The week's comedy trivia

• ‘My physique is basically down to 20 years of eating a lot of cheese.’ Ricky Gervais

• Sacha Baron Cohen has reportedly become a father, after his 31-year-old actress girlfriend Isla Fisher gave birth to a baby girl in the early hours of this morning. But her ‘people’ have not yet confirmed the news.

• The ever-sensitive Frankie Boyle on why he quit his former job in mental health support: ‘If you can’t get them to wipe their own arse, you’re pissing in the wind trying to get them to make fairy cakes.’

• Poor Rory Bremner: ‘I had just refined Ming's voice and he goes and resigns. I'm like the ITN man who spent years getting the name of an African dictator right and when he did, they shot him.’

• Russell Brand will be seen ringing his dad in his new Channel 4 series Ponderland – to ask how brown his penis is.

• Former Roseanne star John Goodman has been treated for alcoholism at a rehab clinic in the US, saying he ‘voluntarily took the necessary steps to remain sober for the rest of my life’.

• Ray Pack comic Joey Bishop, who died yesterday, was one of the few Frank Sinatra associates who could joke about the Boss. One line he used on stage was: ‘He spoke to me backstage. He said, “Get out of the way”.' When supporting Sinatra at the Copacabana in New York in 1954, Bishop’s act was interrupted by Marilyn Monroe making a dramatic entrance into the audience. She wove her way through the tables in an ostentatious full-length, white ermine coat until she found her seat. Keen to get on with the show after the disruption, Bishop won the audience back with the ad lib: ‘Marilyn, I told you to wait in the truck.’

• Jack Dee says appearing on the first Celebrity Big Brother was ‘a reckless decision that I wouldn’t take again’. He added: ‘It was very difficult for my wife having the press outside the door. My main regret, however, is that ithas become such a shameful, despicable show and I don’t like having my name connected to it.’

• Airport owner BAA booked Pam Ann for a management conference – but obviously didn’t look beyond the air stewardess character and ask about the material, which ‘stupefied’ delegates were said to have found too ‘lewd’. ‘It became clear it was inappropriate and the act was pulled swiftly,’ BAA told the Times business diary. ‘An apology was issued to those who may have been offended.’

• Jerry Seinfeld was once an illegal street vendor, selling cheap jewellery on the streets of New York. He said: ‘It was a very proud moment in my parents' lives. I graduated college and a week later I'm running from police in Manhattan.’

• Mel Smith says he has a strange relationship with Not The Nine O’Clock News co-host Pamela Stephenson, now the psychologist wife of Billy Connolly. ‘The last time I saw her she was a little bit full of herself with me, as if we'd never been in a comedy show together,’ he said. ‘It's odd, isn't it?’

• Daniel Kitson won’t sell scripts of his storytelling shows to TV because ‘acting is for losers’ and he would hate thespians ’trampling their cloven actor hooves over my pure, virginal narrative’.

• Ruby Wax says she once saw somebody having a heart attack in the frozen food section of a grocery store, but her shouts for help were completely ineffective. ‘Everybody just laughed at me as soon as I opened my mouth,’ she said. ‘They didn't take me at all seriously.’

SOURCES: London Lite, Sydney Morning Herald, Chortle, Daily Mail, Time Out, BBC News, New York Times/Baltimore Sun, Readers’ Digest, The Times , Parade, Daily Telegraph, The Melbourne Age, Daily Telegraph

Published: 19 Oct 2007