asks if it’s gluten free, and upon being told it is, throws it away, saying ‘no good for me’. Then he opens the task… and it turns out contestants must use the first fruit and bread they touched, meaning Leigh has to go find and use the gluten free bread he just discarded.
- Brynley is hit by the touching rule as well, and ends up having to hit a pineapple a long distance with a loaf of rye bread. Her first strike of the pineapple not only goes backwards, but also completely obliterates the rye.
  Brynley: Can I have another loaf?
  Paul: I only baked one.
- The brotherly rivalry dynamic between Paul and Guy comes to the fore in this task:
  Guy: That tape measure’s pretty cool. Where’d you get it?
  Paul: Bought it online.
  Guy: That’s a shame, not supporting local New Zealand businesses.
  Paul: It was a local New Zealand website.
  Guy: Oh yeah? What’s it called?
  Paul (clearly trying to suppress a smile): …Kiwi Tape Measurers.

A Political Hotcake

Angella struggling to explain her prize, a roast chicken with an egg inside it (and also the whole thing is cake).
Guy singing in the opening of the first task ‘so the production team can save money on music’.
- The contrast between Angella and Brynley’s attempts at the balloon task. Angella just ambles around the garden slowly and unsurely, repeatedly asking Paul how much time she has left. This is interposed with Brynley’s extremely high-energy rushing about the place grabbing as many items as she can.
- Not that it serves Brynley particularly well - she fails almost immediately.
- Though Angella does no better, deciding to rub the balloon on Paul’s back so that it will stick with static electricity, only for the balloon to immediately get blown away and pop on the grass.
  Paul: It was one of the windiest days. But I would say, even on a calm day, that idea was crazy.
- Introducing her attempt, Paul calls Madeleine ‘the most considerate, thoughtful, and kind contestant’. When we see the VT, it turns out this is only because she was the only one to tell him to rest the arm he was holding up the balloon with.
Leigh failing to notice Paul in the intro to the vase task.
- Speaking of failing to notice things, Leigh, Guy, and Brynley all manage to miss the second task inside the vase, just smashing it to pieces and leaving the lab.
- In the studio, despite the video having specifically zoomed in on and focused on the unopened tasks left on the floor, Brynley still doesn’t realise she’s messed up for a few moments, which Paul mocks her for… and then it turns out she was actually the first of the three to realise what she’s done, as neither Guy nor Leigh managed to notice it in the video either!
- Madeleine using peanut butter as an adhesive to stick her vase back together.
The national anthem task:
- Both Madeleine and Leigh hit China, a troubling prospect considering the tasks were filmed in the early days of the COVID outbreak in Wuhan.
  Leigh: We both got China and at that time it was… politically… kind of a hotcake.
  Madeleine: Yeah it was. It felt all of a sudden very pressured to be on camera.
  Angella: I think we all know that they can’t handle China. (barely any reaction) Cause of the vase…
  Guy: Oh, well done.
  Angella: Sorry… I sleep with a lot of dads.
- Brainstorming his China song, Leigh says he’s worried about offending people. Cut to a shot of his paper, where he has written ‘ya ei-ei lap sap chung’.
  Paul: Is that Mandarin you’ve written?
  Leigh: Well… I wouldn’t call it full Mandarin, no.
- Angella’s song is about Bangladesh.
  - Firstly there’s this lyric, about how Bangladesh is sandwiched in between India and Myanmar:
  Angella: And I’m in the middle. Like Malcolm.
  - Then she adds in a YouTube pronunciation guide video as a duetting track.
  Angella: I met a guy from…
  Pronunciation Video: Bangladesh.
  Angella: I said say that again…
  Pronunciation Video: Bangladesh.
  Angella: And when he left he went to…
  Pronunciation Video: Bangladesh.
  Angella: And I never saw him ag-
  Pronunciation Video: PronounceNames.Com.
- Brynley’s song is about Democratic Republic of the Congo, which she quickly learns to her horror is known for its use of child soldiers, and decides to skip that part. However, when we see her actual anthem, she’s included a line specifically stating that she won’t mention child soldiers, and also invented ‘a national park full of boulders’ for the specific reason so that it would rhyme with ‘child soldiers’. Paul then reveals that Brynley’s song was originally much longer, but most of the cut stuff was about child soldiers.
- The main lyric of Madeleine’s song is ‘Fuck the western world, we’re China.’
- Guy’s terrible Libyan anthem, ‘Unite the People with the Spirit of the Country of Libya’. It just consists of him chanting the same line ‘Are you ready, for a song, and a song, about Libya’ over and over again with limited musical backing; he then runs out of time, but decides to continue anyway, and smashes up two guitars while chanting the line with ever increasing intensity.
The ‘yeast spread’ in the live task.
Jeremy: This is not the type of yeast that you’re thinking of.
Angella: But if you had it, how would you get rid of it?
- Also this, while the contestants are painting their maps of New Zealand:
  Paul: What artist are you channelling?
  Brynley: I don’t know any artists!
  Guy: The artist that I’m channelling is Brynley, I’m just looking at her one.
  Brynley: Oh fuck off Guy!

D.A.P

The prize task category is the least useful item.
- Angella brings in strawberry-scented labial chapstick.
  Madeleine: Yeah, you really don't want to get a DAP.
  Angella: What's that?
  Madeleine: A Dry Ass Pussy.
- Then Leigh introduces his prize, a garden hose extension nozzle:
  Leigh: Angella might enjoy my one, this could be quite helpful. We've got this nozzle...
  Angella: How dry do you think my pussy is?
'Make this tree sexy, sexiest tree wins'.
- Leigh awkwardly talking about pubic hair.
- Madeleine playing an Australian cricketer character called 'Brett Shane-Brett'.
- Paul apologises before he shows Angella's attempt, saying he's contractually obligated to play it. In the clip, Angella forces Paul to be a stripper using the tree as a stripping pole, complete with tearaway trousers (though Paul has another pair on underneath them) and nipple clamps, while Angella puts cream on his chest and squirts him with oil. That would be funny enough, except, as per usual with Paul and Angella, the interactions between the two are not sexy at all but extremely awkward.
- Jeremy complains that Angella didn't make the tree sexy, she just made Paul sexy.
  Paul: I would argue that when someone goes to a strip club they don't leave thinking 'Wow, those poles!'
  Angella: What if it's a Polish bar?
- Paul apologises before Guy's attempt as well, again saying he's contractually obligated to play it. This time, though, it's Guy who strips - stripping completely naked and standing in the tree. According to Paul, it took Guy less than a minute to settle on that idea. Paul then shows some behind-the-scenes footage which shows that Guy had trouble taking off his underwear while in the tree, so he had to get Paul to peel his underwear off for him.
  Angella: I think that if I saw a naked man in a tree, I'd call the police — and be like, "there's a man who looks like Guy Williams possibly masturbating in a tree."
The awkwardness in Leigh and Angella's first team meeting.
- The task is to catch a grape in a tuba from the furthest distance, with bonus points available for playing a song on the tuba whilst catching the grape. Leigh plays the tuba both before and after the catch, but not during; he tries to claim that it still counts because he was playing 'one of those songs that has a bit of a break in the chorus'.
  Leigh: You normally have the instrumental break, we had the break from the instrumental.
Leigh's martial arts 'clearing the mind' as he enters the lab for the piñata task. Also, his mispronunciation of 'dojo' in the studio when asked to justify it.
- According to Paul, four out of five contestants, when trying to fill the piñata with something surprising, first attempted to fill the donkey piñata through its anus, instead of the door on its stomach.
- Both Guy and Madeleine put more piñatas inside the piñata. Unfortunately for Guy, Paul had already seen Madeleine's attempt first, in which she had also supplemented the smaller piñata joke by putting CDs of Paul's music in the piñata, so he is far less surprised and/or surprised by Guy's attempt.
- Guy then tries to rescue this by claiming Paul's lack of emotion is reflective of the men's mental health crisis in New Zealand. Jeremy argues that Guy's attempt was in fact detrimental to men's mental health and ends up deducting a point from him as a result.
- Angella tried to make the piñata explode by attaching a string for Paul to pull to a Christmas cracker inside the piñata. Unfortunately, because she also inexplicably decided to put a spinach pizza in there, the string got soggy and doesn't work at all.
- Leigh fills his piñata with flour, turmeric, and corn kernels, and more or less openly admits in the studio that his intention was to blind Paul (though it doesn't work as Paul knocks it off the string). Madeleine suggests he was using 'white people spice' and should have used chilli and curry powder.
  Leigh: I should have just put diesel in there.
- Finally, Brynley's attempt.
  Brynley: His name is...
  Paul: I'd prefer that you didn't give it a name, when I'm about to beat it with a bat.
  Brynley: Oh okay. ...Good luck, Fabio.
- It then turns out 'Fabio' is full of meat and fake blood, and Brynley sobs and screams loudly as Paul violently destroys him. Paul says in the studio that he wasn't that surprised as such an attempt was very in character for Brynley.
The live task is to write down a sport, an animal, and a colour, and strike poses to mimic those things.
- Leigh runs out of time to write down a sport, so ends up just standing there. To Guy's indignation, Paul and Jeremy decide that Leigh has fairly represented the act of not doing sport, and award him a point for it.
- Angella and Madeleine picked the same sports and animals (cricket and a cat) but both times Jeremy fails to guess Angella but correctly guesses Madeleine. At the end of the round, Angella is the only person who scored zero points.
  Angella: I'd like to strike another pose.
  (gives Jeremy the middle finger)

I'm Queer, I'm Here

The prize task is best gift for your enemy.
- Guy brings in a 'Guy Williams Friendship Certificate', which he intends as a sort of token of rapprochement for his enemies.
  Jeremy: Are you actually extending a hand of friendship to your enemies, though, or are you saying that it's the worst thing in the world to be your friend?
- Leigh comes next after Guy and begins by assuring 'Well, mine's not quite as lame as that'.
- His prize turns out to be a number of cables and power adapters plugged into each other. When Jeremy protests that you could take it apart into usable items, Leigh claims he's superglued them together.
- Angella's laxative-covered bird feeder. Her plan is that birds will eat the laxatives and then shit on her enemy's lawn; Guy points out that birds fly, so they could just as easily end up shitting on her lawn too. Then it turns out the laxatives on the bird feeder are actually human laxatives, so as Angella says, the birds will probably 'shit their innards out'... which Jeremy notes will just leave her with dead birds on her lawn.
Leigh's attempt in the vegetable task, in which he spends most of time retrieving and then attempting to repair a food processor. At one point, when it's clear he's running out of time, he just cuts open a pepper and pops a sprout inside, completing the task effectively without even needing the processor. (He does eventually get the processor working and use it for his final attempt, though.)
- After Leigh's effort is given one point for the second time this episode:
  Leigh: Can I just ask a sort of admin question... is one point the best?
The contrast between the two teams in the intro to the 90-second film task.
- Firstly, in how they retrieve the task - Angella just digs around in the popcorn to find the task, while Guy, Brynley, and Madeleine tip over the whole popcorn bucket onto the floor.
- Then, in their planning stages, the team of three - mostly Madeleine and Brynley - are just running about energetically, diving over the desk into the popcorn and coming up with constant ideas. Leigh and Angella, meanwhile, just stand there awkwardly, with Angella at one point suggesting they start by counting 90 seconds just to see how long it is.
- Madeleine has an idea:
  Madeleine: What if this film, just for like equality and feminism stakes, is (looks directly down the camera) Jane Bond?
  Guy: Did you just stare down the camera after you said that?
- Guy does agree to the idea, though, because Brynley's costume is appropriate.
  Brynley: I'm a Girl Scout, not a Nazi!
From the actual films:
- Guy flubbing his line in the Jane Bond film.
  Madeleine: Bond, Jane Bond. I'm queer, I'm here, get used to it.
  Guy: Queer! ...sorry...
  Madeleine: You okay? ...Come on, what do you want?
  Guy: Jane Bond! It's Spencer, I'm from the government.
- Brynley's fake hand.
- Paul asks Leigh if he wants to say a few words to introduce his team's effort:
  Leigh: What you're about to see is a multi-layered... film noir... kinda... it's so, it's so... uh... oh, just roll the clip, it's awesome.
- These lines, from Leigh and Angella's film, about 'Leafblower Man'.
  Angella: Go f*** yourself.
  Paul: You're going to regret saying that.
  Angella: Why?
  Paul: Because they're going to bleep it out in the edit.
  [...]
  Angella: Wherever there is a child crying, he is there. Not because he caused it, but because he is fixing it.
- Angella accidentally presses the stop record button on the camera in the middle of filming it, leaving a couple of seconds of the film without video. Leigh claims that that was the sex scene.
'Make this mum proud'
- Guy discovers the mum hates smoking, so, having smoked every day since he was fourteen, decides to sign an agreement with the mum that he will never touch a cigarette again. After having signed it, he reveals that he actually doesn't smoke at all and never has. The mum is fairly impressed by this, but Jeremy points out in the studio that all Guy did was sign an agreement not to do something he already had no plans to do, and he might as well have signed an agreement never to murder someone.
- The largely paltry attempts from many of the contestants, from Madeleine doing a very simple obstacle course, to Leigh trying to do yoga, to perhaps the worst effort, Brynley just running to a tree at the end of the Taskmaster garden and back.
- It's already alluded to at the top of this folder, but Angella being birthed by Paul, which is equal parts horrifying and hilarious. It includes Angella making an umbilical cord out of sausages and surprisingly committed performances from both Paul and Angella. What sells it is the mum's rather horrified look throughout. (Angella still gets the five points though for her effort.)
After explaining the poem live task, Paul asks if there are any questions. Madeleine asks if they can keep the pens after the show. Then, while the contestants are writing their poems:
Guy: These pens are really nice. I'm so excited to get these!
- In the task, the poems are scored from one to five, but those points are lost if the Taskmaster successfully guesses who wrote the poem. Brynley scores only one point and then manages to lose it anyway by audibly reacting when her poem is scored badly.

Unhealth Must Be Dead

While Angella's story about her mother sending her a bra while she was doing time in a bail hostel is more uncomfortable than funny really, it does give us this exchange:
Guy: What was your mum thinking when she gave you a bra?
Angella: She was thinking 'my daughter needs support'.
The task is to blow an egg the furthest distance off the table. When the egg breaks, the distance is measured from there.
- Guy makes a big show of refusing to finish reading the task to allow himself more time (though it seems really more to annoy Paul). However, once he does officially start his time, he just blows the egg off the table straight onto the floor and breaks it. The effort is so pathetic Jeremy decides not to throw to an ad break just yet so the audience isn't left with that.
- Brynley on her hands and knees, desperately blowing an egg along the floor.
- Leigh and Madeleine both rush to the shed to get a leafblower to increase their blowing power. Madeleine however just uses the leafblower to blow the egg directly off the table and onto the ground - basically Guy's effort but with more power. Leigh spends more time setting up some apparatus for a more stable blow... and then ends up cracking the egg while setting up, meaning he finishes last in the task.
The next task is to be the most unhealthy in ten seconds.
- The source of this episode's title:
  Angella: Dead... If health is alive, then unhealth must be dead.
  Paul: (quietly) Don't do it.
- Angella does end up 'dying' however, lying in a coffin whilst eating fried chicken. Paul reads out her eulogy.
  Paul: (dressed as a priest) Angella Dravid died drowning in a vat of butter from a heart attack. Her last moments were spent stalking her ex-boyfriend's girlfriend on Instagram and replying to dick pic. RIP (blows whistle)
- This leads to another in-studio commentary on Angella and Paul's awkward dynamic.
  Jeremy: Your dynamic is now starting to get into that kind of German death porn thing.
  Angella: Is there any other kind of German porn?
  (Jeremy laughs)
  Angella: Oh my God! Not for me, I like them alive. Fuck!
- Brynley's unhealthy attempt includes making a booty call. The guy she calls turns out to be busy that night so she never ends up asking him.
- Guy spends a long time explaining all the various unhealthy things he's going to do in his ten seconds. He then spends so long trying to light the fifty or so cigarettes that he wastes most of his time on those.
- Leigh blends pizza, crisps, chocolate, and alcohol into a disgusting smoothie. You can audibly hear Brynley in the background saying 'no' while he does it. He drinks it for the full ten seconds, then inexplicably keeps going after the whistle has already blown.
- Leigh points out he put an exercise bike in shot to make a point of how unhealthy he was being, and Paul mentions that Leigh went to the trouble of taking the seat off the exercise bike, so that nobody could use it.
  Jeremy: That is very unhealthy, if you ever use an exercycle without a seat.
  Madeleine: Or, surprisingly pleasant.
  Leigh: Roll that footage.
- Before showing Madeleine's attempt, Paul has to assure everyone that this was filmed before the COVID-19 pandemic. We quickly find out why, as Madeleine has got most of the production team to cough violently on her while she smokes a bunch of cigarettes. She also apparently almost started a bushfire after she threw the lit cigarettes onto the ground. Leigh suggests Madeleine's attempt might have been the superspreader event that started the COVID pandemic. Paul then praises the production team for their work in scapegoating Wuhan as the epicentre of the outbreak.
  Jeremy: Who could forget those glory days when it was okay to get eight men to cough on you.
The third task involves doing something impressive hands-free.
Leigh: Masturbating. I suppose that would be a challenge. For the network, that is, not for me.
- Both Brynley and Angella decide to draw without using their hands, but while Brynley gets the production team to set up an easel for her, Angella spends some time trying to set it up herself hands-free, and ends up getting stuck in it.
- Brynley confusing Edvard Munch with Edward Monkton.
- Leigh dressing up as Hannibal Lecter and attempting to drink a gallon of milk, coming close to waterboarding (or 'milkboarding'?) himself in the process.
- Guy's initial plan is to do a golf swing with his mouth, but finds it quite painful, so instead he tries to kick a bucket from the ground up onto his head. In an editing choice reminiscent of Nish and the basketball from UK series five, it initially appears that Guy has managed to do it on his first try, only for Paul to then reveal there were thirty other unsuccessful attempts first.
Angella loses the episode by one point after messing up during the alphabet soup live task. Jeremy points out all the different words she could have had that would have given her the victory.
Angella: This isn't helping me feel better.

