The week's comedy trivia

• ‘If you talk to someone and say life is meaningless, they’ll either get concerned or not want to hang out with you any more. If you say it to an audience, then they laugh.’ Simon Amstell

• Yesterday’s Chris Langham verdict was delayed by nearly four hours - because a juror overslept. He did not turn up for the 9.45am start of deliberations, so police checked hospitals and even CCTV footage at the train station he usually used. Officers knocked at his door every 30 minutes until the judge then ordered the door be forced. At 12.30pm the juror was found asleep. And he wasn’t even drunk.

• Dom Joly says that at Toronto’s Pearson airport, immigration officers were happy to stamp the homemade passport for his daughter’s toy panda – but on returning Heathrow, the officials were much more surly. ‘I thought for one terrible moment that Pandy might be headed straight to Guantanamo as he muttered something about “forgeries ...very serious affair”.’

• American comic Louis CK on dying onstage: ‘You want to get offstage. But you also don’t want to get offstage till you can solve it. Millions of things race through your head, but it’s mostly visceral. It’s mostly in your gut: Your stomach gets a shitty feeling, your throat constricts, you can’t breathe in a natural rhythm, you’re too aware of how you’re breathing. It’s like being high, but bad. You feel your pulse in your head.’

• Mike Reid sent a text to his agent David Hahn shortly before his death saying: ‘Aliens are abducting men with huge willies. You will be fine but I am just texting to say goodbye’.

• Former Diff’rent Strokes star Gary Coleman has been given a ticket by Utah police for disorderly conduct after a row with a woman. A couple of witnesses saw the former child star – now 39 - smacking his steering wheel during the tiff, in which his car was blocking a car park exit. ‘At one point he exited his vehicle, waving his arms, yelling and screaming,’ said one of the cops.

• Russell Brand had mixed fortunes filming the Hollywood movie Forgetting Sarah Marshal in Hawaii. ‘I had to do horseriding and surfing, which I was crap at, and a sex scene, which I was obviously superb at,’ he says.

• Guests at Steve Martin’s wedding last week had no idea they were going to attend the ceremony. Such is the comic’s desire to shy away from the limelight, he told friends to come to his Los Angeles home for an intimate dinner party – and it was only when they arrived they discovered he was tying the knot to Anne Stringfield, a journalist 26 years his junior.

• The build-up to Edinburgh is a hard time for any comic, so spare a thought for Martha McBrier, who was diagnosed as having a brain tumour just before her show So You Think You’re a Good Heckler, opens. She said: ‘I have a slow growing benign brain tumour which grows on your eighth cranial nerve. I have decided to embrace the tumour and consider myself lucky that I did not get something commonplace and dreary. I feel very special for this.’

• And we’re always quick to tease others who make mistakes. So apologies for anyone surprised by the headline that appeared on Chortle for about 20 minutes on Monday suggesting Harry Hill was ‘raped’ for clips he showed in TV Burp. Regulators might be clamping down on dodgy TV, but it hasn’t quite come to that yet…

• SOURCES: Sunday Times, The Times, The Spectator, Esquire, The Sun, TMZ.com, The Sun, E!, Chortle, Chortle

• Published: 3 Aug 2007