The week's comedy trivia

• We’ve found out more than we can possibly want to know about Alan Carr’s sex life this week, as he does the promotional tour for his C4 show. ‘If all the people came forward who I’ve had sex with, you’d think I’d had a gang bang in a circus,’ he said. Example? He once got off with a man who worked as a special-needs carer in Blackpool. He woke up the next morning to find the carer on one side of him - and his special-needs charge on the other. ‘I was so terrified I left my glasses behind and never went back for them,’ he says. We’ve also learned that Carr fancies rugby player Ben Cohen, saying: ‘ It doesn't matter about the personality. I've got enough for two people.’ And if he had to ‘choose between shagging a woman and getting shot, I'd shag Sarah Beeney’.

• Bill Cosby, 70, is apparently working on a rap album. But he promises State of Emergency will not contain any foul language, nor denigrate women.

• Irish comic Jimeoin says his worst gig was in Esperance, Western Australia, when he tried to defend the support act from a ‘man mountain’ called Ditchy who came onstage and tried to punch him. Jimeoin managed to hit the guy and a furious fight broke out – at one stage Ditchy tore a brick out of the theatre wall – until police came, called by theatre security, a 70-year-old guy called Neville, and ejected the violent heckler. In the second half, one of Ditchy’s mates stormed onstage and tried to hit Jimeoin with a bottle, but some of the police had stuck around so threw him out. Not to be deterred, he and his mates came back after the show. The comics hid backstage, and Jimeoin desperately held the stage door shut while they hammered at it. The police were called back and gave the comics a lift back to their motel – but as it was the only place to stay in town, Ditchy’s mates soon figured out where they were. ‘The ever-increasing baying mob surrounded our room,’ Jimeoin recalled. ‘We had to barricade ourselves inside with a chest of drawers pushed up against the door as these guys tried to break in. I have never been so frightened in my life.’

• Stand-up Paul Tonkinson nearly sustained a nasty injury while performing a Combined Services Entertainment gig for the troops in Iraq last week – and it had nothing to do with hostile forces. A practice ‘take cover’ alert was called two minutes before the start of the stand-up show, in which everyone on the Basra camp – including fellow comics Colin Cole, Rudi Lickwood, and Tom Stade – hurled themselves under cover while donning a flack jacket. Tonkinson said: ‘I learned that keeping your keys in your front pocket is not a good move as it nearly ended my hopes of having any more children.’

• Russell Brand once glued dog hair to his forehead to look like Vanilla Ice.

• And he upset engineers on his Radio 2 show when he got caught short mid-broadcast – and decided to piss into a paper cup. Even though he was pre-recording the show, he couldn’t be doing with visiting the toilet, and ‘whipped out his Johnson and took a whaz into this beaker’. A technician reportedly got angry about the threat to his equipment – and his sensibilities – and in reply Brand flung a CD at him, like a frisbee. Brand’s getting quite a reputation for his toilet habits; having done the same trick before on stage – and threatening to do it on the set of Have I Got News For You.

• David Walliams has been branded Greedy after grabbing two goody bags at a cystic fibrosis charity event on Thursday night. Still, he helped raise £2million – so you could probably forgive him. His date was Natatlie Imbruglia, if you need to know such things…

• Victoria Wood one told Jo Brand: ‘I wish I was a bit ruder, like you.’

• Stand-up Bethany Black is hoping her forthcoming visit to the Leicester Comedy Festival goes a bit better than her last visit to the East Midlands. Following a fraught, long-delayed air journey, made all the more stressful with children playing up and her dread of flying, she was delighted to land at East Midlands airport. Disembarking onto the Tarmac, she lit up a cigarette – only for security to swoop on her, dragging her through the terminal to an interrogation room where she was questioned for 90 minutes and threatened with anti-terror legislation that could have mean she could have been detained without charge for 24 hours. Eventually, the police showed up, told her that her actions were stupid and dangerous – and let her go. Oh then she got back to find her car had been broken into. Happy holidays…

• Red Dwarf star Chris Barrie came across like a Daily Mail editorial when pondering the idea of a Spitting Image comeback this week. ‘I think something could be lost because of the PC brigade,’ he grumbled. ‘We didn’t have that the first time around so it would be interesting to see how thwarted we would be.’

SOURCES: The Sun/Independent/Northampton Chronicle, Allhiphop.com, timeout.com, Chortle, The People, Independent, thelondonpaper, Daily Telegraph, Chortle, The Sun

Published: 1 Feb 2008