The Problem Is Me

The prize task category is the thing that scares you the most.
- Guy brings in a wad of printed-out Facebook comments about vaccines.
- Brynley tells a bizarre story about how when she was moving house, she found a pair of shoes outside with ham hocks stuck in them to look like severed feet. When Jeremy ranks her lowly, Brynley accuses him of being the culprit.
- Angella goes her usual uncomfortable route:
  Angella: I brought a mirror...
  (audible 'Awww' from the audience)
- She also gets a killer one-liner though during Madeleine's prize. Madeleine has trypophobia, and has brought in a number of crumpets due to their many holes.
  Jeremy: Madeleine, I don't share your fear of holes. And I love crumpets.
  Angella: Oh, I thought you were going to say you love holes.
Madeleine's ominous implications while brainstorming for the 'make something disappear' task that she may have killed a number of her ex-boyfriends.
Madeleine: (to Paul) Why are you shuffling nervously?
- For this task, Madeleine ends up making the caravan disappear, which ends up taking a lot longer than she expected.
- Everything about the disasterpiece that is Brynley's film.
  - In the film, we first get a shot of the past, with several people walking past a cow talking about their love of nature. Then cut to the present day, where the same people are walking past the cow talking about computers, and eventually the cow is taken away and replaced with a sign saying 'Computer Shop Opening Soon' (which promptly falls over after Brynley puts it up).
  Paul: She wants to go on a picnic, but I only want to go on the Internet.
  - The flaws in the film are immediately apparent. Besides the terrible script and acting, one of the most glaring flaws is that the idyllic past of the film is explicitly set in 1915 - i.e. during the First World War. Paul also points out that Brynley's present-day shots were set in 2020, and how it's strange the worst thing Brynley could think of associated with the year 2020 was the opening of a new computer shop.
  - Paul then points out that between 1915 and 2020, the cow population actually rose from about 600,000 to over five million. Madeleine suggests that cow populations were so low in 1915 because they were all conscripted into World War One.
  - And then we get into the production issues:
  Paul: You may have noticed that was one of the worst-filmed tasks. That was because most of the production crew were in the film.
  Jeremy: I think it was one of the worst tasks full stop.
- Mind you, Brynley still gets two points, because the one-point effort is Guy's; after spending about 45 minutes attempting and failing to make a huge bubble using string, he gives up and ends up throwing a cow in the pond. In a reprise of Tim Key insisting his ice block has disappeared in the UK series, he fervently insists to Paul that throwing the cow in the pond - where it is still clearly visible - has made it disappear.
- Angella's effort involves Photoshopping the house out of a photo. Jeremy praises Angella for managing to make a filmed task not uncomfortable for the first time. Her in-studio response is long, awkward silence, causing Jeremy to retract his praise.
  Angella: Do I really make tasks uncomfortable? It feels normal...
  Guy: On one of them you brought along vaginal lipstick.
  Angella: It's not my fault that you find vaginas uncomfortable.
  Guy: (once the laughter has died down) ...I see now that the problem is me.
The team task asks the contestants to collect tools and bring them for the second part of the task, which involves transporting soup from one vat to another. Leigh and Angella do well for the most part, bringing two large vessels. The team of three, on the other hand, bring a vast array of random items, including Brynley bringing a pot plant, Madeleine bringing a guitar, and most egregiously once it's revealed what the task is, Guy bringing a vast array of tools full of holes and thus completely useless, such as a shopping trolley and a tennis racket. They end up sending the soup through a hollowed-out rake.
The ingenuity of the third filmed task. Shortly after the contestants enter the lab, Paul dashes out, claiming to have forgotten something. The task, however, says 'Leave the room. Fastest wins. Your time started when Paul left the room.' Cue a bunch of footage of the contestants just standing awkwardly in the lab wondering if they should wait for him to come back or not.
- Paul remarks that Leigh's failure to immediately realise this was a trick task was particularly odd, as while for the other contestants Paul claimed to forget something he usually has on him, such as his iPad or his jacket, he told Leigh he'd forgotten his glasses. Paul has never worn glasses.
- Angella is the lone exception to the above, as she leaves the room just seven seconds after Paul, without even opening the task, because she wanted to make sure he was okay.
  Jeremy: Angella, that was nice, you seemed genuinely concerned for Paul.
  Angella: Yeah... I think I won because I was a good human being.
- What makes her attempt hilarious, though, is when she comes back into the room and opens the task, and appears uncertain about whether or not she's succeeded at all.
  Paul: How do you think that went?
  Angella: I'm so confused.
There's a cute little moment in the live task where Madeleine pulls the whole wax seal off the envelope before opening it, hands it to Leigh who tries to put it in his front jacket pocket, but can't because it's sewn shut. So he hands it off to Guy who puts it in his front pocket instead.
- The task ends up being one of the most anticlimactic tasks ever; the contestants are blindfolded and have to stand up before a slice of toast pops, but all of them end up standing long before that happens, leading to at least two minutes of just waiting around for the toast to pop.
- At least Angella's there to make things more interesting with her dark quips:
  (in a discussion about how to remove toast from the toaster)
  Brynley: I've got some wooden toast tongs at home.
  Angella: I just use a knife. Go out strong.
  [...]
  (in the middle of the task)
  Guy: Is Angella up or down?
  Angella: I'm down, generally.

An Intervention

The prize is the worst thing to show the Taskmaster.
- Angella brings in a book with a collection of negative comments about Jeremy and the show, many of which come from her.
  Book on screen: I think he's started a cluster. - Angella Dravid
  Angella: That one's anonymous.
  Jeremy: Oh, there's another one?
  Book on screen: I'm sure he's a nice guy but I think he's a reminder of how New Zealand needs to move on. - Angella.
- Brynley gets Greg Davies, the UK Taskmaster, to send in a video criticising Jeremy. Unfortunately, the advice Greg gives to Jeremy in the video is to clamp down harder on the contestants' efforts, and Jeremy duly complies by giving Brynley one point.
- Guy brings in his nasty pillow, but Jeremy ends up giving it only three points, claiming he wouldn't mind sleeping on it, which infuriates Guy.
  Madeleine: I think you two are becoming the Paul & Angella of the live show.
  Guy: He's certainly fucking me, that's for sure.
The 'find Paul' task.
- Brnyley saying Paul looks like 'a little ghost girl'.
- Leigh accidentally dropping the telescope off the house balcony.
- According to Paul, Guy takes longer on this task than anyone else does on any other task. His increasing frustration is evident.
  Guy: (yelling) Paul! Please! ...Sorry to the sound man for that one. Actually, not sorry. Fuck you for making this shit game.
  Guy: You might want to turn the cameras off cause as soon as I find him I'm going to physically assault him.
The second task envelope is in a suitcase. Guy struggles to open it and insists it's a 'trick suitcase', despite Paul saying it's just a regular suitcase. He then says that everyone else will surely struggle with opening it as well. Cut to all four other contestants managing to open their cases immediately.
- The task itself is to have the best fake holiday.
- Leigh attaches the car to the caravan and drives it a short distance with Paul still inside.
- Brynley takes Paul on a road trip, which largely consists of driving through downtown New Zealand with Paul and yelling 'Road trip!'. Jeremy calls it 'a chant-based holiday'.
- Guy pretends he visited a Christian holiday camp, and borrows Paul's trousers so he can take golf shots.
- Both Madeleine and Guy post their fake pictures on Instagram to make the fake holiday seem more realistic. Madeleine got likes on her post from Aubrey Plaza and a bunch of other NZ celebrities, leading her to say she's too big for this show and jokingly leave. Guy, on the other hand, mostly got likes from 14-year-old-boys.
- Angella's Big Trip, a fake holiday video made by Angella, complete with terrible Windows Movie Maker-style video editing. Though some of her holiday-faking methods are amusingly ingenious, such as using a garden chair to look like a plane window, or getting crew members to shake the caravan and pass plants by the window to simulate a train.
The third task is to paint a picture of the Taskmaster at the same time as a five-year-old, with the intention of tricking Jeremy into thinking their picture is the five-year-old's picture.
- Leigh completely misunderstands the task and paints a very good picture of Paul instead, meaning Jeremy picks his out instantly.
- Some of the conversations between the comedians and the children are quite funny. For example, Brynley:
  Brynley: What do you want to be when you grow up?
  Child: A pilot.
  Brynley: That's a great choice. Can I give you a piece of advice?
  Child: (derisively) Hm.
  Brynley: Oh, okay.
  [...]
  Brynley: (leaving) Hey, good luck with the piloting. Don't become a comedian.
  Paul: He didn't ask for your advice.
  Brynley: Savage, Paul.
  Paul: (whispering to the child) You should get into comedy. It's a lot of money.
- Angella struggles to connect with her five-year-old. In the studio she claims Quinn - again, a five-year-old - had 'a Mean Girl vibe'.
  Angella: What's your name?
  Quinn: Quinn.
  Angella: Mine's Angella.
  Quinn: I already know that.
- Guy asks his five-year-old 'Who's your favourite princess in Frozen?', and then 'Who's your favourite Moana in Moana?'.
- He also comments on how the five-year-old refused to shake his hand at the beginning, leading to this:
  Angella: First rule I learned was never shake an unknown man's hand.
  Guy: I'm not unknown, I'm Guy!
  Angella: Yeah, but everyone's a guy.
  Madeleine: I would not trust anyone who asked me who my favourite Moana in Moana was.
  Leigh: And let's be honest, you had just been on a Christian camp.
  (Angella loses it)
The live task is to sculpt the third most impressive dog.
Paul: What are you thinking, Guy?
Guy: I think I'm born to do this and I'm ready to win.
Paul: You don't want to win, you want to come third.
Guy: Shit.
- Even funnier when Guy does eventually end up winning, and thus losing.

Sweaty Socks And Depression

The prize category is the best thing that sounds better than it is.
- Guy brings in his dad's Facebook photo book, which he has barely edited, and includes some pictures of flooding as the first photo.
- Leigh appears to have put very little thought into this one and brings in his Uncle Hank's 'Boston Marathon sports shorts', which are apparently unimpressive because his Uncle Hank didn't compete in the Boston Marathon. His awkward attempt to sell his prize completely breaks Angella.
- Angella herself announces her prize by saying she 'collects a lot of nudes'. Turns out she means nude-colour paint swatches.
'Get someone you went to primary school with on the phone, fastest wins'
- Guy smashes the task and manages to call someone in thirty seconds. Unfortunately for him, nobody focuses on the impressiveness of his effort, because he somehow managed to forget that he was sitting across the table from Paul... his brother... who he went to primary school with.
  Guy: Who do I know from primary school that I still know now?
  (Paul looks at the camera)
- In contrast, Brynley thinks to call her brother immediately.
- After the break:
  Paul: The contestants had to call someone they went to primary school with.
  Jeremy: That's a tricky one, I mean, are you still friends with anyone you went to primary school with?
  Paul: (looking pointedly at Guy) No.
- Leigh tries to call a number of friends, almost all of whom go to their answering machine, causing him and Paul to increasingly break out into helpless giggles. All in all, he takes twelve minutes to complete the task, ten minutes longer than anybody else. At one point, Leigh calls his wife to look for a friend's number, and waits for her response. Turns out she doesn't have it. At the end of the task, all of his friends start ringing him back.
  Leigh: (looking through his phone) I couldn't possibly ring them... he's dead... never even heard of them...
One task requires the contestants to come to the studio recording with an 'outlandish costume' under their outfit.
- Angella takes a while to pull out a unicorn horse mask from the bag around her waist, which is amusing but a little underwhelming... until she pulls the rest of her dress off revealing the rest of her unicorn costume, and lies on the floor as a 'unicorn rug'. Later in the studio discussion Angella reveals she's on her period, and her unicorn tail doubles up as a tampon.
- Brynley becomes Gollum, complete with removing a wig to reveal a bald cap. Apparently, because of the tight turnaround between shoots, Brynley had to wear her wig in both this episode and the previous one. This annoys Guy, who says Brynley had told him it was a new haircut, and he had had to awkwardly praise it.
- Guy calling back to Lady Gaga's meat dress by wearing a 'fish suit', i.e. a bunch of fish taped to his clothes.
- Leigh 'misunderstands the task', and just wears an exact copy of his existing clothing underneath his clothing.
- After they both get awarded five points, Guy and Angella struggle to high five.
Leigh, after reading the last task, where the contestants have to reassemble a computer keyboard:
Leigh: Thoughts?
Paul: My thoughts?
Leigh: Yeah.
Paul: ...good luck?
- Leigh and Madeleine both resort to just scooping the keys in a pile onto the keyboard. Then comes the second part of the task... they have to use their keyboard to type a message to the Taskmaster.
- Angella is the only person to put together her keyboard competently and manages to type a mostly correct message, though it does just degenerate into her trying to send messages to Paul to work out if she's typing correctly.
- Madeleine also manages a somewhat correct message, though all it really says I like mmmmmmmmmmmmm ass ass'
- Everyone else fails hopelessly, ranging on a scale from Guy's 'Hello Jeremy' becoming 'Hukko Jjuiumt', Leigh's 'Dear Taskmaster' becoming 'u5q5 u895' and a stream of other numbers, and Brynley's total gibberish, which is so bad Paul makes her read it out in person.
Everyone struggling with the phones in the last task, especially Leigh, who never works out how to actually send a message.

Astro Blasters

The prize task is the thing that has aged the worst.
- Guy brings in his Bill Cosby CDs. Jeremy asks him why he's only throwing them away now, and didn't when the allegations came out against Cosby.
- Angella brings in an 'outdated hairstyle' - a picture of Jeremy Wells in the 90s with frosted tips.
  Jeremy: Would you say that I haven't aged well, or that I didn't youth well?
  Angella: I was going to use a picture from last week but I thought that was too harsh.
- Brynley brings in her two-week-old dinner, made from Bill Cosby's Fatherhood. There's something white coalescing on top of the dinner.
  Guy: Please tell me that's cheese.
  Brynley: It's mould.
  Angella: I thought it was frosted tips.
The task to colour in a whiteboard fully.
- Guy took only 49 seconds, but didn't properly colour the whiteboard at all, leaving more than half of it white. He then spends the remainder of his time shooting finger guns at all the cameras in celebration.
- Brynley covers her whiteboard in coloured squares and then attempts to describe it:
  Brynley: What's the word for it... mo... mon... modern.^note
  Paul: Modern. It's a good word.
  Jeremy: (chuckling) It's a good word!
The team task is to make the most amusing amusement park ride, which Paul will ride in.
Guy: In no part of this does it say it has to be safe.
Paul: I'd prefer it to be safe.
- Guy's original idea is to put Paul between three rubber tyres and roll him down a hill into a lake, calling it 'Astro Blasters'. Apparently, this idea was dropped because it would always result in Paul drowning.
- This, when the team of three is testing Guy's tyre idea:
  Madeleine: I'm worried these [tyres] are too small for you.
  Guy: My head's not that big, mate.
  (Madeleine struggles to fit the tyre around Guy's head)
  Madeleine: Your head is that big, mate.
- The eventual idea the team of three goes with is an ecologically-themed ride, in which Guy, as 'Mother Nature', pushes Paul on a wheelchair through a number of scenes of beautiful nature and how plastic is corrupting it, though it seems he didn't exactly liaise with Brynley and Madeleine on how long his preamble was going to be. When the time finally comes to push Paul down the hill, Guy ends up giving him such a shove that Brynley has less than a second to do her bit in which she plays a ghost, only having time to yell 'I'm a ghost!' and throw ping pong balls over Paul as he careens into a crash mat.
- At one point during Leigh and Angella's preparation, meanwhile, Leigh apparently pisses behind the shed.
- Leigh and Angella make a water-based ride.
  Paul: It's a slip and slide?
  Leigh: There's kind of a difference that we don't want to talk about yet, because we haven't thought of it.
- Their eventual idea involves Paul, in a blue shell-shaped basin, being pulled across a slip-and-slide by Leigh in a utility truck.
The contestants have to order ingredients for a sausage that begin with the letters of the word 'sausage'. There are many creative ways of getting round the difficult 'U' - Angella orders 'uncut chives', Guy orders 'Ugandan sea salt' (rather egregious since Uganda is landlocked), and Leigh orders a 'utility ingredient', which he says is chicken stock (and which he later extends to include flour as well).
- Brynley, meanwhile, orders a bunch of random sweet ingredients, including sherbet, apple pie, and eclairs.
- Her sausage ends up bursting in the pan, and she ends up serving Paul basically a fritter. Even though Paul says it was the best-tasting, she scores just one point for it not being a sausage.
Guy gets the individual secret task... of having to pass Level 1 NCEA mathematics. He is horrified.
- We soon find out why - Guy did terribly on the test, getting no questions right, spending most of his time on the first few pages, and eventually putting '7' for every question. Jeremy still gives him a point out of pity, though.
- At one point Guy asks for a calculator. Paul points out they've given him an abacus.
- This:
  Guy: So two plus seven equals... (excruciatingly long pause) ...nine.

