The week's comedy trivia

• Ricky Gervais has put up a £1,000 reward to find a neighbour’s pet dog.

• Overheard on a train in Yorkshire. 'I love Peter Kay. I much prefer Northern comedy to Southern comedy. I think the reason Southerners aren't so funny is - and I don't mean nothing by this - because there are more foreigners down there.'

• There’s a bloke who works in Sheffield kebab shop Chubbys who’s called Omid Djalili. The more famous namesake met him after popping in for a post-gig chicken shish last week.

• Is this comedy? Ray Peacock spent the best part of five minutes viciously hurling bags of Revels chocolate at a special-needs teenager for his headline set at the Chortle student comedy gig in Newcastle. Although the victim of this pummelling appeared willing, he later confessed he had dyspraxia – the ‘clumsy child syndrome’ which means he couldn’t catch or deflect any of the sponsor’s products he was being aggressively pelted with…

• Harry Enfield is said to have a character called Paddy the Paedophile in his new BBC comedy series – until someone told him it might not be such a good idea.

• Stephen Merchant has been asked to pose naked for a magazine centrefold. But, unsurprisingly, he turned down the request from Cosmopolitan. ‘It's not going to happen,’ he said. ‘It would come back to haunt me as soon as it was published. I'm not sure whether I want my [body] seen by the photographer, never mind the nation's lovelies.’

• Visitors staying at the Leicester Comedy Festival’s official hotel, the Belmont House Great Western, last week were surprised to find themselves sharing the venue with something of an incompatible booking after Christian Voice took one of the hotel’s conference rooms

• Griff Rhys Jones wanted to name the first volume of his autobiography Everything I Can Actually Remember – and a followu-up called Hang On, I've Just Remembered a Bit More.

SOURCES: The Sun, Chortle New Statesman, Chortle, PopBitch, Contactmusic.com, Chortle, London Evening Standard

Published: 23 Feb 2007