WTF: Weekly Trivia File

• ‘As a music performer you stand on the stage saying, “Look at me. Look at me. Fuck me I’m so sexy.” As a comedian you stand on stage saying, ‘Oh this awful thing happened…Don’t look at me.”’ Russell Brand

• Ricky Gervais decided he had to lose weight after scoffing 11 sausages in one sitting. He said: ‘I couldn't stop eating them. I felt really ill and had to lay there for a couple of hours, like a snake just trying to digest it. I thought, Right, that's ridiculous”.’

• Talking of chubby comics, James Corden has turned down repeated offers to take a half-time penalty at his beloved West Ham because he knows he’d be taunted from the terraces. He said ‘Personally, I don't like the thought of 36,000 people singing 'Who ate all the pies?’

• Who is this Tory standing against Chancellor Alastair Darling in Edinburgh South West? Could it be We Are Klang’s Steve Hall? No, but Jason Rust doesn’t half look like him…
  

• A Barry Island store has started selling seaside rock with Rob Brydon’s Gavin & Stacey line: ‘Bryn: It means hill in Welsh’ running though it.

• Russell Brand has a solution to save the music industry: more stars on heroin. The former addict said: 'The top of the hit parade would look very different if teenyboppers were exposed to heroin. It would weed a lot of them out...I don't think Justin Bieber could handle Syd Barrett's habit. A lot of people in their journey to rehab overdose, and then, perhaps, we could be spared their awful music. It's Darwinian. It's the law .

• When twats go to comedy clubs...
  

• When stand-up Nick Thune was bitten by a mosquito at the Melbourne comedy festival, fellow American comedians Arj Barker and Eddie Ifft decided to play a prank, putting a note under his hotel room door, saying: ‘Please be advised that a recent pest inspection of our hotel has revealed that this property has a low-to-medium-level infestation of the Victorian wallaby spider. Please note that that the wallaby spider's bite is NOT usually fatal.’ The note told him to search his linen and wardrobe to check for the fictional spider – even though it was sad to be the size of a pinhead and to report any rash to Michael Dwyer – aka stand-up Mickey D. The pranksters came clean… eventually.

• The readers of the Daily Mail were true to form after the paper claimed the character of Michael was to come out as gay on My Family. Extracts from the paper's online comment boards: 'Well I for one will be watching this show no more. It's a disgrace'; 'Yet again ruining a good series for the PC social engineering... why has TV been totally taken over by left wing idiots??'; 'Oh how PC - PATHETIC!'

• Al Murray says people like taking offence at comedy because it makes them look good. ‘What some critics are [really] saying is, “I don’t find that funny,” which sounds mean spirited and weak whereas, “I’m offended by that,” sounds positive and strong.’

SOURCES: Latinoreview.com, The Sun, Justin Lee Collins' Good Times, Chortle, This is South Wales, Rolling Stone, YouTube, Melbourne Age, Daily Mail, Metro

Published: 16 Apr 2010