My Uncle John

The namesake of the episode; Guy's prize task entry for best DIY. He brings in the ashes of his Uncle John, apparently the result of a DIY cremation in the oven.
- Jeremy asks Paul if the story is true.
  Paul: As a member of Guy's family, I can confirm this is not real.
- Nonetheless, he takes out the box of ashes, and at some prompting decides to eat them, finding them surprisingly nice (if difficult to tell whether they are ashes or not). Paul passes them to Madeleine, who tastes some herself, and to Guy's increasing horror (and eventual protestations that it's really kitty litter) the box of ashes starts getting passed down the line so everybody can have a taste.
The task is to commit a crime without breaking the law.
- Guy goes through a list of things that are surprisingly legal.
  Guy: Marrying your cousin! That's cool!
  Paul: (sounding genuinely taken aback) What?
- According to Paul, Guy attempted to marry his cousin, but 'the cousin was still mad from the time Guy cremated our uncle'.
- Brynley meanwhile suggests 'public fornication', asking Paul if he's up to it. When Jeremy presses her on this in the studio, Brynley jokingly asks him if he's up for it, only for Jeremy to reply with 'Not publicly', leading to a hilarious range of surprised, confused, and oddly flattered facial expressions from Brynley.
- Brynley's actual attempt, however, is disastrous on a number of levels:
  - She decides to trespass on the neighbour's field, hopping over a fence, but immediately realises that the crime is not as exciting as she thought it was, and she is just standing in a field.
  - The sheep in the field run away from her; Brynley tries to chase them down.
  Brynley: Come back! I need you for my crime!
  - Apropos of nothing, Brynley finds a skeleton in the field. She decides to steal it.
  - Then, as she vaults the fence again, she knocks over the Go Pro camera, considers it another crime, and then runs off with that as well.
  - In the studio, Paul reveals that not only did Brynley not do any damage to the Go Pro, she also never actually did any trespassing as the field she went into was part of the Taskmaster house property.
- Angella tries to trademark the Taskmaster logo by sticking a small TM sticker next to the larger TM logo on the house.
  Angella: It doesn't make much sense, but crime doesn't make much sense either.
- Leigh attempts to make a bad cheese toastie as a sort of culinary crime, by adding cheese he doesn't like and mustard. However, he somewhat forgets the task halfway through and ends up just making a really great cheese toastie, realising his 'criminal' additions were actually really good, and both he and Paul enjoy the toastie (with Paul even looking to camera and saying that it's genuinely the best toastie he's ever eaten). Jeremy ends up giving Leigh five points, with the rationale that 'not actually doing the task is the greatest crime of all'.
In the final team task, the goal is to get to 10 points, with a point being scored every time someone gives a compliment.
- Guy, Brynley, and Madeleine figure it out quickly and complete the task in three minutes. They then decide to trash the area as they leave, much to Paul's consternation.
- Angella and Leigh, on the other hand, never figure it out at all. Angella comes extremely close when she briefly considers the importance of the complimentary mints, but eventually the two end up handcuffed to one another, standing on a trampoline, throwing basketballs into a net, and unintentionally scoring points every time Leigh tells Angella one of her throws is 'not bad'.
- Even after having seen Guy, Brynley, and Madeleine's attempt, it isn't until partway through his VT that Leigh even realises what the scoring system is at all.
  Leigh: (in the studio, under his breath) What are we getting points for?
The contestants come into the lab to find a range of sweet ingredients, and read the next task as 'Make the best dessert'. Angella, Guy, Leigh, and Madeleine all start using the ingredients to make various (slightly messy) desserts, although a couple of them are mildly thrown by the inexplicable presence of gherkins on the table.
- A quote from Guy as he struggles during the task:
  Guy: Some people were born for greatness, others have greatness thrust upon them.
  Paul: Which one were you?
  Guy: Neither, I'm a fuckwit.
- After seeing those four, Paul then reveals that the task was actually 'Make the best desert', and all of them had misread it. We then see Brynley's attempt, in which she intially starts planning to make a dessert, but then glances back at the task... and notices the misspelling. After getting Paul to Google 'desert' for her, she uses the items to make a desert scene (including the gherkins as cacti). She suggests out loud that probably only about one person will end up making a dessert instead of a desert.
- Jeremy points out in the studio that while Brynley's desert was really good, since it was also the only desert, she could have just taken a shit on it and it would still have got five points.
Angella is nervous about karate chopping her spaghetti log in the live task, not helped by Guy:
Guy: Someone is gonna break their hand on this concrete.
Angella: (anxiously) That's what... ohh... (she recoils)
Guy: Oh. Sorry. Just... don't hit the concrete, you'll be fine.
- The series ends fortunately in a Moment of Awesome as Angella, and everyone else, successfully and cleanly chop their logs.

Season 2

General

The running gag of Guy Montgomery's Paul shirts. When the first filmed task is shown, it is revealed that Guy's task outfit is a shirt with a picture of Paul as a 14-year-old-boy. Paul admits in the studio he has no idea how Guy managed to get that photo, as it usually is in his parents' wardrobe.
Paul: Someone in my inner circle has betrayed me.
Guy: I like that photo because you can really tell you're in the grips of puberty.
- After his first task attempt has been shown, the camera cuts back to Guy in the studio where he has taken off his outer shirt to reveal another shirt with a second, different photo of Paul as a child underneath.
  Paul: Where'd you get that one from?
  Guy: Just got it down the shops.
- This then happens again in the following episode, and again... all in all, Guy wears a different shirt with a different photo of Paul in every single episode, to the point where by the fourth episode Paul has just accepted it and Guy's shirt isn't even brought up.
David Correos putting a lot of manic effort into tasks, only to have everything come crashing down and his attempts end up being for nothing, invariably leading to frustrated screaming. This happens several times throughout the series.
- David's intensity is especially funny in contrast to Urzila having almost the exact opposite approach, recognising when she's going to be unable to beat her fellow competitors and just using the time to casually mess about and bully Paul.

Flight Of Fantasy

Matt overestimating distances throughout the episode.
The prize task is the best green thing.
- David brings in a green screen, complete with several green-screen images, all of which feature him in his underwear.
- Laura brings in the green M&M.
  Laura: I actually think this is the best green thing because it's really important we have positive female role models in the M&M community.
  Jeremy: You think she's doing great things for women in those boots? With no pants?
  Laura: You know, Guy's got his legs crossed right now...
  Guy: I think we can all agree it's a very fuckable chocolate.
- Jeremy takes issue with Guy's own prize though as objectifying women, seeing as he brought in Green Party MP Chlöe Swarbrick as a 'thing'.
- Urzila brings marijuana.
  Urzila: Once you enjoy my green thing, you'll see the light in their green things.
In the bowling pin task, the contestants are not allowed to get Paul to deliberately knock over the bowling pins. So what Guy, Matt, and Urzila all do is they get Paul to close his eyes and then blindly direct him into the pins, so it doesn't count as deliberacy. Urzila even adds to the destructive potential by attaching a lawn chair to Paul's legs.
- David, meanwhile, gets Paul to bring the pins to him so he can knock them over. There's a brilliant moment where Paul is taking the bowling pins out of the basket he used to carry them and David just knocks each one over immediately.
- Guy throwing an orange into the caravan door and it rebounding into his head.
- Jeremy, on Matt's attempt:
  Jeremy: Matt, you know we have a pre-existing relationship so my expectations for you are reasonably low.
  Matt: And I don't respect your opinion.
The introduction to the next task includes a pair of wings suspended from the ceiling.
Laura: (flirtatiously) Did you lose your wings?
Paul: I don't have wings.
Laura: Is that cause you fell?
Paul: Why did I fall?
(Laura points upwards with a smile)
Paul: From the roof?
The sheer audacity of the task itself: 'Fly. Best flight wins.'
- Every contestant manages to put in a funny performance however:
- Matt and Urzila interpret the task literally and both decide to launch themselves off the dock into the rather sewage-y Taskmaster Pond, though neither manages to fly more than a couple of metres. Urzila also says this, in a quote that will be memorialised in the Season 2 intro sequence:
  Paul: Are you happy with that?
  Urzila: I'm peeing in the water.
- David prints out a tiny version of himself, attaches it to some helium balloons, and lets them fly away.
  Jeremy: It's like Phileas Fogg and Passepartout.
  David: I'm too young for that reference. It's like the movie Up!
- With the help of a green screen, Laura commands a flying carpet. She tells Paul he can go anywhere; his choices are the city of Nelson (Paul's hometown) and then Stoke, a suburb of Nelson. Laura says she hopes the production team can find stock footage of Stoke; when they go there, the green screen is just replaced by a 'Media offline' screen.
  Paul: David said it at the beginning of the show, green screen is incredibly powerful.
  David: Not then.
- Guy's attempt initially appears similar to Matt and Urzila's - he makes makeshift wings and gives it a running jump ('I'll jump, and hopefully I'll just keep going.') When he takes off though, he actually flies!^note
The task to brush Paul's teeth from as far away as possible
- Matt dangling his toothbrush off the balcony into Paul's mouth. Paul calls it one of the worst experiences he's ever had.
- Laura comes up with the idea to use her phone, directing someone brushing Paul's teeth over the phone. However, despite being only constrained by the range of her network, she still doesn't think to go as far away as David, who just attached some string to a bicycle.
The live task is to build a toilet paper tower, then everyone gets to throw a shoe at a tower of their choice. However, it ends up being highly anticlimactic as every single contestant misses their shoe throw, so the task is scored on the height of their original towers anyway.
- David's strategy in the toilet paper tower building phase is to tear apart the rolls and create a mound of paper.
  David: If it's not structurally sound, you can't fuck with it, can you?

Heat Stroke

The prize task category is hottest thing.
- Laura brings in an iron, which she later reveals was the iron covering Jeremy's modesty in a naked photo of him taken for an advert.
  Jeremy: True story about that photo, the billboard happened to be 200m from my grandmother's house. She was 91 when she saw that, and she lasted another month.
  Laura: She died of heat stroke.
- Matt also brings a photo; a sexy photo of him and Jeremy cuddling up, which also works as a heater.
- Guy brings the slice of tomato from the middle of a toasted sandwich.
- This, after Jeremy marks David down for his mask full of Deep Heat:
  Jeremy: Yours was hot, but terrifying at the same time. Three points.
  David: But mine burns people! It's so hot!
  Jeremy: (assertively) You should be happy with three.
  David: (backing down immediately) Thank you...
The task is to float a brussels sprout down from a balcony.
- Matt pronouncing origami as oregano.
- Both Matt and Urzila spend some time developing a floating system involving balloons and a parachute respectively, but both sprouts spend minimal time in the air. Matt says he was so disappointed by his effort at the time he was considering quitting, at which point Paul points out that it was only the first day.
- This wonderful cut:
  Paul: Both Matt and Urzila assumed there wouldn't be helium in the house, so they didn't bother to look. Here's David Correos.
  David: I found the helium!
- David's attempt is hardly without its chaotic moments, though - while trying to fill balloons with helium in the kitchen, he keeps dropping them and they float up to the ceiling. Eventually he manages to lose the whole bundle, and decides the only way to proceed is to clamber up dangerously onto the kitchen cupboards to get them back, then painfully jump back down. His balloons do eventually work effectively though.
- Paul grabbing a telescope from the house to try and keep an eye on David's balloons.
- After Matt tries to dispute David's time in the studio, seeing as Paul never saw it land:
  David: I floated longer jumping down from the top of those [cupboards]!
- Laura dropping a ball of string in a leafblower and breaking it.
- Both Guy and Laura interpret 'floating' as able to mean 'floating in water' - Guy places his sprout in a bowl of water underneath the balcony, while Laura hangs hers off the balcony in a bucket. Paul announces in the studio that both lasted several days, and then starts to move onto the next task without establishing who won... at which point David snaps, ranting about how he saw Laura's bucket during almost every single one of his tasks and he desperately needs closure on it.
The contestants are tasked with transforming the lab, with thirty seconds of darkness beginning when they say the phrase 'Let there be dark'.
- For the second series in a row, someone makes Paul be a stripper; this time it's Urzila, who insists Paul look 'hungry', though the look he ends up giving is more 'constipated'.
- Guy's farm, including the crew members as sheep and Paul as an unenthusiastic cow.
- Laura's rave, complete with her DJ name 'Assmaster'. Apparently Laura wanted the asses on the silver morph suits to be cut out, but the crew members, who were wearing the suits, objected.
- Matt's pathetic attempt, involving him flailing about on a plastic swing (a 'trapeze' according to Matt) while he strikes at a plastic elephant with a whip.
- David's attempt is the most chaotic, however. The contestants are each allowed to say 'Let there be dark' as part of the task, before they officially say it. When David says 'Let there be dark', however, the room immediately goes dark, and David, believing this to be a trick pulled on him, panics and strips off all of his clothes, sitting naked on the lab table. Then the lights come back on, and Paul reveals it was a genuine mistake and miscommunication with the lighting person. He offers David another go, but David decides to keep that as his attempt, pointing out how his nakedness has completely changed the vibe of the room. According to Paul, David didn't even have the full thirty seconds of darkness; he took just twelve seconds to remove all of his clothes.
- When Jeremy puts David last, Laura tries to defend him, only for Jeremy to tell her that he thought her effort was the best, and that she's welcome to give her points to David if she likes, leading her to become an awkward sputtering mess.
The sunscreen squirt task.
- Both Guy and Matt fail completely by accidentally getting sunscreen on their tarps while preparing for the squirt.
  Guy: You know what they say, Paul.
  Paul: What do they say?
  Guy: Fuck.
- Laura uses a cup as a hammer to extend the power on her squirt, only to accidentally smash a hole through the bottom of the cup. Amazingly though, a speck of sunscreen manages to ride one of the cup shards onto the tarpaulin, allowing her to take second place.
- Urzila just whacks it within about five seconds and wins.
But of course we're going to give an entire separate section to David's attempt at the sunscreen task, arguably his third total meltdown of the episode and one of his best in the series. Apparently, this task was only upgraded from tiebreaker into regular task after David's attempt.
- Firstly, David encounters Guy's pot with the sprout on it on his way into the task, picks it up and takes it with him. While preparing for his squirt attempt, he tosses Guy's sprout out to use the pot, meaning it is finally revealed that Laura won the sprout-floating task (and indeed her bucket is still hanging as of the studio record).
- David's preparation though is just insane. He brings out a variety of different items to use, the main bit being knifing several pool noodles in half to construct a sort of watery channel, which according to Paul actually worked quite well. He then starts drinking from the sunscreen bottle and spitting it out again, for reasons that are never really made clear.
- But while he is doing this, one of his mouth-squirts accidentally sprays sunscreen onto the corner of the tarpaulin, meaning for all his effective preparation, he failed in exactly the same way as Guy and Matt. Cue David screaming in anguish.
  David: (on the ground, screaming, with sunscreen around his mouth) NOOOOOOOOOOOOO! NOOOOOOOOOO!
Urzila's nightmarish clown portrait of Jeremy's mother Sheryl in the live task.
- Guy's portrait contains the letters SMA in the top corner.
  Guy: I was going to write 'smart', but Paul blew his little whistle. So now it's an acronym: Sheryl. Mum. Awesoooooome!

