WTF: Weekly Trivia File

• At the Just For Laughs festival in Montreal, comic Lewis Black said he once had a TV executive reject a comedy show he was working on because it was ‘too funny’

• How would a hard-pressed newspaper picture editor illustrate a story that suggests people with big heads cope better with Alzheimer’s? Why, with a picture of Dara O Briain, of course, whose massive cranium may yet prove a blessing… To add insult to injury, the advert next to the story on the Irish Herald’s website is for Anusol, the pile relief cream.

• Patrick Kielty says he almost died – in the same helicopter as Neil Armstrong. The pair were on their way to a corporate gig when the chopper got into' real difficulty'. 'When you see a man who managed to land on the moon look worried, you know you’re in trouble,' Kielty said.

• Now we at Chortle freely admit we let the odd typing error slip through. But for garbling English we really have to hand it to the guys who wrote this supposed tribute to Mitch Hedberg.

• Shazia Mirza is renting her own flat for the Edinburgh Festival this year instead of sharing. This earth-shattering piece of news is the lead item in the diary column of today’s Independent, the only newspaper that dare report the truth…

• Robin Ince says his worst gig at the Belfast Empire when he first started. ‘The Introduction was "and now, from London” and the entire crowd started booing before they said my name,’ he recalls. ‘I was determined to stay on stage for my allotted time even though they booed through the whole set and threw whatever they could get their hands on at me.’

• Forget the Sydney Opera House, Ularu or the Great Barrier reef, Bill Bailey this week did the ultimate Australian tourist trip... he walked down the oldest spiral staircase in Tasmania.

• Now *this* is how to heckle:
  Harry Hill has contributed a strange idea to a new art project. Visitors to the Unrealised Potential project at Manchester’s Cornerhouse are invited to make themselves into works of art using suggestions contributed by artists. To take up Hill’s idea recreate the Beatles’ 1965 album Help! – but wearing Nazi uniforms and singing in German accents. Curator Mike Chavez-Dawson says it would be ‘interesting’ to see it done.

• Russell Brand has been voted the ultimate eccentric celebrity ahead of Boy George ... who, let's not forget, imprisoned a rentboy in his home and beat him with a chain.

• Top Tweets of the week:
  Jason Manford: ‘Trying to trick my girls into thinking it's nighttime by putting a sheet over their cot. Much like you'd do with a parrot.’
  Gary Delaney: ' Cleopatra's Needle. Good point, well made.’
  Patton Oswalt: ‘Time for sleep. Or, as I call it, ridin' the Nightmare Bus into Piss-Sheet City.’

SOURCES: Hollywood Reporter, Irish Herald, The Independent, Seedol,com, The Independent, Metro, Twitter, YouTube, Manchester Evening News, Femalefirst.co.uk, Twitter

Published: 16 Jul 2010