‘You attention-seeking shithouse'

The Weekly Trivia File

‘I don't think a comedian should even be concerned with being cool or sexy - as soon as you do, you aren't a comedian any more.’ Ricky Gervais.

Kevin Eldon says one of the worst gigs he ever performed was a corporate do for an IT firm’s Christmas party, in a room above a pub. He had to follow the managing director, who got loads of laughs with his office in-jokes. But 90 seconds in to his set Eldon lost the audience, as they started talking among themselves. ‘Hey, watch this,’ he told them cheerfully, momentarily getting their attention back. He then purposefully walked out of the room, down the stairs and ran out into the street, yelling ‘Twats! Twaaaaaaaaats!’ as he ‘giggled like a tiny girl’.

Kanye West says he’s a big fan of Alan Carr. ‘I don’t always know what he is talking about – but the voice and all that is so funny.

On the other hand, Carr is no fan of the people of Maidstone, reminiscing about the Kent town’s now defunct Up The Creek club, he said: ‘I’m pleased to say it’s closed down now. They hated me. I never lasted more than seven minutes. It was full of homophobic narrow-minded morons. It wasn’t just me, if you were black or Asian you got racist abuse, if you were a woman you got “show us your tits”. I better be careful in case I’m doing a book signing there… but I suppose I’ll be all right as half the people in Maidstone can’t read…’

‘You attention-seeking shithouse. Were you not fucking loved enough as a child?’ Peter Kay on stage with the Kaiser Chiefs this week:

As a German comedian working in Britain, Henning Wehn encounters his fair share of problems. At one gig in Bilericay, Essex, the promoter went around the audience during the interval handing out gaffer tape. When Wehn came on, they had all stuck Hitler moustaces on. ‘I think they were getting some shoe polish for the black comedian they had coming the following week,’ he later joked.

Australian comic Adam Hills this week learned the hard way to always be careful what you ask an audience. And you should be warned, this is truly horrible, so proceed with caution. On his Facebook page, Hills tells of how, in Edinburgh, he found a forensics investigator in the audience, so the question inevitably came up: What's the weirdest death you've ever seen? The punter told of a drug-addicted man who had run out of veins to inject, so he began injecting heroin into his penis. Eventually those veins collapsed, so the only way he could get aroused was to inject cocaine into the same veins. But this causes the flesh to die, turn black and drop off. Eventually, he died, although he continued to have sex with his junkie girlfriend until his death. Two weeks later, she died of septicaemia, but no one was sure how. So the forensics investigator was called in and discovered the cause… the end of his penis had fallen off inside her. Nice.

As part of the Reading Comedy Festival, local radio newsreader Molly tried her hand at stand-up, with all the comics who had been interviewed on 2-Ten Radio contributing one of their gags to deliver. But the one Paddy McGuinness offered wasn’t his to give – but one of Tim Vine’s. Naughty Paddy.