At Your Service

Best New Zealand thing:
- David brings in a bag of feijoas, which Paul reveals are actually native to Latin America. David attempts to defend his prize by citing himself as an example of an immigrant who has nonetheless become part of NZ culture, but it doesn't work.
- Matt brings in some New Zealand earth in a lunchbox.
  Matt: That's four times as kiwi as anyone else.
  Urzila: You can make it five for your lack of effort.
- This, after Laura wins the five points:
  Laura: One thing you just can't deny about this show is that the Taskmaster's a really good guy. And I just can't wait to receive the head at the end.
Everyone's multi-character films.
- Laura's murder mystery, complete with a lot of hammy acting.
  Laura: I went to drama school. It cost me $60,000.
- Guy's 'big race' film, where he plays a number of characters whose names start with the same letter as their country (Austin from Australia, Craig from Canada etc.)... and he doubles his character number by introducing all their wives as well. There's some discussion in the studio about how for an international race, all the characters are caucasian. Guy says he did it out of self-preservation.
  Matt: So you've got no diversity at all, and the women are playing a subservient, non-starring role?
  Guy: I don't remember the brief being "make the most progressive short film".
- David's drunk driving PSA, where he plays a number of inanimate objects. Several of them have corny punning lines - such as the clock saying 'It's never a good time to drunk drive!' - but after a while they degenerate into just making noises, like the train just saying 'choo choo!'.
- Urzila's baffling soap opera, which we apparently only see highlights from as the actual film was fourteen minutes, even though Urzila only plays three characters (and Paul plays two).
  Jeremy: You know, I try to be generous, but what the hell...
  Urzila: I opened that task and a bit of me died. Like I can take this munter (points at Matt) but not these three, I'm never gonna do it, I may as well just fuck around with Paul.
- Matt's film takes place at a 'smoking-weed-in-the-bush' party, which is then attacked by a pencil-wielding serial killer. This then leads to an extended sequence of anguished grunting as each character is successively hit with a pencil. One particularly funny moment is when one character is hit by a pencil, slumps against a tree, and then continues smoking weed. At the end the killer is thwarted by a detective called 'Reginald Bathgate'. According to Paul, Matt spent most of his time developing that character.
Paul's intro to the first team task:
Paul: Teamwork makes the dream work, unless your dream is to work alone.
- Jeremy comments upon Matt and Urzila's slight awkwardness with one another as being like two people who slept together but really shouldn't have, and are now trying to leave it in the past.
  Matt: But the sexual chemistry grew over the challenges.
  Urzila: No it did not.
- The task is to build a castle out of dry wheat biscuits, receiving more to work with every time a wheat biscuit is consumed. David just shovels down the wheat biscuits, eventually managing to eat twelve. Unfortunately, his team's castle is not really good enough to justify his efforts. They do include a very nice working drawbridge, however.
- During the task, the team of three discuss sweat glands, and Guy makes a crack about how he's pleased Prince Andrew spoke out for people without sweat glands. In the studio, Jeremy calls his reference concerning.
  Guy: See, I thought I'd make a joke on the comedy show.
- Matt breaking the scissors.
- Matt complains about eating the dry wheat biscuits without any milk; Urzila offers to breastfeed him.
- Urzila then just tells him to get Paul to bring him some milk. Matt mentions he was completely unaware he could just order Paul about like that, and Urzila claims she's already got Paul to wash her car twice.
- The big funny moment of the wheat biscuit task, however, is Matt's cheating, hiding wheat biscuits in his pocket and claiming to have eaten them. What makes it hilarious is David's vitriolic reaction.
  David: Fuck you man! I ate twelve dry wheat biscuits and they came out twelve dry wheat biscuits!
- When Jeremy disqualifies Matt and Urzila, and the audience goes 'awww...':
  David: Why are you going 'awww'? HE'S A CHEATER!
The hopscotch task:
- Urzila refusing to hop. In the studio, she says she is saving her joints for if she's ever chased by a knife-wielding maniac, 'not for this shit'.
- Urzila then proceeds to get fairly drunk over the course of the task.
- Both Matt and David have the bright idea of carrying the table to the bucket rather than the individual shot glasses, but while Matt does a clean tip, David tries to scoop them up in the tablecloth and ends up spilling quite a bit.
  Paul: How was that?
  David: (with audible frustration) Perfect.
  Paul: Thank you David.
  David: Cool.
  (David goes round the corner)
  David: GNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!
The task is to get a photo of someone doing a thumbs up and with a bowl on their head in the most extraordinary location.
- David takes a picture while skydiving.
- Guy photoshops himself into a picture of the John F Kennedy assassination, which causes David to crack up.
- Matt, in a move reminiscent of Rhod Gilbert's 'creepiest thing' from the UK series, takes a photo of himself next to a sleeping Jeremy in Jeremy's bedroom after a party.
In the live task, contestants have to draw an 'adequate pig' before they get a chance to shake a coin out of a piggy bank. Matt asks someone to describe a pig so he knows what he's drawing, completely missing the fact that all five contestants have a piggy bank in front of them.

Unbung

The prize task is the best stolen item.
- There's plenty of good entries to this task, from David stealing the shoe rack from his flat (to his flatmates' anger), Urzila stealing Paul's teddy bear Gregory, and Guy somehow stealing a Victoria Cross (and being unable to explain who he stole it from).
- However, the highlight of this prize task is clearly Laura stealing the girlfriends of all the male cast members with increasing glee.
  Laura: I stole Paul's girlfriend.
  (cut to pictures of Laura on a date with Paul's girlfriend; Paul is stunned)
  Laura: We went on a date, we had a magical time... I've stolen her heart. Do you find that funny, Jeremy?
  Jeremy: I think that's fantastic.
  Laura: Well that's good, cause I also stole your girl.
  (picture of Laura on a date with Jeremy's wife)
  Urzila: Ooh, I really wanna win now!
  Laura: Guy, are you laughing?
  Guy: No, I don't laugh.
  Laura: Well, it's probably good that you weren't laughing, because I also stole your girl.
  (picture of Laura on a date with Guy's girlfriend)
  Laura: Do you find that funny, David?
  David: What the fuck?!
  (picture of Laura giving flowers to David's girlfriend)
  Laura: We hung out outside a Royal Oak Pak'nSave.
  David: I know the one! I take her there too!
  Laura: Matt, took a while to track your girl down, but I think I found her.
  (picture of Laura with a blow-up sex doll)
  Laura: Urzila, uh, I respect you too much.
This line from Paul in the studio after the Swiss balls task, which causes Guy to completely lose it.
Paul: I gotta get this off my chest. Swiss balls are way too big. I was recently trying to play basketball in Zurich...
- Most of the contestants attempt to throw the Swiss ball into the kayak in one shot, with no consideration of what will happen if they miss. Eventually, most of them retrieve the ball for another shot which they handle more carefully... except Guy, who just gives it another shot, and misses again.
- Urzila asking Paul to do 'positive thinking' to guide her ball towards her.
  Urzila: Are you doing the positive thoughts for the ball to go here?
  Paul: Oh sorry, I started thinking about those ducks.
- David stabs the ball with a knife, reducing it to a skin, ties a string around the skin, and hurls it towards the kayak... and the skin comes off the string, meaning he has to fish it out of the sewage-y pond.
David spending way too long testing all the presents in the intro to the Christmas song task.
- All the ways the contestants try to get around using the forbidden words in this task. In particular, Matt including the greeting 'happy happy happy!', and Laura's 'Merry Merry Jesus Birthday'.
- Matt does a genuinely well-written rock-style guitar song, including this memorable lyric:
  There will be no tasering tonight
  Because the family is all together.
- However, Matt's song uses the forbidden word 'tree' as its second word. According to Paul, Matt rehearsed the song seven times, checked the list of banned words between every single rehearsal and still missed that he'd used the word 'tree'.
- Then comes David's song, where he uses the word 'tall bush' instead of 'tree'.
- Laura also makes a genuinely good song, and really the only one to use its selected item for more than a casual reference, called 'I'm Gonna Laminate This Calendar Day'. It does however include the lyric 'If Jesus was here, we'd have a three-way'.
- Urzila's terrible 'vegan night' song, which she did just one take of before giving up with thirty minutes and forty seconds left on the clock.
  Jeremy: I think I speak for everyone when I say there was nothing good about that at all.
- Urzila's explanation to Paul of her minimal effort in this task:
  Urzila: I am fairly confident that I'm not gonna crush this challenge, but I know that at some point you and I are going to box and/or wrestle, and I'm gonna crush that one.
- Urzila's song is so terrible that she ends up swapping her two points with Matt's one point, admitting that his was better even though he used the word 'tree'.
- Guy's bizarre song about the 'festive fox', in which he tells a story about his childhood Christmas where a fox came and brought them all presents, and also fucked his dad. The song being intercut with little shots of Guy turning towards the camera wearing various wigs as the different characters makes it especially hilarious.
  Guy: I remember family Christmas with mixed memories really, Mum was always scuppering [sic] around for an oven, and Dad was always out the back going hammer & tongs on a fox.
The third task is a clever twist on a throwing task - the contestants have to say an animal with each throw of a chocolate fish into a fishbowl, with the animal they say upon getting a fish into the bowl being their chosen animal. Then, the most powerful animal wins.
- Paul claims that they've got all five animals in the studio and that they will set them loose upon each other to truly determine which is the most powerful.
- The beauty of this task is how the contestants end up accidentally screwing themselves over with their own success, such as Matt accidentally getting in a practice shot after he says the word 'otter', and Laura inexplicably saying 'red panda' and then getting it in.
- The crowning moment, however, is David, who gets a fish in on 'red-eyed tree frog' and initially seems very happy with his performance, having not realised it was most powerful animal.
  David: (rereading the task) Fuck. Does this go up against the other- FUCK!
- As he leaves, David promises to have 'debate level facts' to argue for the red-eyed tree frog. Come the studio record, he unfurls a whole scroll of them, though it quickly becomes apparent the task was harder than it looks as David's first two arguments for the tree frog's power is that it lives in trees and that it's not venomous. He does however make a decent point about how the tree frog is a powerful jumper for its size, and that this sort of power-per-capita is very much in the NZ spirit. It's not enough to win him the task, but it is enough to net him three points, finishing above 'otter' and 'red panda'.
The contestants' different walks in the suitcase task: David's exaggerated struggling (and on his second attempt, his hiding the suitcase behind him), Guy's casual walk, Laura's dainty walk, and best of all, Matt absolutely hurtling himself across the stage to slam the suitcase down onto the spot.
After Guy wins the episode:
Guy: I get my girlfriend back! (to Jeremy) And your wife!

Feel My Bean

The prize task is best voucher.
- A variety of amusing vouchers are offered in this task, from Matt offering five broadcasting lessons with notorious conservative NZ broadcaster Mike Hosking and Urzila offering a $20 voucher at adult store Peaches & Cream, to Guy offering $100 'any time, any place' and Laura offering one kiss on the mouth with tongue from her.
- However, the cherry on the cake is served up by David, who presents a voucher promising to duplicate any of the other vouchers and add 10% - so that's 5 1/2 broadcasting lessons with Mike Hosking, a $22 voucher at Peaches & Cream, $110 offered 'any time, any place', and a kiss on the mouth with tongue 'but 10% more'. Guy suggests the '10% more' in that last one should be 'a thumb up the bum'.
All of the contestants being frustrated by the 'spill the beans' task.
- Guy hammering the cans open and spraying himself with tomato juice.
- Laura having what appears to be a genuine breakdown while completing the task.
- Once again it's David who goes above & beyond though. His attempt is introduced as 'a calm and rational approach', but quickly becomes anything but, as David tosses all the cans on the ground, and is then forced to go back through them one by one, tasting and spitting when he inevitably discovers tomatoes. At one point, he does a number of cans all while giving Paul a severe Death Glare. All in all, he went through 141 of the 145 cans before he found the beans.
  Paul: I was slightly confused, it felt like he didn't understand the task. He was opening lots of cans of tomatoes.
  David: You're such a fuck, Paul. You're such a fuck.
- Matt, on the other hand, finds the trick (the beans can being labelled as 'Not Beans') but unfortunately he spent quite a lot of time chatting to Paul beforehand, so he ends up coming second behind Guy.
The task to make your hometown proud.
- Matt is seen muttering 'Maybe I'll write a song.' Smash Cut to Matt outside the caravan in nothing but a toga fashioned from a table-cloth, a flat cap, and some face paint, as he sings about Dunedin.
- This, after Jeremy presses him on some of the details of the song:
  Matt: There's a particular street in Anderson's Bay called Every Street, and let's just say in the early 90s, things round there got a bit dicey. We don't need to go into the details. To be fair it's not one of the things people from Dunedin are that proud of. There's not much of their families left.
  David: (giggling uncontrollably) Oh my god, oh my god...!
- And after all that, Matt suddenly remembers in the studio that he was actually born in Oxford, England, so Dunedin isn't even his real home town.
- Urzila's effort, about Benoni, South Africa, is mostly about how shit Benoni is. She reckons that having shoes and a full set of teeth is enough for Benoni to be proud of her. She ends up moving Benoni on the map to the Mediterranean, and makes Paul hold the map up in front of his face while she recites a terrible rhyming poem about the town, despite his complaints that his arms are getting quite tired.
- Guy's brainstorming session is briefly interrupted by a bee.
  Guy: It's okay Paul, it's just a bee. It's not interested in you.
  Paul: Sorry.
  Guy: It's probably just trying to collect pollen.
  Paul: It's trying to make sure the ecosystem doesn't collapse.
  Guy: That bee? I hope they're not worrying about that. It'd be very difficult to just do their job if they're worrying about that. You'd be distracted constantly just by the crushing weight of how virtually everything in the world relies on that bee doing its job. (beat, abruptly returns to the task at hand) So I could just turn this caravan into a mini Christchurch.
- Guy's actual attempt involves making a cardboard Christchurch Cathedral that says 'Everyone Welcome' (or 'Welcome Everyone'), a sign to support the sports teams reading 'Well Done Christchurch Sports Teams', and a couple of other signs saying 'Good Climate' and 'Not Too Many Hills'. His complete lack of enthusiasm throughout does lead Jeremy to question however whether he even likes Christchurch.
  David: You're talking like an alien who went on holiday to Christchurch.
- Guy's Christchurch attempt is marked higher than David's, however. All we see is David booking flights for him and Paul to fly there; apparently David talked for half an hour about what he likes about Christchurch, but it all got cut out as it was quite boring and mostly involved David naming his favourite malls and avenues. We do, however, see the snaps from David and Paul's trip to Christchurch... in which they only seem to visit said malls and avenues, and Paul looks demonstrably bored in every photo.
  David: (after being told he will only get one point) You got to meet my parents! My dad gave you cookies! From Cookie Time!!!
- Laura's military recruitment-style advert for Palmerston North ('the Palmy Army'), which deteriorates into promoting violence against John Cleese (as Cleese once criticised the town), complete with subliminal messaging of the phrase 'eliminate John Cleese'. Matt confuses John Cleese with former NZ Prime Minister John Key.
Matt guessing what the loudest noise team task will be before they open it.
- The contestants are not allowed to talk while they prepare for their noise. Urzila scribbles something onto a piece of paper and shows it to Paul. The paper reads 'Can we kill a duck?'
- Somehow, the only verbal noise that either team makes during their preparations is not a barely-audible mutter, but David screaming loudly in frustration after Paul tells him he doesn't have a stereo.
- Matt and Urzila eventually put a bunch of things in a wheelie bin and push it off the lab table, but the sound is disappointing. Guy points out how they effectively put all their loudest things into a noise-cancelling bin.
- The team of three strike on the idea of creating an echo chamber, and Laura gets David to completely empty out the shed to create one. When they test it, however, Guy decides, to David's visible fury, that the kitchen would probably be more effective than the shed.
After Urzila wins the episode, she cashes in her kiss voucher from Laura up on stage... and then Guy points out that she has to kiss David as well now, much to her horror.

