The week's comedy trivia

• Robin Williams regularly receives phone calls from female fans mistaking him for Robbie Williams.

• According to the website of Hollywood trade magazine Variety, comics attracting the most buzz at Montreal’s Just For Laughs festival last week included Dane Cook, who wasn’t there, and Bill Hicks, who’s ever so slightly dead. Let no one say these TV people don’t have their finger on the pulse of stand-up… Here is the story.

• Vic Reeves on The Simpsons: "It's the funniest thing on TV, funnier than my shows were.’

• Russell Brand is begging neighbours in Hampstead, North London, to sell him spare parking permits as he has so many visitors. He joked: ‘I’m living in a grim half-life, chatting to people through car windows and curtailing my afternoon liaisons.’

• After being linked to Steve Coogan and Noel Fielding, Courtney Love is now said to have her sights set on David Walliams. She apparently wants him to star in her new film about Nirvana - and wants to ‘get her claws stuck into him.’ Fact: Love once said: ‘Really good comedians are sometimes more rock 'n' roll than rock 'n' rollers.’

• Nick Hancock: ‘When I first started doing stand-up, the idea you could be a professional comedian was not possible. These days you get comedy listings in the papers, there’s a great raft of panel games you can go on, and I’m fairly sure you can study it at university. That idea would’ve seemed alien back then. You only did stand-up because you were compelled to.’

• Message sent out by Amazon.co.uk: ‘As someone who has purchased or rated books by Ricky Gervais, you might like to know that Sports Journalism: A Multimedia Primer will be released on 30 July 2007.’ Huh?

• ‘You have a better chance of stopping a serial killer than a serial thief in comedy’. US comic David Brenner

SOURCES: ContactMusic.com, Variety, Derby Evening Telegraph, The Sun, Daily Star, Sunday Mirror, Amazon, LA Times

Published: 27 Jul 2007