The week's comedy trivia

• ‘I’m one of the few people who went to rehab to wean myself off God.’ Brendon Burns

• Dom Joly went to school with Osama Bin Laden. He said: ‘It sounds like a joke but it isn't. I grew up in the Lebanon and went to the same school Osama Bin Laden did. When I was eight he would have been in his final year but it's possible we wandered past each other in the corridor. I've tried finding him on Friends Reunited - but with no luck’

• This is probably one of the oddest and pointless bits of showbiz memorabilia since – well, the prostate of Dame Edna Everage’s fictional husband we mentioned last week. Going on sale on eBay on Monday – a 1995 Nissan 100 NX Pacific that Harry Hill has scratched his signature into. Promoter Joel Sanders, who runs the Comedy Bunker in Ruislip, Middlesex, invited the TV Burp star to deface his vehicle to help him flog it. Here’s the evidence of Hill doing it:

• Talking of comedy eBay auctions, Ross Noble is auctioning off this massive – and we do mean massive – poster of his Noodlemeister tour for charity here; while Scottish stand-up Janey Godley is flogging a painting she created for Arthur Smith’s Arthurart exhibition here. Bids currently stand at £200.

• Bob Mills' stepmother dubbed the voice of Tripitaka in Monkey.

• Alan Carr may be gay, but there’s one woman who’s caught his fancy: Property Ladder host Sarah Beeney. ‘I think she looks great in a hard hat – I’ve got a bit of a crush on her,’ he said: ‘My spare bedroom’s done up like a shrine to Sarah Beeney.’

• Stand-up Paul Thorne got whacked in the head on stage this week – by another act. Newcomer Solomon Anker was taking part in the notoriously brutal gong show at London’s Comedy Store on Monday, and didn’t take too well to being voted off by the braying audience. He wouldn’t leave the stage, even when his microphone was turned off, and tried to use compere Thorne’s to keep talking. When he said no, Anker slapped him across the back of the head, sparking what one witness called ‘mayhem involving bouncers’. Don’t expect to see Abker headlining the Store for a while yet.

• Paul O'Grady is learning to thatch roofs.

• Irritating American comic Dane Cook says: ‘I have some crazy ass Looney Tunes fans. I've gotten all the groupies. I'm talking about photos of the girls doing the Sufi [a Vanilla-Ice-style hand gesture that’s something of a visual catchphrase for him], naked, standing in a tub of pudding... mental craziness. I have to go under aliases now at the hotels, because last year I had a girl show up nude at my door at like two in the morning. She was kicking my door naked. She was like, “Oh yeah, I want to bag you Dane Cook.” And I opened the door like slightly and she was literally naked, screaming “Oh yeah” in the hallway.’

• Ed Byrne is running the Dublin marathon next month. Click here to sponsor him.

• Ross Noble on whether he would ever move from stand-up to acting: ‘I wouldn't mind playing an alien, especially if I got to wear some sort of prosthetic head...’

• Scottish comic Karen Dunbar always carries a ‘gratitude stone’ with her – she says it’s basically ‘a wee stone that I picked up from my front drive. Each time I touch it when I go into my bag, I remind myself to be grateful for something’.

• Alan Davies on his alleged sex appeal: ‘Someone threw a bra at me at a gig in Lewisham once, but I think that was an act of hostility rather than a sexual advance.’

SOURCES: The Times, Chortle, Chortle, PopBitch, The Mirror, The Sun, Chortle, The People, Contactmusic.com, Chortle, Manchester Evening News, The Scotsman, Sunday Mirror

Published: 28 Sep 2007