Eat Your Asses

The prize task is to bring the two most different things from one another.
- Guy invokes idiomatic expression by bringing in chalk and cheese. However, Urzila, whose previous entry of tofu and biltong was rejected because both were foods, has a problem with this.
  Urzila: They're both edible.
  David: I've eaten chalk. She's correct.
  Guy: Just because David eats something doesn't make it food.
- Matt shows off that he's managed to pick up signs from Cape Reinga and Bluff, the northernmost and southernmost points of New Zealand respectively. He initially gets a 'Wowwww' reaction from panel and audience, until Jeremy interrupts to point out they're still both yellow signs with black font. Matt tries to defend himself:
  Matt: Paul, what's the opposite of Bluff?
  Paul: (thinks about it) Telling the truth.
The first filmed task takes place on a large parachute.
Jeremy: How did you acquire that big parachute, Paul?
Paul: It landed there during the war.
- Laura trying to argue that the images of the tiny Lego bricks she left on the parachute is 'camera trickery'. Paul rebuts that it's just 'camera recording'.
- Laura also tries to object to Guy's, because the VT never showed him leaving the parachute himself. Guy points out he's not on the parachute now.
- During his long-winded effort, in which he stood on top of the rocking chair and hopped about on it, Guy suggests that all the other contenders have a chance of coming up with something more intelligent, apart from David obviously. But unlike Guy, David read the task before sitting on the rocking chair, and Paul suggests that Guy has assumed incorrectly, and that David actually attempted the task in a very measured, well-thought-out fashion. Then we see David's attempt... and Guy was absolutely correct, he just immediately sits on the chair and starts hopping about exactly as Guy did.
- Matt's strategy is truly baffling. He tips the rocking chair over and stands on its back, hopping about like that. Except not only does this a) break the rocking chair and b) make it considerably more difficult and tiring for him to move around, it also means that none of his item movements even count, because the task stipulated that you must be sitting while you move the items off the parachute.
- Urzila is the only contestant to both stand up whilst reading the task and take advantage of that to move all the items into position... except in typical Urzila fashion she ends up not even bothering to complete the whole task and leaves several things on the parachute.
  Urzila: I don't need to win, I just don't need to embarrass my family.
The diss track task. All of it. This may be one of the most iconic tasks in all of Taskmaster history. And words don't really do it justice.
- Let's start with what most people remember about this task - David's aggressive preparatory freestyling while the team of three write their rap, which quickly goes to a very dark place.
  Guy: David came up with a different freestyle of increasing intensity for every beat we sampled. A lot of it was unbroadcastable.
  David: I got beef with Matt Heath. Matt, Matt, run him over like a cat.
  David: Get Matt Heath, wrap him with a shoe lace. Have his body, hanging from this tall place.
  David: Fuck You Urz!
  David: This how flow goes, I'm a break your nose, break your teeth bitch! Get out of my flow!
  Guy: I can't wait to hear his Christmas song.
- This last comment from Guy is particularly funny once you've already seen David's Christmas song from a couple of episodes ago, which was actually very sweet and not at all like this.
- All this aggressive freestyling leads into perhaps one of the funniest editing juxtapositions in all of Taskmaster:
  Matt: (brainstorming) Montgomery, more like... Montgoobery.
  David: I'm gonna gonna drown you. In your own blood. Hold your face down in your own blood now.
- In the studio, David is somehow still going.
  David: Matt Heath, stab him in the face, get blood on the sheath!
  Matt: Shit, man...
- To pivot away from David for a second, here's another great editing cut:
  Matt: They've got nothing on us, we're untouchable.
  Urzila: Good luck to them.
  Guy: Oh I know, we should make fun of them for being old.
- The insulting power of Matt and Urzila's diss track is fundamentally undermined by Matt making a repeated threat to the team of three that he's going to 'eat their asses', which according to him he only learned from Urzila after the task meant something sexual.
  Matt: You've been surpassed, we're gonna eat your asses.
  Urzila: Not me so much, I'll have a biscuit.
- The team of three introducing themselves as 'The Three Friends', a cute name somewhat undercut by David violently psyching himself up and yelling in the background.
- Here's the full lyrics of David's segment of the official Three Friends diss track:
  Matt & Urzila!
  I'm a break your face, just in case you don't know your place!
  Hit you with my foot while I spray you with mace!
  Ha HA!
  Split you like banaNA!
  Better call your maMA!
  I know, you owe. I'm gonna break your bones, I know you owe.
  Drink more milk, BITCH!
- He then ends it with this line:
  David: I'm a kill both of you! Right in the eyes, knife, BOOM BOOM!
- In the studio, David says he felt so guilty about how violent and dark he went in this task that he asked the producers not to broadcast it, and when they said no, made complimentary meat packs for Matt and Urzila by way of an apology.
Paul's long bit with a phone as an intro into the video call task.
Paul: Ring ring, ring ring - sorry, just let me take this - ring ring (starts miming a phone) Hello?... Okay I'll tell them. (to Jeremy) They say it's time for another task. (back on the phone) Sorry, what's that? Why am I pretending to be on the phone? I just thought it would be a good way to throw into the next task... Yeah yeah, I know I was wrong... yeah, I can feel that now... I'm kind of stuck in this bit now though...
From the "Dress as Abraham Lincoln and join a video call" task:
- Laura is the first to arrive, though as Paul points out, she looks more like Osama Bin Laden than Lincoln.
- Guy joins next, claiming to be on his way to the theatre, which both Paul and Laura try to stop him from doing. When asked to give a famous Lincoln quote, Guy then mixes Lincoln with MLK.
  Guy: Four score and ten years ago, I had a dream.
- Then David joins, though his full arrival is interrupted by the card he used to buy the costume being declined. He also accidentally says he loves slavery.
- Urzila joins wearing a sheet as she says Lincoln is dead.
- Paul then notes David and Guy are in the background of each other's shot and they proceed to join together. It's revealed afterward that Guy and David had had lunch right before the text with the instructions was sent, so they both went to the same store to ask for a Lincoln costume.
- Finally Matt joins the call, wearing a traffic cone on his head and holding a strip of paper to his chin.
  Guy: I would like to see the Abraham Lincoln with the orange cone wave with two hands.
  (Matt lets go of the cone and it drops over his face)
In the live task, the contestants have to name successive celebrities whose names begin with the last letter of the previous celebrity. If Jeremy doesn't know the celebrity, they have ten seconds to convince him they are famous.
David: How well do you know Yu-Gi-Oh?
Jeremy: Is that his first or his last name?
- In a move reminiscent of when a similar game was played in UK Taskmaster series 5, David's first play is 'Joaquin Phoenix'.
- Matt immediately reveals he's misunderstood the game after following 'Harry Potter' with someone whose name begins with P.
- Laura plays herself, 'Laura Daniel'.
  Jeremy: Who's that?
- Guy eventually loses the final round after attempting to play the colour yellow.

Completing The Set

The prize task is biggest bargain.
- Guy brings in a bottle opener that costs $120 dollars, arguing that it would usually be worth $130 or even $140.
- Laura bringing in fifty billion Zimbabwean dollars. Paul points out they are only worth about 32 cents.
- David also brings in money, bringing in a $50 note with a price label for 50 cents tied around it. He says whoever wins can pay him 50 cents to get the money. Guy points out the problem with this:
  Guy: If we win, we just get the fifty dollars, and take the label off.
  David: Oh fuck.
The task to 'make the most inappropriate wedding cake':
- Urzila sends Paul out the room to get her some food colouring. She then reveals she doesn't know if she's going to use the food colouring at all, but it's just nice to have Paul out of the room.
- Urzila's fecal-themed cake, which she describes to Paul in excruciating detail.
- As is pointed out in the studio, while Urzila makes sewage out of cake, Matt makes a cake out of sewage - specifically, out of the sewagey mud from the Taskmaster pond, complete with stacks of loo roll. Paul goes up to smell the cake and immediately backs away with a truly disgusted grimace on his face.
- David's cake is made with soy sauce and a bucket of chilli powder. He then sticks a sign in it that says 'Syphilis'.
- Guy arranges three sponge squares into a triangle shape and asks Paul what it is; Paul suggests it's a tree. Then Guy adds more squares to elongate the triangle, making clear that he's going for the classic cock-and-balls imagery, and asks Paul again; Paul suggests it's a tall person on a bike.
  Guy: Oh, sweet Paul.
- The message on Guy's wedding cake reads 'I Fucked Your Dad'.
  Laura: In Palmerston North we call that completing the set.
- Laura makes a large cake reading 'Sorry', which is covered in cream (apparently inappropriate because the bride is lactose intolerant). She then decides it has to be more inappropriate, though, and suggests to Paul that he 'American Pie' the cake.
  Paul: I don't know what that means... but I think I can guess. And I'm not that keen.
  Laura: Any takes from the cameramen?
  Paul: Don't ask them, cause one of them will do it.
- Laura then says she's just going to leave the cake alone with Paul in the room, and turn the lights off. When she turns them back on, there's a large circular hole in the cake.
  Paul: I didn't move. I stood here the whole time.
- David on the hole:
  David: You got a thick dick, Paul! There's some circumference on there, bro!
The "Eat the Grape" task has everyone doing something funny.
- Guy and Laura are paired up, and while Laura clearly has a whale of a time, Guy seems to respect Paul's ingenuity in coming up with the task while also hating him for it, ending the task by calling Paul an absolute fuck.
  Guy: Am I gonna have to use my fucking wits for this? I hate that.
- Urzila steals the money meant to be used to buy the caravan door key, then uses it to bribe Paul for the cupboard door code, so has to use her credit card to buy the door key.
  Urzila: (whispering) Taking the money. Not my fault they leave money with a South African.
- Matt also steals the money, but his problem comes when he needs to find the 10 cents left under the couch cushions, taking 26 minutes of his 43 minute total to find the coin, despite looking in the right place several times. By the time he gets out of the caravan, he has forgotten what the original task was.
  Matt: I didn't know ten cents were that colour. I thought they were silver.
  Guy: Someone's doing well for themselves.
- David, who as Guy notes has had his head in his hands throughout everyone else's VT's, has an all time Taskmaster meltdown. He takes 19 minutes to even spot the grape (for contrast, Laura took 16 minutes to complete the entire task), pours away the water meant to melt the iced screwdriver, convinces himself that he's actually meant to stay in the caravan and the grape outside is fake, never finds the code to the cupboard door and instead manages to knock the book down and pull the key out of the small gap, melts down when he realises he's 10 cents short of the key price and pays it via internet banking, while complaining that he meant to bring 20 dollars to buy pie. He ends up taking an hour and 23 minutes.
  Guy: It's an incredibly cruel irony that David wasn't allowed to damage the caravan but it seems the caravan has permanently damaged him.
The task to make the most extreme cup of tea.
- Urzila makes Paul a super-spicy tea with chillis. Drinking even just a sip causes Paul to emit what can only be described as a deeply unsettled gurgle from his oesophagus.
  Urzila: Your asshole was stacking ice!
- Matt's pathetic attempt. He spends most of his time trying and struggling to think of something, and then eventually decides (in part due to Paul's suggestion) to bungee the teabag off the balcony into the mug, but misses his first few attempts.
  Matt: Can we cut it so that it goes in on the first go?
  Paul: Yes.
- David as a 'tea bat', i.e. hanging upside down from the rafters while he serves Paul a cup of tea.
  Jeremy: You were a tea bat.
  David: I felt like a prize tuna.
- This comment from Guy:
  Paul: You've got 22 minutes and 12 seconds.
  Guy: Thanks Paul. And you've got a place in my heart.
- Laura pouring tea off the balcony onto Paul's arm as he cycles past.
- Paul finds Laura's tea 'extremely nice', and Laura is quick to latch on how this turn of phrase uses the word 'extreme'.
  Paul: Like her cake, it was delicious.
  Urzila: Did you fuck the tea as well?!
  Paul: ...I don't like this episode.
Guy commenting on how Jeremy gets a yellow waterproof jacket to wear for the lemonade-spraying live task, but none of them do.
- Before Jeremy shakes one of the lemonade bottles, the contestants are allowed to ask one question. A couple try to ask him which he's going to shake, but others recognise the effective pointlessness of this and just ask him random questions.
  Urzila: Will you be shaking the bottle with your wank hand?
  Matt: Is there anything sexual going on between you and Hilary Barry?^note
  Guy: Can I have your jacket?
- The lemonade task is incredibly anticlimactic as every single person fails on the first go, meaning nobody scores any points at all.

Judgement Day

Laura presents her prize entry (best nostalgia-inducing item) as an 'unopened pack of Snifters'. However, when we see them, they are definitely an open packet. Urzila claims to have encountered them backstage and been unable to help herself.
Urzila: There's three left.
The contestants have to build a tower from only onions, and whoever delivers the most moving speech while completing the task receives an extra 15cm added to their tower height.
- Matt has a disaster after misreading the task and trying initially to use buckets as part of his onion tower. After tipping several of his onions out by mistake, he ends up just trying to stack them without cutting them or anything; it falls over without support and his final score is just the height of one onion.
  Matt: (rereading the task) Build a tower using... onions... mainly...
  Paul: It says only onions.
  (Matt's bucket of onions tips over in the background)
- Urzila asks for Paul to get a knife; Paul says he thinks Urzila should go and get it herself. After a brief back and forth ('I think you should get it.'/'I think you should get it.') Paul eventually capitulates and gets her a butter knife. She eventually uses her knife as a secret support for her tower, but Paul notices and makes her take it out. There is another hilarious back-and-forth where Paul tries to get Urzila to put an onion back where it came from and she refuses.
- For her moving speech, Laura retells Finding Nemo.
- Guy, meanwhile, tells the story of Australian skater Stephen Bradbury:
  Guy: It's a great watch on YouTube, I got into it during lockdown last year.
  Jeremy: It's like a 2 minute race, did you watch it for the whole of lockdown?
  Guy: No, I got into YouTube last year.
- Matt's moving speech mentions 'God's journey'. When Jeremy disregards it as not especially moving:
  Matt: Youu may be the judge of this, but Judgement Day is coming for you.
- David has yet another chaos breakdown attempt. After managing to get a knife and more or less skilfully stack half-onions into a reasonable tower, he tries to add just one more at the end of the time, only for that to unbalance the whole tower and cause it to fall over just as his time goes. He ends up jumping on top of the bath full of onions and screaming into them in despair. What's worse is that David's last onion was a half onion, meaning it was worse even than Matt's.
  Matt: You're shitter than me!
The contestants are confused by the next task, 'time travel', asking them to do something impossible.
Paul: I thought it was pretty straightforward. Or straight backward, depending on which way you're going.
- Matt decides to make time literally 'travel' by building a Roman-style trebuchet in the back garden and launching a clock, all while dressed as a Roman peasant (complete with a crash helmet with a brush stuck to it). Unfortunately the trebuchet doesn't really work and only flings the clock about 9m.
- David's attempt isn't particularly amusing in itself, but what is funny in an Adorkable sort of way is him asking Paul for a ride home.
- Laura attempts to parody Back to the Future.
  Laura: We're gonna go back to the future!
  Paul: I don't know if you can say that.
  Laura: Oh. We're gonna go... to... the future, that's not trademarked. And neither is a Honda Delorean!
  Paul: I think Honda is.
  Laura: Uh, a Hondorian.
  Paul: Isn't that a person from Hondora?
  Laura: Come on Paul, we just gotta go!
- Laura's, however, turns into quite a haunting story, as the future turns out to be terrible - she claims there's a disease 'like Covid, but with lots of ants', and there's lava everywhere (although there is no sign of either of these things). Her hammily despairing breakdown is hilarious.
  Paul: Thank you Laura.
  Laura: (yelling in anguish) I'm gonna call my mum!
- Urzila going back in time to her Afrikaner school in the 80s. The best part of it is that she didn't tell Paul beforehand that she didn't learn English until the 90s, so she exclusively speaks Afrikaans to him (which he can't understand).
- Guy goes back in time to kill Hitler.
  Guy: Heya, you Hitler?
  Hitler: (played by Paul) No.
  Guy: It says it on your name tag though.
  Hitler: You made me wear that.
- Jeremy praises Paul's performance:
  Jeremy: You were quite a good Hitler.
  Paul: I don't wanna hear that.
The balloon team task:
- Matt trying to pop the balloon the task comes in in the car door, but the window is open so it just goes through without popping.
- Matt struggling about in the caravan.
- This task has a special component for the team of three, as Laura is given the secret task to sabotage her team members. She worries however about having to betray her friends, so Paul tries to reassure her.
  Paul: They would do the same if they were in your shoes.
  Laura: Would they? I feel like David wouldn't.
  Paul: Yes okay David wouldn't, but Guy would.
  Laura: Guy absolutely 100% would.
- Laura's terrible sabotage which Guy and David somehow don't even notice, including just throwing random balloons away, putting in very little effort, and pretending to roll her ankle. However, because of the sheer effort Guy puts in (he almost put the same number of balloons in the car on his own as Matt & Urzila did together), the team of three successfully win anyway, meaning Laura gets no points. David, who clearly feels very betrayed, is perhaps a little too psyched about this.
  David: (giving Laura the double finger) FUCK YOU! Fuck you!
David has yet another breakdown in the drawing task, where he breaks his pen, then manages to break his backup pen as well, so he just ends up carving his portrait into the canvas. He also seemingly struggles to stay upright and almost tips the canvas over himself a couple of times.
Laura's portrait is missing her legs.
Laura: This is me at my goal weight.
Jeremy: You've lost half of yourself.
Laura: Exactly.

