WTF: Weekly Trivia File

• ‘I’m actually a true comedian at heart,’ says, erm, Mariah Carey.

• Chris Byrne, the man who Frankie Howerd regarded as his adopted son, has been banned from public office for 18 months, after wasting around £160,000 of taxpayers' money by making 177 complaints against parish council colleagues. Byrne, who still lives in Howerd’s old home in Wavering Down, Somerset, triggered the costly investigations after alleging, among other things, that he was discriminated against on grounds of his homosexuality and dyslexia. None of the 177 complaints were upheld by Sedgemoor District Council.

• Lee Mack's opening line at Andover The Lights, where he played four nights this week: 'This is the first time I've played anywhere named after a hold-up in a chandelier shop.'

• Lots of 'Ricky Gervais announces world comedy tour' headlines this week as he announced dates in – wait for it – TWO countries. He did say he planned to do more, promising the first 'world comedy tour', conveniently ignoring the fact that the likes of Eddie Izzard, Chris Rock and Russell Peters regularly play all over the place. In 2008/9, for example, Peters played Australia, America, Canada, Norway, Sweden, India, The Philippines, Singapore, United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, Bahrain, Jordan and the UK. Kinda puts Gervais's six dates in three cities in context...

• Meanwhile, Gervais has quit Twitter after less than a month, saying: ‘I am sorry, but I am going to stop these tweets because I don't see the point. There's something a bit undignified about adults using it. Particularly celebrities who seem to be showing off by talking to each other in public. If I want to tell a friend, famous or otherwise what I had to eat this morning, I'll text them.’ Mind you, Gervais hasn’t been shy about using his blog to the same effect, boasting a million visits a week for such entries as: ‘In all, I ate nine sausages.’

• Iain Lee has also backed away from Twitter, at least partially, after getting a torrent of abuse for his role in new ad-agency sitcom The Persuasionists. An hour after the show went out on BBC Two on Wednesday night, he tweeted: ‘There are only so many times I can be called a cunt on Twitter in one day. Just doing my job. With that, I delete twitteriffic from my phone.’

• An actual adult man thought this was a good idea to put on the internet:
  

• Stand-up Lucy Porter has been complaining that marrying character comic Justin Edwards has left her with a huge hole in her material, now she's had to ditch all the gags about being a singleton.

• Have we mentioned that Chortle was ten years old this year? Here is roughly what the front page looked like in June 2000, thanks to the Wayback Machine web archiving project, although a lot of the images have gone missing.. Click here to see some of the front pages through the ages.

• Simpsons fan Glyn Stott is going to celebrate the show’s 20th anniversary by watching all 451 episodes back-to-back. It will take him more than six days non-stop.

• John Oliver admits he’s ‘mystifyingly addicted’ to reality show Project Runaway. He sadi: ‘I'm embarrassed to admit this, but when [presenter] Tim Gunn was a guest on The Daily Show, I deliberately wore by best suit to impress him.’

SOURCES: Daily Star, The Times, Chortle, Chortle, Ricky Gervais.com, Twitter, YouTube, The Independent, Metro, Toronto Globe and Mail

Published: 15 Jan 2010