WTF: Weekly Trivia File

• Alan Carr gets so nervous before gigs that he often throws up before going on stage. He said: ‘On my last tour I was vomiting into a bucket at the Birmingham NEC.’

• Watching Comedy Central’s Dirty, Sexy, Funny, you might think Olivia Lee couldn’t be embarrassed... but she says her most painful memory was a romantic Valentine’s Day meal that went awry. She recalls: ‘The table was lit by candlelight and as I leant over the table to whisper sweet nothings into his ear my hair caught fire and went up in flames. It ruined the meal, the whole restaurant stank of burning hair, I broke up with the guy, and I had a bald patch for months after.’

• Michael McIntyre thinks the middle name of Katie Price’s boyfriend Alex Reid should be ‘I Can’t’.

• A comedian made a good-natured joke about a country, their leader made a good-natured comeback on radio. Media raves about ‘fury’ and ‘anger’, despite little evidence of same. Hurricane warning issued in teacup:
  

• While he was a young trainee at BBC Radio Cambridge, Chris Morris won himself something of a reputation as a technical troubleshooter. According to the new biography Disgusting Bliss, he came up with a particularly inventive solution when a retractable mast on their radio car froze solid and couldn’t send a signal back to base. A colleague recalls: ‘Legend has it that Morris climbed on top of the vehicle and pissed on the mast to release it.’

• Backstage at the Bloomsbury Theatre in London is a poster of Jimmy Carr… with a Hitler moustache drawn onto it.

• Katy Brand’s grandmother Violet wrote a book about how The Blitz affected Kent.

• Here’s a clip from a Finnish comedian trying stand-up in English – and you’ve gotta love the comment it attracted on YouTube: ‘ This is very good stand-up! In my home village in Russia, they never believed I could make it in the standing-upping business. But now, after 20 years, I have much money and many women! Good luck on your journey.’
  

• Jon Richardson had to miss a bunch of shows at the Melbourne Comedy Festival this week after being hospitalised for three days with pneumonia. But he’s recovered now and has just done his first show after ‘the unpleasantness’.

• Also from Melbourne, Sarah Millican Tweets: ‘I broke my vibrator and then got it working again my bashing it on the bedside cabinet. Are you listening, impotent men?’

SOURCES: The Sun, Sunday Mirror, Evening Standard, Daily Mail et al, Disgusting Bliss by Lucian Randall, Twitter, ThisIsKent, YouTube, Twitter, Twitter

Published: 1 Apr 2010