Bing Bang Schlong

The prize task is the most edible-looking inedible thing.
- Matt brings in a platter of urinal cakes. Jeremy praises him for finally understanding the task.
- Guy selling his prize task:
  Guy: Jeremy, have you ever been to a nice house?
  (everyone starts laughing)
  Urzila: Has he ever been to a nice house? He probably owns ten of them!
- David brings in a water bottle full of an orangey-yellow liquid, labelled 'Dave's Yum Yum Fuel'... which is petrol. He then reprimands the audience for thinking that it was piss.
- Urzila brings in pineapple lumps, which are actually an edible and commercially available item in New Zealand - she just thinks they taste like shit.
The art heist task:
- Plenty to love in the Three Friends' effort - David's terrible acting; Guy and Laura disguising themselves as 'pigeon hunters' who arrive immediately after being phoned; Laura spraying the ground to make 'lasers' (red string) show up; the fact that Paul the gallery-owner was told to turn on the 'lasers' even though he knew the pigeon hunters were coming, and also that Guy and Laura could have easily disarmed the 'lasers' using a button right next to the door but didn't bother; Guy saying that the heist was his 'first rodeo'; Guy and Laura very obviously leaving with the painting, and saying they've left a ladder in the gallery 'because we didn't think you had enough ladders'; David coming back to the gallery, and taking the ladder with him; and Guy turning to the camera at the end and saying once again that this was his first rodeo.
  Jeremy: Guy, was that your first rodeo?
  Guy: Yes. But if I'd done another one, I would have proudly said that it was my second rodeo.
- While the team of two prepare for their attempt, Matt suggests lowering himself from the ceiling.
  Urzila: How are you going to lower in though? Cause Tom Cruise had that physique. Years in the gym, training his upper body, et cetera...
  Matt: Yeah, so... very much like me...
  Urzila: Hmm.
- He then suggests 'Catherine Zeta-Jones-like' manoeuvring through the lasers.
  Matt: Tell me if you don't like it.
  Urzila: Okay.
  (Matt leaves)
  Urzila: (to camera) I don't like it.
- During their actual heist, Matt and Urzila have a number of red string lasers to get past, but with their unwieldy umbrellas and painting, they hit almost every single one.
  Matt: I haven't touched a laser yet.
- At one point trying to navigate the lasers, Matt accidentally kicks Paul's leg.
- Laura questions their need for umbrellas:
  Laura: You shouldn't have taken the umbrellas in.
  Urzila: Well there were pigeons shitting on us!
In the next task, contestants are given elaborate directions to plant their umbrella in a particular spot, and whoever gets closest to that spot wins.
- David asking if he 'can choose where north gets to be'. He then tries to look at the sun to work out where north is, but can't because he can't look directly at the sun.
- Before introducing the next task, Jeremy points out that an important part of the task is making sure you set off in the right direction. This sends Guy into helpless laughter as he realises his attempt is about to be shown.
- Both Guy and Laura manage to get a compass off Paul, but the compass turns out to be faulty, not to mention that neither of them really seem to know how to use a compass, so they both end up going off in completely the wrong way.
  Paul: The issue is, I always keep my compass on me, because you never know when you'll need it, but I do keep it in the same pocket as my magnet.
- After David's attempt, Jeremy critiques him for licking his finger to work out which way north was. Then, when Matt's attempt is shown, the first thing he does is lick his finger, which causes David to break out into what can only be described as a psychotic laugh.
- Matt does however successfully manage to work out the trick in the task (that the directions just lead the contestants right back to where they started) and ends up with a distance of just 37cm.
The first date task is an absolute all-timer:
- Urzila, upon receiving the task:
  Urzila: (yelling menacingly at Paul through the caravan window) It'll never work, Paul! You're not my type!
- Urzila begins her date by announcing through a bullhorn 'I'm coooooooooooming!!!' She then puts Paul in a canoe - on his own - and pushes him out into the lake, while she goes and has a cocktail.
  Urzila: Is there anything more special on a date than getting to know yourself? You've got to love you, Paul. Now paddle out.
  (later) Urzila: Here, I got you a juice! (throws the juice into the lake)
  Urzila: (as she leaves) Leave me alone, Paul. So clingy.
- David takes Paul out to a picnic down on the dock with heart balloons and smoking candles around them, while repeatedly asking Paul if he's comfortable. His 'I got a second date, yeah!' as he walks off is both hilarious and cute.
- Matt, meanwhile, fills up the bathtub in the garden (with cold, dirty water), strips to his underwear, and has a bath with Paul (who gets in fully clothed). At one point he is seen just strumming the guitar violently while singing 'Paul! Paul! Paul!'
- Paul and Laura have a first date like awkward preteens, with Laura trying to subtly lead Paul to do romantic things and Paul acting generally oblivious to all of it. Laura's awkward character work throughout is hilarious. The date culminates in Laura attempting to 'Lady and the Tramp' Paul with a plate of spaghetti, only for Paul to end up sucking the strands out of her mouth.
  Paul: Did you get any of that?
  Laura: I think you kind of sucked it out.
  Paul: Quite gross in reality.
  Laura: It looked better when the dogs did it.
- Laura expresses her annoyance in the studio that they didn't show her and Paul playing board games, only then Paul points out that this consisted of Laura going up to cook pasta while he played one-person chess.
- Paul introducing Guy's attempt:
  Paul: His name rhymes with 'You're the apple of my eye, Montgomery'. It's the apple of my Guy, Montgomery!
- Guy's attempt is hilarious, as he uses a green screen to take Paul to many different places. The awkward dialogue between them is so good that it's impossible to pick out just the highlights, so here it is in full:
  Guy: Welcome to beautiful Miami, Florida.
  Paul: Green screen.
  Guy: (Beat) Miami, Florida. Feeling thirsty, my dear? Allow me to mix you a non-alcoholic pina colada. So, tell me a little about yourself.
  Paul: I'm Paul.
  Guy: Interesting. I love that about you. (handing Paul a pina colada) Cheers.
  Paul: It's yum. Pineapple is my second favourite fruit.
  Guy: After what?
  Paul: Strawberries.
  Guy: Well, you're gonna love what I have in store for you next. Close your eyes. Imagine a strawberry. Now open them again. (a strawberry appears on screen)
  (the green screen changes to a picture of the Nou Camp in Barcelona)
  Guy: We've come to Barcelona, to watch one of the great football teams play football against your favourite team.
  Paul: Fulham.
  Guy: (Corpsing) Fulham FC. Goal, to Fulham! They've won the Champions League!
  Paul: I'm stoked with that.
  Guy: And what better way to celebrate being in Barcelona, Spain, than drinking one of their iconic national drinks. A pina colada.
  (the green screen changes again to a picture of Paris)
  Guy: Welcome to gay Paris! Beneath the lights of the Eiffel Tower, designed by Mr Eiffel himself. I propose a toast. And what better way to celebrate than the national drink of France? The remnants of a Pina Colada.
  (he and Paul both start drinking the leftovers of their pina coladas out of straws, then look at each other and both start uncontrollably Corpsing)
  Paul: (managing to regain composure) I'm sorry.
  Guy: It's all right. (leans in for the kiss)
  Paul: (not leaning) Hello?
  Guy: (awkwardly moving away) Just wanted to see you up close.
  Paul: Is that the date?
  Guy: That's all I had planned, yes. Want me to green screen you up a cab?
  Paul: Yes please.
  Guy: (snaps his fingers) Taxi! (a taxi appears on the screen)
  (Paul walks backwards across the screen to simulate being taken away by the taxi)
  Guy: (to camera) He's gonna make an honest man outta me.
- When it's discussed in the studio, it turns out what Paul was most excited about was the idea of Fulham winning the Champions League, to the point that Guy says he was apparently buzzing about it all day.
The contestants are presented with a tie, and tasked with donning it in a brand new way.
- Laura wears the tie as a hairband... and matching laces. Unfortunately her effort ends up being less innovative than everyone else's, which means she ends up in last place. Her sputtering indignation at this as Jeremy attempts to cut to commercial is hilarious.
- Matt appears to have put the tie on like normal, only to bring his hands up to reveal he's cut the tie up and put parts of it on his fingers, calling himself 'Edward Tiehands'.
- Urzila ties it around some toilet paper and turns it into a hat for the pony races.
- David comes in dressed like normal, then takes his shirt off to reveal a tie painted onto his chest. When Paul questions if that is the real tie, he takes his shorts off as well to reveal the real tie is wrapped around his genitals as underwear.
  David: Is everything inside?
  Paul: I'm not looking.
  David: Me neither.
- It then turns out Guy has done exactly the same thing as David and is wearing the tie as a loincloth.
  Guy: One track mind, ten minutes isn't too long, body on the line, tie on the body... bing bang bong.
  Urzila: Bing bang schlong, you mean!
Most of the charades in the final task, but especially Matt getting Jeremy to guess 'Jenny Shipley becomes the first female Prime Minister' by saying 'ship' and pantomiming breasts.

A Good Time, Not A Fast Time

This episode might as well be known as the 'David goes on an emotional rollercoaster' episode, for reasons that will soon become clear.
The prize is most futuristic thing.
- David brings a 2022 calendar. What's more, he has spelt out the letters of each month with his body.
  Jeremy: So they actually have physical calendars in the future, do they?
  David: Well they do next year, Jeremy!
- Urzila brings in a solar-power phone charger, which she says would be useful in a zombie apocalypse.
  Jeremy: We've had solar power for quite some time...
  Urzila: Yeah, but this can go with you into the future.
  David: YOU CAN TAKE ANYTHING YOU WANT INTO THE FUCKING FUTURE!!
  Urzila: Exactly. So this task was really fucking easy for me.
- Laura brings in a positive pregnancy test, which she makes sure to assure is not hers... in fact, she got a friend of hers to pee on it for her.
- Guy brings in a rock, because it's all that will be left once humans are gone.
- David's rage when Matt gets the five points ahead of him for his 'road warrior apocalypse outfit' after the latter reveals it has a light on it, which somehow sways Jeremy.
The task to get the most footage of Paul on a camcorder. The contestants all find a man in a white jacket quite easily and start filming him... only for it to turn out the house and grounds are filled with decoy Pauls, wearing his clothes, while the real Paul moves between locations. Jeremy calls it 'a great day for the late-20s white male actor'.
- Paul's morning routine, which was the path he was following while the contestants were completing this task: he wakes up in the shed, jogs round the back of the house, prepares his breakfast of cookies and milk, eats it in the lab, then takes it to the caravan and finishes it there.
- Matt spots Paul during one of his movements and sprints after him, eventually catching him and shoving the camera in his face while he was against the wall (with Paul looking genuinely quite distressed during this). He then gets Paul to stand with several other decoys in the kitchen.
  Matt: (with unsettling enthusiasm) I was much faster at running than you! I hunted you down like an animal! I grabbed you, I stuffed you, and then I got a whole load of other Pauls in there... five points.
- David finds Paul almost immediately in the shed and, in much calmer contrast to Matt's, just goes on a lovely walk with him. During this, he comes across someone sitting next to the bath in a chipmunk outfit, who when her head is removed turns out to be Angella Dravid.
  - Even better - after meeting David, Angella asks him 'What's the task?', as if she wasn't part of it and had just wandered onto set wearing that.
- With only one attempt left to show, Urzila says 'you know what, I think we've covered it'. She gets no footage of Paul at all, and just wanders around aimlessly for ten minutes, chatting to the fake Pauls. Her comments during the task about Paul, however, are hilarious.
  Urzila: (calling) Paaaaaaaaaaaauulyyyyy!
  Urzila: Let's go check the closet. I think we all thought he would be in there.
  Urzila: I hope he's not at the water unattended.
  Urzila: Hey fake Paul... what was the brief for this? Put you in a suit and stand here like a fuckwit?
  Fake Paul: Yeah, more or less.
  Urzila: That's what it says for Paul too.
  - At one point during her attempt, Urzila finds Angella on the bench, films her up close and deduces she isn't Paul, but doesn't take the head off revealing who it is, making her next line all the funnier:
  Urzila: Well, it's good to see actors working.
David enters the pantheon of Taskmaster contestants forced to complete a solo task when he's tasked with untying a lot of shoelaces. A LOT of shoelaces. He breaks his previous record for longest time taken by almost an hour, with 2 hours and 12 seconds. He at least gets 5 points for his suffering.
- David realising he was the only one to do the task: at first he seemingly shuts down entirely, just lying slumped in his chair with his eyes glazed over and his Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned, before he suddenly perks up in a fit of rage.
  David: I KNEW NO ONE ELSE WAS GONNA DO IT! YOU DON'T HAVE THE TIME TO DO THAT TASK FOR EVERYONE ELSE!
- When David discovers there are thousands more shoelaces in the lab, he seemingly has a simultaneous mental breakdown both in the VT of the task and in the studio.
- Don't worry, though - once the VT starts showing David untying all the shoelaces, he proves he's seen the funny side and breaks out into giggling.
- A great quote from David during the task:
  David: I take solace in knowing everyone else has to go through this as well.
- At one point David compares himself to Rumplestiltskin, and Paul begins reading the tale to David's clear (and amusingly childlike) delight. Unfortunately Paul reads the original version, in which Rumpelstiltskin tears himself right down the middle into two, shocking David.
- That then leads to:
  David: So after I'm done with this, are you going to tear yourself in half?
  Paul: Probably not.
  David: That'd be a sick task man... 'David. Rip Paul in half. Your time starts now.'
- As David finishes, Paul pulls a little party popper to celebrate his effort. In the studio, all the other contestants stand up and applaud him. Jeremy, on the other hand, is less kind:
  Jeremy: Well, to be fair, it wasn't done particularly fast.
- David calls for people to give him their shoes so he can prove his adeptness at untying shoelaces. After he does both Matt and Guy's, Laura points out she has zippers on her boots; David just leans over and unzips them.
In the intro to the last team task, Urzila does a little bit with Paul where she talks to him with a sock puppet. Then she and Matt read the task... and it turns out to be to perform an educational puppet show.
- Matt and Urzila's puppet show, about Marmite and Vegemite arguing over their differences, but eventually realising it's better not to fight... until a jar of peanut butter shows up, which they both despise and push off the stage.
  - At one point during Matt and Urzila's attempt, the camera zooms in on Paul's blank stare as he sits underneath the puppet theatre.
- The team of three's play, meanwhile, is called 'The Authorised History of New Zealand and Puberty'/ What it ends up being is a sock-puppet talking to several puppet characters about going through puberty, and then intercutting that with random facts about New Zealand history which Guy is shown to be reading out of an encyclopaedia.
  - This, when Guy's sock-puppet character appears:
  David: Hi, Mr Sock Man!
  Guy: Mr Sock Man was my father's name. Call me the Puberty and New Zealand History Sock.
  - The highlight is when David's character, who is having wet dreams, appears. David rips off the piece of fabric covering the puppet's genital area and starts squirting glue through it in a steady stream.
  Guy: While I've got you here, would you like to hear about Horace Emerton Hodge?
  - At the end, the three puppeteers appear in the theatre window, and Guy takes a look at what's happened on the stage.
  Guy: (noticing the glue) Oh, that's a huge puddle of cum.
The infamous milk & microwave task, where Paul warns the contestants beforehand not to open the task, because once they do, it turns out they have to lift two bottles of milk above two microwaves, and their time started when they entered the room.
- Matt opens it almost immediately, saying he doesn't trust Paul, only to suddenly realise he should have trusted him all along.
- Guy also opens the task early on. His combination of absolute fury and wide smile at the ingenuity of the task is hilarious.
- At one point Guy asks Paul to reach into his pocket. Paul does so, and just pulls out a short length of purple ribbon.
- From Urzila's attempt:
  Urzila: I'm going to open the task.
  Paul: I'd advise against it.
  Urzila: No offence, Paul... what the fuck am I meant to do then?
- David, after panicking for a while about whether or not to open the task, decides to have a cup of tea with Paul, and chats to him about life. At about an hour into his attempt, the crew break for lunch, and bring him and Paul lunch to eat in the lab.
- This line from Paul while talking to David and eating salad:
  Paul: If you travelled back in time and told nine-year-old me that one day he would like salads, he would be like, 'That's what you came back to tell me?'
- When David finally capitulates and opens the task, he initially doesn't realise that he's nailed it, and with a loud 'FUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!' he goes to complete the task in absolute frustration. Then, once Paul lets him know how long he's been going, this becomes a scream of jubilation, and in the studio David runs over to hug Paul.
In the live task, contestants have to prepare a salad for the Taskmaster in 100 seconds. Then, they receive another task, saying the Taskmaster no longer wants his salad, and they have to restore all the ingredients to their original condition.
- Matt's terrible salad, which is just a mess of vegetables and salad cream. His attempt to restore it is a disastrous mess.
- David puts loads of effort into his salad, saying it's going to be 'so fucking good'. Then, when the second part of the task is revealed, he freaks out and does a lap of the entire stage in anger.
  David: (basically sobbing) I balanced it with the acid and the fats! I tossed it so well! (looking in anguish at a lemon, which he bit during his preparation) I can't unteeth this!

Season 3

General

Chris Parker makes the same mistake as Brynley in Series 1 by dressing in a uniform that makes him look a bit like a Nazi.
Chris: I'm starting to panic that I look like I am in the Hitler Youth, but... I am just making it crystal clear, that I am a park ranger, not a young Nazi.
Paul E: That's exactly what Hitler said to them.
- In another costume-related running gag, the frequent jibes at Paul Ego's crocs.

