The week's comedy gossip

• Sean Lock on people who should probably quit stand-up: ‘There are people that are definitely masochistic, who aren't funny and are just determined to become comedians. There's one woman in particular, I won't mention her name, but everyone sees it as almost self-harm, because it's so excruciating every time she gets on stage.’ Any guesses?

• American comics Jon Lovitz and Andy Dick have been involved in a punch-up at Hollywood's Laugh Factory. The two came to physical blows following a long-running feud that stems from the murder of Phil Hartman – who starred with both of them on the sitcom News Radio – by his drug-addled wife Brynn. Dick is said to have put ‘the Phil Hartman hex’ on Lovitz in a previous furious row which flared up again when they ran into each other this week. Following an exchange of words, Lovitz lost his temper, took Dick’s head by the hair and smashed it ‘four or five times’ on to the bar, until blood started pouring from his nose. Lovitz said: ‘All the comedians are glad I did it because this guy is an asshole.’ Lovitz believed Dick was ultimately to blame for Hartman’s death, because he gave Brynn cocaine after she had been clean for a decade, so getting her back on the drug. But then it was Hartman who gave his wife a gun…

• But as if to prove not all stand-ups are violent: David Cross was sucking at Jim Jeffries’ nipple within minutes of meeting at Paul Provenza’s Green Room show at Montreal.

• Griff Rhys-Jones knew when his sort of comedy had fallen out of favour at the BBC, when he proudly presented a ‘very funny’ sitcom script he had written to a commissioning editor. The man in suit told him: ‘It’s very male. Can a woman write it?’ ‘That’s difficult,’ Griff replied, ‘because I write it.’ At that point he remembers thinking: “Fuck them… You don’t want to end up like Dudley Moore, hanging round on the fringes until someone says, “OK, all is forgiven”.’

• Comic Kirsten O’Brien, who’s working on an Edinburgh show about her experiences as a kids’ TV presenter, once accepted a dinner date from a man she’d met on her radio show. She arrived at the address to find not only him there but also Dr Legg from Eastenders preparing a Burns Night supper. She says: ‘When I went to the loo I looked in the bathroom cabinet there were lots of headache tablet boxes but no drugs. I’m presuming he pinched the prop stuff off the set of his EastEnders surgery.”

• New York comedian Mark Malkoff has visited every Starbucks in Manhattan - all 171 of them - in just 24 hours. He spent $369 buying something in each branch, including at least 50 caffeinated drinks

• Hugh Dennis has completed the even more gruelling 200km Etape Du Tour, the amateur leg of the Tour de France, in 11 hours and 7 minutes – a whole hour ahead of the lorry which scoops up the riders that are too slow. He said of the race, which takes in five peaks of the High Pyrenees: ‘It was hot enough at one to point to melt the tarmac on the road and it took me nearly 9 hours to catch up with a French cyclist with only one leg, but all in all a very good day’

SOURCES: Derby Telegraph, New York Post, Chortle, Times, New York Daily News, Chortle

Published: 20 Jul 2007