F*ck Golf

Josh annoyedly critiquing the quality of things from the Taskmaster house throughout the episode, including a pair of glasses, some tape, and a crème brûlée, only to always insist afterwards that he's just 'a chilled out guy'.
The prize task is the best thing that weighs exactly 10kg.
- Josh Thomson selling his prize task, 10kg of Thomson family marmalade:
  Josh: Jeremy, you seem like the sort of guy who has an adventurous mouth.
- Paul Ego weighs exactly 100kg, so he divides a picture of himself in ten and allows Jeremy to pick any tenth of him. Jeremy, disputing the prize because the picture itself weighs nothing, decides to give Paul 0 points.
Josh is anxious that the safety goggles provided for the first task mean that he's about to get shot in the face.
Josh: If I get shot in the face, I'll be upset.
Paul: If you get shot in the face, it has nothing to do with this task, it's just a coincidence.
- During Justine's attempt:
  Justine: (cracking an egg) Fuck! Sorry, I'm trying not to swear. (she breaks another egg) Son of a bitch!
- Both Chris and Josh come up with strategies involving lifting a soft basket up to the eggs' height and tipping the pole to knock the eggs in. It works well for getting the eggs in... only for both of them to then mishandle and knock over their cushioning stick, spilling almost all their eggs out.
  - Josh blames most of this on 'Paul's shitty red tape', and is still grumbling about it as he leaves the task.
  - Paul asks Chris, who got 5/12 eggs, how he thought he did.
  Paul: You happy with that?
  Chris: I would say... 4/10. Well, five. Out of twelve.
In the intro to the crème brûlée task:
Josh: Ooh, a delicious crème brûlée.
Kura: A crème brûlée!
Justine: Is that a crème brûlée?
Paul E: Is that a cheeky little tiramisu?
- Justine dropping several different utensils onto the crème brûlée from a height in order to crack it, while looking at the camera and saying the name of each one as she drops it, and missing almost all of them.
- Paul Ego cracking the crème brûlée with a mannequin's foot, then licking the custard off the foot.
- Kura talks at some length about how she wants to slowly and satisfyingly crush the crème brûlée with a vice, only for her actual crack to end up just cracking it once in half and knocking the crème brûlée on the floor.
- Josh constructs an elaborate, somewhat catapult-style cracking device. He draws a huge sword to cut the rope... then puts the sword down and just ends up sawing through the rope with a knife. It works remarkably well though.
- Chris puts on a top hat and a cape and calls himself 'Chris Copperfield', and starts lobbing teaspoons from the balcony towards the crème brûlée whilst blindfolded. Eventually, after several misses, he boomingly announces that he will do an attempt without the blindfold, but no glasses; then after missing further, he announces he will do it 'with the ability to see'; and finally, with only twelve seconds left on the clock (of a total of thirty minutes) and the crème brûlée still uncracked, he rushes downstairs with the teaspoons and races to the crème brûlée, but just doesn't manage to make it in time. The dramatic slow-motion shot of his slide across the grass to smash the crème brûlée only to just miss it, set to haunting opera music, is hilarious.
  - This, from Chris's attempt:
  Paul: You hit the microphone.
  Chris: Sorry.
  Paul: It's okay, it's satisfying for me, cause I really don't like the sound guy.
Justine saying she doesn't like golf, 'because she's not 80'. Jeremy then points out Paul Ego mentioned he loves golf.
- Just the fact that the real golf hole ends up being not on the field but upstairs in the house.
- Neither Justine nor Paul are able to find the golf hole, so they dig their own holes and put the golf ball in those. Paul is particularly funny as he never seems to figure out that he isn't doing the correct thing.
- Chris's gleeful running across the field when he sees a flag.
- Also this, from Chris's attempt:
  Chris: Are you the hole?
  Paul: No.
  Chris: How many holes have you got?
  Paul: I'm not answering that.
- Chris's excitement after he wins: 'I WON A SPORT!'
- Justine and Paul missing the hole gets even funnier at the end when it turns out they both went upstairs after the task and both managed to completely miss the real golf hole on the table.
Paul Ego being the only person to misunderstand the animal noises element of the live task (that the contestants have to make the noise asked of the person before them) and constantly getting his tower pushed over. A particular highlight is his mouse noise, which sounds neither like a mouse nor like a rooster (the animal asked of Kura).

Sauce Tits

The prize task is the best thing that delights all five senses.
- Kura brings in a Big Mac with ambient lighting around it and sexy music underneath it.
- Paul Ego's bizarre prize, a container full of butter chicken with strawberries and a picture of Jason Momoa in it, surrounded by a strip of velvet, and with the sound of children laughing. Everyone points out that the sound of the children laughing actually sounds quite scary.
- Josh brings in a 'sushi train', a tie rack he has converted into a mechanical sushi delivery device, complete with its own theme music and a video of his children enjoying the sushi.
  Paul: Is it just me, or is Josh trying heaps harder than the rest of us?
  - After Chris calls him a 'nerd' for this, Josh has a sudden outburst.
  Josh: I'm an early target, I'm an EARLY TARGET! I've got an early lead and I'm an early target! I won the last one and now everyone's coming for me! WELL BUCKLE UP! CAUSE I'M READY TO GO!!!
  Chris: Oh, the nerd's getting angry.
  - Josh gets five points, and in response Justine invents her own version of the Sushi Train song:
  Justine: It'll poison your children with old sushi/My kids might die, but I'll win this show!
In the "Make a Dramatic Exit" task:
- Josh clumsily kicks through the barn doors, stumbles through a parachute, kicks a female mannequin in half and badly does a headstand while Paul pours balls on him. At the time he seems quite happy, but in the studio clearly regrets how it went.
  - Paul also mentions the mannequin kick, which Josh also clearly regrets somewhat, trying to excuse it but eventually deciding to go with it and saying "If you want drama... kick a woman in half."
    Jeremy: "If you want drama... kick a woman in half." Do you wanna walk that back? Or you wanna keep that on the table?
    Josh: Ahhh, ooh ummm in my head I was like an elegant, like a gibbon, like, flying around. I just look like a drunk man falling over a lot, and then, um, sort of beating the shit out of a woman. Which is not good. An umm, uhh... But dramatic.
  - Jeremy then points out that Josh going through the barn doors was the extent of his 'exit', and all the other stuff was really just 'post-exit'.
- Justine does a parody of Shortland Street. Jeremy notes that in the credits that scroll over her attempt, Justine is credited with every single thing, including the camerawork.
- Chris tells Paul to pretend to be having sex with 'George the grocer', and say the line 'I'm sorry baby, I'm sorry, it's not what it looks like'. Paul pulls down his trousers, revealing another pair of trousers underneath, then delivers the line as flatly as possible while standing at quite a distance from the mannequin.
- Chris's attempt as a whole is hilarious, involving him entering the lab with a drawn-on moustache and bowler hat and doing a British accent, and then proceeding to throw an entire paper-bagful of vegetables and several drinks at Paul before squirting him, George the grocer, and the statue of a dog with a water gun.
- Paul E bursts out of the shed with a cricket helmet, a guitar and bottles of sauce taped to his chest and a bottle of champagne taped to his crotch. He sings about his dramatic exit and then jumps on a mini trampoline to squirt the sauce bottles and pop the champagne. Throughout the =VT= and Paul's explanation afterwards, Josh is crying with laughter.
  Jeremy: Was that a dramatic exit, or was that a happy ending? It's hard to know...
  Justine: I think that was a cry for help.
  Paul E: I remember telling my kids they should watch this show. Yeah, yeah, I really went a different angle from the whole- some fantastic dramatic performances, but I thought, how dramatically can I just exit a shed? And I've always wanted sauce tits. You know, why not do it on national television?
  Jeremy: I can't even remember what everyone else did any more.
When the teams meet for the first team task, the team of three just all start screaming in unison.
Kura: How did we not hear each other?
Justine: Yeah, I'm quite loud.
Josh: I... totally heard you guys.
- Jeremy expresses concern about Josh being put in a team with the two women, since he kicked the female mannequin in half during the first task.
- Paul Ego's 'croc-induced slip' while helping Chris in the zorb.
- Jeremy points out the distinct lack of trust in the team of three's effort, where none of them really seem to be on the same page about how to complete the task.
  Jeremy: Kura, you seemed to be doing most of the work inside of the zorb.
  (Kura makes a face that shows she agrees but doesn't want to say anything against her team members)
  Kura: (affecting a stilted voice) It was a team effort. (winks awkwardly)
  Josh: Well, I had a really fun time.
  Justine: Well, I was covered in shit.
From the task to recite pi:
- Josh freaking out while trying to memorise the digits of pi, dropping his script on the ground and running off whilst screaming.
- Paul Ego degenerating into random numbers, including 'eleven', and eventually going into letters. What makes it especially funny is the graphic underneath including the letters in his effort.
- Also, Paul managing to eat an entire pie during his attempt.
- Justine misunderstands the task and just starts reading the digits of pi to Paul straight off the paper in her ten minutes. Even better is that Paul doesn't stop her, so she just keeps reading, even once she's checked the task to make sure she's doing this correctly. Then, when it's time for her attempt:
  Paul: You ready?
  Justine: For?
  Paul: Reciting pi. Reciting it from memory.
  Justine: (resignedly realising her mistake) ...yep.
  - She then manages to get it wrong after only one digit, saying '5' after 3.
  Justine: I hate maths. I hate maths, I hate numbers, I hate Paul, and I hate the caravan.
- Chris makes several comments before his attempt is shown that suggest his has gone even more disastrously. He spends some time coming up with an elaborate movement-based mnemonic system to help himself remember the digits, only to forget to include the very first digit (3) in his system and begin after the decimal point with 1, meaning he gets a score of zero. Once he realises, he decides to do his movement-based system anyway, but turns it destructive, throwing stuff around and smashing the pie on the table.
  Chris: But you know what? It... actually, it wasn't even fun, I don't know.
  Paul: Can you remember any of it?
  Chris: Of course not, I've blanked the whole thing out. (trying anyway) One five one...
  Josh: No... three.
  Chris: (realising he's now made the same mistake twice, just gets up and leaves the stage in shame) Thank you for this opportunity!
The live task referencing Rose's infamous 'shid' fish poster prize task from UK series 9 by locking all the contestants in a shid and getting them to memorise the fish on the poster.
- Jeremy's comment while all the contestants are concealed in the shid and quietly trying to memorise the fish:
  Jeremy: It's a good one for the audience, this one, isn't it?
- After each one is eliminated, the contestants have to go back inside the shid.

Mexican Lasagna

The prize task is your most prized childhood possession.
- Chris brings in a toy car given to him by the speech therapist who helped him when he suffered from glue ear. Instead of focusing on the heartwarming story, Jeremy focuses exclusively on the connection between Chris's Hitler Youth-esque outfit, blonde hair, Christchurch upbringing, and the German 1930s style of the car, setting off a train of jokes throughout the episode relating to Chris being a Nazi.
- Kura brings in her school reports. Paul points out that even though in her written report the teacher had said her behaviour was 'inappropriate at times', she hadn't ticked the box under 'behaviour' that said 'inappropriate at times'.
- Josh's prize:
  Josh: I grew up in the South Island on a farm, so naturally I spent a lot of time running around paddocks... dressed as a ninja!
  - His prize is a full ninja outfit, complete with some shurikens he made out of nails.
- Paul Ego brings in a cardboard cutout of his mother, apologising that she is not there that day because her bad knees would make it difficult for her to get up the step. Jeremy tells him to be careful or else Josh will kick her in half.
This, in the intro to the first task:
Josh: What a time to be alive.
Paul: 5:08.
- Meanwhile, Kura initially jokes around and reads the task as 'Run a full marathon, fastest wins'.
- The actual task is amusing on its own; the contestants are given a basket of laundry and told to hang as many things as possible on a rotary clothesline (or whirligig), and that they must stay on when Paul spins the clothesline once. Only once they start going through the laundry do they realise there are only a few actual items of clothing, and the other things include cans of beans, gummy worms, and various other un-hangable items.
- Paul Ego putting a lot of stuff in a jacket and then turning it upside down so it all ends up falling out.
- This conversation between Josh and Paul, just as Josh is finishing up:
  Josh: Sad, sad, 41-year-old man, trying to hang up a sour worm.
  Paul: It's not sour, it's just gummy.
  Josh: I am under time pressure Paul, I haven't got time to properly identify lollies.
  Paul: Well, the sour ones normally have sugar on the outside...
  Josh: Jesus Christ, I know about the sour ones, Paul. There's only one sour worm here and that's J. Thomson.
- In the studio, the contestants start quizzing Paul about several bras among the washing.
  Jeremy: Whose bras were they?
  Paul: I'm not sure, I just... found a lot of them in my house...
  Chris: You can be honest Paul, whose bras were they?
  Justine: Yeah Paul, you slut.
- Chris outwits the task by hanging the whole basket on the clothesline.
  Jeremy: One thing you can say about the Nazis, their technology was good.
  - More of Jeremy praising Chris for his technique:
  Jeremy: Centrifugal force, you understand that, putting the basket in the middle was smart.
  Chris: Didn't think of that. But I played the centrifugal in high school.
The second task includes the line 'Pick a card from Paul's deck'. Even considering this is New Zealand, and 'e' sounds often sound like 'i' sounds in that accent, it sounds a lot like Chris deliberately says 'Pick a card from Paul's dick'. Paul's face afterwards is hilarious.
- This task is another with a cruel trick in it. The task is to create the flag of the country written on their picked card, but on each card the name of the country is paired up with the incorrect flag. Cue four of the contestants making completely the wrong flag without noticing.
- This also leads to loads of great moments of dramatic irony, from Kura^notetasked with Uruguay, but making Argentina mentioning offhandedly that Uruguay's flag is similar to Argentina's, to Justine^notetasked with Jamaica, but making Tanzania saying her flag is 'recognisable to any Jamaican who knows their flag', to Paul Ego^notetasked with Mexico, but making Italy seemingly subconsciously realising his mistake when he suggests that seeing the Mexican flag would make one want to eat a lasagna.
  - Jeremy notes the cruellest thing is when they make the contestants do shots of them looking into the camera next to their incorrect flags and say their names.
- Josh is the only one who avoids the trap, noticing he has to make a UAE flag (and not a USA one as depicted on his card). He largely just takes a bunch of random coloured items and assembles them in a grid, including a green mailbox as 'the Burj Khalifa'.
  Josh: I wouldn't be surprised if some citizens of the UAE just came and were like 'Oh, better roll that up' and I had to say 'Oh sorry, it's just a bunch of stuff'.
  - Paul struggling with how to say 'Emirates'.
- This conversation between Chris and Paul, while the former makes his flag:
  Paul: Do you have a favourite flag?
  Chris: Do you want to guess? It's got many colours.
  Paul: Pride flag.
  Chris: (affronted) No? It's Australia. Why would you think Pride?
  Paul: Cause it's got many colours?
  Chris: Or is it cause I'm gay? Jerk.
  [...]
  Paul: Have you made many flags before?
  Chris: Yes. A certain rainbow flag.
  Paul: Australia?
  Chris: (affronted again) The pride flag, Paul.
The next task is in a mailbox filled with snakes. According to Paul, they tried to get some of those snakes that pop out, in order to scare the contestants, but couldn't get any, so they had to just use plastic snakes. But it doesn't matter as all the contestants are frightened by the plastic snakes anyway.
- Paul Ego claims that there was a real kingsnake hiding amongst them, and that it killed three of the crew.
The task in the mailbox is to frighten the Taskmaster.
- Josh decides to leave Jeremy a voicemail, and initially pretends to be a tax officer claiming Jeremy is in trouble, only to suddenly degenerate into a creepy voice threatening to touch Jeremy's bum. Dissatisfied, he then leaves another voicemail with this message:
  Josh: (doing a weird voice) I'm coming for you daddy, I'm coming for you daddy, and I'm gonna come reeeeeeeeeeeal nice, in the dark.
  - Even funnier is Jeremy repeating this line, deadpan, twice, in the studio.
  - Josh doesn't stop there - he then leaves a couple more voicemails, largely pretending to be television executives or Jeremy's co-workers saying he hasn't been doing a good job recently. Paul points out that Jeremy will get all these calls from the same number, which means all these people, not to mention the creepy guy, are all sharing the same phone.
  Josh: Aagh, I shoulda just run him over.
- Justine misunderstands that she has to frighten Jeremy and not Paul, so she ends up blindfolding Paul with tape, taking him into the forest, and running at him with a sword. She still ends up getting four points as Jeremy finds her misunderstanding of the task, and the fact that the production team have spent millions on marketing him and not Paul as the Taskmaster and yet it evidently hasn't worked, to be very frightening.
- Chris's attempt is very odd. He chats with Paul about calling Jeremy claiming he's been severely injured after falling off the roof while doing a task ('get closest to the Sun, fastest wins'), and starts taking him through everything he has to say on the call.
  Chris: He's got two impalements, he's concussed, he broke his ankle... he's got a weird STI, but I don't think that was from the fall, that just came up during the doctor's report.
- In the midst of his elaboration (which becomes quite STI-focused), a car suddenly drives onto the Taskmaster property and masked men get out, tie Chris up, and take him away. According to Chris, he's only here in the studio because TVNZ paid the ransom... which was only £20.
- Paul E wearing a mask of Mikey Havoc (Jeremy's comedy partner from his Havoc and Newsboy days), stripping to his underwear, and singing 'happy birthday' in a sexy voice.
In the live task, the contestants one by one have to come up and select an object. Kura does a very dainty walk as she goes up to get her object; then, when it's Chris's turn, he does exactly the same dainty walk.
- Josh then asks Chris if he should replicate his walk, and when Chris says yes, Josh starts goose-stepping over to the table.
- The contestants have to sweep their object closest to the edge of the stage. Paul Ego does a practice sweep with his broom while Paul is still explaining and completely breaks it.

Herbs and Spices

The prize task is best weekend.
- Josh offers up a weekend with his dad on the farm, sorting through scrap iron. Jeremy has one question:
  Jeremy: What are the sleeping arrangements with your dad?
  Josh: You go on the left.
- Justine, an avid Disney fan, brings in a trip to Disneyland with her.
  Josh: Justine, just cause I'm unfamiliar with this kind of stuff, cause I'm an adult...
- Kura tells a long story that ultimately ends in her having sex with NZ rugby player Sonny Bill Williams on an office chair in a Pizza Hut. Her actual prize entry turns out to be a weekend to go to that Pizza Hut to 'see where it happened'.
- Chris bringing in vouchers for the weekend trip made famous by its involvement in the contact tracing of a family during the COVID pandemic, because apparently, while it was in the news, he was just distracted by how nice their weekend trip was.
- Paul Ego brings in several photoshopped pictures of him doing garden work with singer The Weeknd.
- When Jeremy is scoring the efforts:
  Kura: (chanting) Cum stains, cum stains, cum stains!
  Paul: No, I think he uses points.
Chris struggling to open the seal on the envelope of the first task. Turns out the task is to 'prove you're the smartest'.
- Justine is noticeably on edge before her attempt is shown, and it turns out she just got Paul to ask her a bunch of trivia questions, many of which she got wrong. Highlights include thinking the boiling point of water is 'minus something' and thinking 'IPA' stands for 'lager'. Her grumpy embarrassment afterwards is hilarious.
- Kura tries to speak Maori, but has to resort to using Google for some things. When Paul points out that they're filming her using Google, Kura tries to claim she never consented to having any of her tasks filmed, confusing Paul.
  - In her earlier Sonny Bill Williams anecdote, Kura mentioned that she'd told him her name means 'school'. In the studio after this task, she mentions again that her name means 'school', but it also means 'precious'. This leads to Paul asking her why she didn't tell Sonny Bill Williams that.
- Paul Ego spots a spelling mistake in the task - it says 'Prove your the smartest', rather than 'you're' - and spends most of his time smugly correcting it before leaving with 16 minutes still left on the clock. Cut to a shot of the task... and it turns out there was another mistake on there ('You're time starts now') that Paul completely missed.
- Most of the contestants agree that Josh is probably by far the smartest of the five, but he completely fails at this task - after spotting the spelling mistake, he does little more but break the telescope and attempt to explain classical types of column (and according to Paul, get two of them the wrong way round).
- Chris, meanwhile, outsmarts the task itself, by basically not doing it and getting Paul to give him a massage instead. However, one might argue he's not that smart, as Paul clearly does not know how to massage someone, and Chris later says it was one of the most uncomfortable experiences he's ever had.
Everyone's excitement about driving the golf cart in the team task.
- The task involves driving the cart around for eleven laps, and picking up a new task with a new rule to follow every lap. The team of three operate relatively efficiently. Chris and Paul E, however, are chaos. Firstly, Paul sets off at twelve km/h rather than the required eight, meaning they're going much faster than they should be around the course. Then, Paul gets so distracted by the task to high-five Paul Williams and say a catchphrase that he keeps forgetting to pick up the next task, so he has to go round in a circle to pick it back up - a manoeuvre that first leads to Chris dropping the box of ducks (so they have to keep going round so Chris can pick them up each lap), and then leads to them crashing into the caravan.
The duck-in-bucket task:
- Justine accidentally saying there's three letters in the word 'duck', which is doing nothing to rehabilitate perceptions of her intelligence.
- Paul E, paying no attention to any possibility of clues and largely just pulling at random, ends up pulling 25 of the 26 ropes before he finds the bucket with the duck.
- Josh puts is phone on the end of a long stick, which is connected to his watch so he can lift his phone up to the buckets and see what's inside. His struggle to explain this however is hilarious.
  Josh: My phone's connected to my watch and I can see what my watch - my phone - watch - so I can watch what my watch - I can see - I can - I can watch - what was the question?
- Also, Josh manages to find the duck relatively quickly using this method, but then keeps forgetting which one it was that has the duck in it, so he has to go back to check multiple times.
- It's not commented upon for some reason, but Josh makes a comment when he spots the duck that it's a 'toy duck', implying he was originally expecting it to be a live duck inside the bucket.
This, while the live task is being read out:
Josh: (reading) 'You have twenty seconds to hide your toilet brush while the Taskmaster averts his gaze.
Chris: Is that me?^note
- During her first attempt, Jeremy accuses Justine of shoving the toilet brush up her dress, but he is wrong. During her second attempt, Justine decides to shove both toilet brushes up her dress, and when Jeremy guesses correctly this time, she walks over to the bench without dropping them, then opens her legs and appears to shit them out.

The Prime Minister Thanks You

Josh trying to introduce his prize task for the episode:
Josh: We've got some kids at our house. Uh, we own them. They're our kids.
The task to throw water:
- Chris decides to throw his water into the river, so that the river will carry it a great distance. Unfortunately, the 'river' he decides to throw his water into is actually the Taskmaster Pond and thus a lake, so the water doesn't go very far at all.
- Josh swinging a huge bucket of water around like a throwing hammer.
- Paul Ego tips the bowl of water on himself and runs across the Taskmaster property. Not only is that a highly disputable interpretation of 'throw, and not only does he not go particularly far, but he also ends up returning to his original place, so he barely went any distance whatsoever. Plus, he's now soaking wet.
  Paul E: Water is a lot wetter than they lead you to believe, you know, when you read about it in the magazines.
From the task to "Make History":
- Kura brainstorming:
  Kura: What's something nobody's done for a while?
  Paul: A while?
  Kura: Well... forever.
- Paul Ego decides to try and break the world speed record for running 50m in crocs, which he claims is about seven seconds. He does the run, Tom Cruise-style... in about ten seconds. Though Jeremy still gives him four points!
- Kura's is a bunch of random stuff:
  - First, she texts Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to ask her for advice.
  - Then, she goes outside to look for ideas, and eventually lands on trying to catch a goose.
  - She gives up on the goose-catching after a while though, and decides to do a tribute to Whina Cooper, who walked the length of New Zealand, by wearing a headscarf and walking while mildly protesting for peace - though she seems a bit confused about exactly what she is protesting about, as at one point she starts protesting for a five-day working week, then realises that is what New Zealand already has.
- Chris suggests being the first gay man on the moon:
  Jeremy: Has there been a gay man on the moon?
  Chris: They usually go to Uranus.
- Chris eventually does carry out his launch to the moon with the help of green screen, including planting the pride flag in the moon with 'one gay leap for mankind'.
- Josh's attempt once again involves the female mannequin, this time using a lance to knock her top half off.
  Jeremy: That poor defenceless woman again.
  Justine: Again!
  Jeremy: This is starting to look bad.
  Josh: Yeah, hey there's only a woman mannequin in the shed, so if anything, you're making me be sexist. This is your doing, you're forcing me to joust women... it might not be a woman, it could just be a guy with tits, we don't know.
  Paul E: I'm right here, mate. Unbelievable.
  Chris: It's always like, the wheelchair's so close by every time as well.
  Jeremy: There's often a wheelchair.
  Josh: That's what inclusivity's about-
  Chris: Kicking them in the head?
  Josh If we aren't violent to people in wheelchairs, then do they have no place in society?
  (Jeremy visibly tries to avoid cracking up as Justine and Chris begin leaning away from Josh)
  Josh: Guys, let's join together- why are you leaning away?
  Jeremy: I think we should just take three seconds, just to distance ourselves from this.
In the next task, the contestants have to touch the cow: the first person to do so is disqualified, with the second coming third, the third coming second, the fifth coming fourth and the fourth winning.
- Everything about the pairing of Paul and Josh's attempts in this task:
  - Paul Ego initially forgets that there are other contestants, and believes he needs to get the crew members to come and touch the cow before him.
  - This:
  Paul E: So all I have to do is just touch the cow and hope that I'm the fourth person.
  Josh: Oh, unless someone had a meltdown and just saw 'touch the cow' and then touched it.
  (cut to Paul E with his arms around the cow)
  Paul E: I've touched the cow.
  - Josh manages to correctly predict that Paul will touch the cow very quickly. Paul then predicts that Josh will wait a very long time and panic about touching the cow before touching it. Sure enough, that's exactly what Josh does.
  - Josh has something close to a nervous breakdown in this task, repeatedly breaking things such as a deckchair and the plinth the task is on seemingly just by touching them, all while anxiously worrying about when to touch the cow. He ends up touching it after more than 26 minutes.
  - Paul also suggests that Josh won't want to touch the cow because he was once attacked by a killer whale, and he might mistake the cow for a whale.
- All of this is completely overshadowed, however, by Chris, who touches the cow immediately after opening the task and seeing the words 'touch the cow', not realising his mistake until it's too late. Paul reveals Chris took 1.6 seconds.
  - Justine is so stunned by this in the studio that she seems to struggle to remain upright.
From the live task:
- Josh repeatedly claiming he has twelve ducks in his bucket.
- When he opens his final bucket revealing he has two ducks, Josh attempts to grab them both at once, and ends up almost getting his hands stuck in the bucket.
- Paul Ego pays very little attention during all the other contestants' turns, but then on a complete fluke manages to swap his 1-duck bucket with Chris's 5-duck bucket, winning him the task.
  Chris: He doesn't even know what we're playing!

Sweet Navel Orange

The prize task is the best thing to have on a desert island.
- Paul Ego brings in the Edmonds Cookery Book: Coconut Edition, wherein all the recipes are made exclusively out of coconuts.
- Josh brings in a filtration system for dirty water. He demonstrates how any type of water can be filtered, and then a picture of some yellowish water in the bottle is shown.
  Jeremy: What's that?
  Josh: Other stuff.
  (Josh takes out a glass of water and starts drinking it)
  Kura: Is that piss water?
  Josh: Not any more.
- For her own prize, Kura brings in a volleyball with a face on it.
  Kura: Some might call him Wilson. This is... Wilson!
  Jeremy: Spoiler alert, we know what happened to Wilson.
  Josh: Oh, I... haven't seen it.
  Paul E: He went on to make some of the greatest tennis rackets ever.
- Chris brings a boat. Rather than praising his ingenuity, the other contestants all point out how absurd it is that he brought a boat with oars, rather than one with a sail, a motor, or something more powerful.
- When Jeremy ranks Josh lowly, saying he doesn't want to drink his piss:
  Josh: You don't have to drink my urine, you can drink yours!
  Jeremy: I don't want to drink mine either!
  Josh: You can drink Paul's!
  - This then begins a long digression in the studio over what Paul's piss would taste like.
The cast are asked to complete the Fortune Trail (a series of unlucky actions) and then flip 5 heads in a row.
- Paul E is the only contestant to search for $13 exactly rather than trying to find the one lucky penny. In the studio, Paul reveals that not only did Paul E do that, he also only ended up finding $6.45.
- Chris breezes through most of the tasks by simply doing the unlucky actions.
  Chris: Superstition's for cucks.
- On a similar theme, this quote from Josh's attempt:
  Josh: I'm not superstitious about what could go wrong.
  Paul: Car crash on the way home.
  Josh: Jesus Christ, Paul.
- Josh's attempt is conspicuously left for last, and it doesn't disappoint. He gets 3 heads in a row initially, yelling piss when he gets a tails. The incidental music builds to a climax after what was clearly a while as he gets 4 in a row... only to get a tails, causing him to kick the leg off a small plastic table. After another close call, he throws the remnants of the table into a fence. When he finally gets the 5 heads, he is so completely stunned he seems to have a personal crisis. In the studio it's revealed he took 145 flips, 59 more than the next closest.
- It's also revealed in the studio, had any of the contestants chosen to avoid the unlucky action and instead performed the slower choice, they would've found a coin with heads on both sides. It's especially tragic for Josh, who starts screaming incoherently, since he said he'd rather be lazy than do the walking required to find the coin.
The Who's On First-style routine that almost develops when Justine sees the telephone box in the lab:
Justine: Ooh, this is very Doctor Who.
Paul: Doctor who?
Justine: Yeah, Doctor Who.
Paul: Which doctor though?
Justine: Not a witch doctor.
Paul: No, which doctor?
Justine: I can see what you're doing Paul, but I simply cannot be bothered in engaging with this.
- This task is to come up with an original superhero and save Paul.
- Paul Ego squeezes himself into a very skintight green morph suit. When he walks into the living room, he asks Paul to check if any of his back is showing, then turns around to reveal that almost all of his back is showing.
  Paul E: If you think my back was bad you should've seen my neck, my pussy, and my crack.
- Paul's chosen superhero is Milk Man, who rides around on his cow Moovin ('like Marvin, but with moo') to save Paul as a 'calcium deficient weakling'. Unfortunately, the cow cannot move on its own, so after saving Paul Milk Man is unable to leave.
- Chris as the edgy Batman-style superhero 'The Goose', who heads off to rescue Paul from a 'poo lake'. His angsty honking noises as he pulls Paul to safety are hilarious.
- Josh putting copious black makeup around his eyes to frame them, which gets him accused by Paul of doing blackface, which he awkwardly tries to deny. Even funnier when you realise his superhero name was Intolerance Man.
- Intolerance Man's job is to save Paul from eating foods he's allergic to. What is especially funny about his VT is how he dramatically bursts out of a pile of leaves, and then just gets in the car and drives to where Paul is. Jeremy in particular completely cracks up at this.
  Jeremy: (Corpsing) Why don't you live in your car?!
- Kura as Dr Dicksaver, who saves people from being dicks.
  Paul: I've read all of these books.
  Kura: Fuck off!
- Justine as 'Reef Jussie', who lights the way to help stranded ships get to safety. Not only do most of the other contestants point out she is just doing the job of a normal lighthouse, her torch also burns out very quickly so isn't really that useful at all.
Kura's disastrous attempt in the 'pat Paul on the back' task. Unlike most of the others who try to hide themselves from Paul's camera, Kura initially just tries to go across the open field, and gets spotted in the middle of it immediately. She then seemingly tries to 'camouflage' herself by putting leaves under her armpit, and actually manages to make it to the house, only to get spotted mere metres from Paul and have to start again. Finally she ends up just getting in the car and driving to the house, but all in all her effort took 44 minutes, twice as long as anybody else.
The live task involves following instructions to swap several items between pockets. Kura is a bit confused though:
Kura: Why did we have to wear overalls? (it suddenly dawns) Pockets? Oh, pockets!
- Chris putting most of his stuff in one pocket.

Butt Heavy

Best Friends

Well, Alright!

Wet Ass Cutlery

Season 4

A Love Bomb

I'm A Therapist, Not A Greengrocer

The introduction to teams somehow manages to be the most awkward in the series so far.
- After seeing each other, Mel goes in for a hug, only for Ray to be somewhat reluctant.
  Mel: Ray O'Leary. (goes in for a hug)
  Ray: Melanie Bra- Oh, you want a hug? Okay
  Mel: That's not a very nice way to say it.
- But its trios meeting that takes the cake. Since Bubbah didn't realize there was team tasks, she gets completely confused when Dai appears. Bubbah then assumes both Karen and Dai are Maori, despite Dai trying to claim otherwise multiple times.
  Dai: Bubbah! I feel like you're not listening to me. I'm white!
And as for the task proper involves the teams having to build a windmill as long as the they have toast cooking in a toaster.
- Bubbah, Dai and Karen work well together and is able to produce a well constructed windmill.
  - As the task goes on, Dai gets increasingly excited about timing the toast.
  Dai: Heinnie's horny for the clock baby.
  - At one point, Bubbah leaves to get more gear, only to return into the room by frightening everyone with the airhorn.
  Dai: Thats very triggering because that's what my wife use for the start of love making.
- In contrast to the trio, Ray and Mel are dysfunctional.
  - Mel leaves to find equipment before the two can come up with a plan and Ray panics and puts the second slice toast soon after Paul puts the first slice down. This results in Mel not having enough time to put a third toast down after the second one, leaving Mel and Ray with a windmill consisting of two straws glued together.
In the task to blow out the candle in the most eloquent way possible without using your lungs.
- For the second time in two episodes, Bubbah accidently completes the task during a practice. In this case she was intending to put it out with a dance, but accidently swats the flame out before she can start.

Everyone Is Just A Teal Dress

More Licky Licky

Your Hand Can Do A Better Job

There Had To Be Blood

A Pretty Skux Cartwheel

Cigarettes And Steroids

Truffle Pig

Where Is Scorpio?

Like Series 9 and 15 in the UK version, the cast decide on special costumes for the studio segment. This time they are wearing each others video costumes. At one point Ray claims that Bubbah's outfit is taking over his personality.

Funny / Taskmaster (NZ)

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Funny / Taskmaster (NZ)

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