WTF: Weekly Trivia File

• 'I'm terrified of British audiences. I could sell dog shit on a paper plate to American audiences and they clap like fucking retards.' Doug Stanhope.

• Jack Dee trended on Twitter this week... for nothing he’d done, but because so many tennis fans were commenting on how BBC commentator Tim Henman sounded exactly like him.

• Rory Bremner has spoken of how he quit Mock The Week because he felt old and ‘completely intimidated’ by the younger comics – especially Dara O’Briain. ‘"He's just so good and I really struggle with my confidence up against turbo-charged young comedians like him,’ the political impressionist said. ;I suppose I thought I was a bit of a waste of space so I dropped out of the show after the second season There's constantly younger guys coming up, I didn't feel I had a place. Guys like Dara and Jimmy Carr are just so quickwitted, it's hard to keep up.’

• ‘I paid £40 for this ticket. You sing it, bitch!’ Is THAT ‘singalong’ gag – nicked by Australia’s Got Talent contestant Jordan Paris and told by Lee Mack, Steve Harvey, Micky Flanagan and others – the hackiest joke of 2011? Here’s a student comedian doing the same gag in Leicester...
  

• Don’t expect Sandra Bullock to appear in Ricky Gervais’s new comedy Life Is Short, despite what you may have read in the papers yesterday. The BBC tells us it’s not true.

• Dom Joly has rescheduled some gigs on his current tour following the death of his father at the age of 88. Yesterday’s show at Huddersfield was moved to July 26, and tonight’s show planned for The Forum, in Barrow will now take place on July 23. He Tweeted: ‘Many apologies for change.’ Joly and his father had been largely estranged since his teenage rebellious patch, but patched things up in recent years. Five years ago, Joly wrote in his newspaper column: ‘My father, who fought in the Fleet Air Arm in the Second World War, has his own extraordinary tales that he rarely shares with anyone. It makes me very proud and not a little humbled by what they all went through, and it becomes clearer to me now how my adolescent gesturing and cod-rebellions must have looked to those who had known real hardship.’

• Comedy agent Mike Leigh is recruiting comedians for the annual comics v Stenhousemuir FC football match at the Fringe. The event’s been happening for 16 years, and for the record the stats are Played 16, Won Zero, Drawn 1, Lost 15.

• Want to see Kevin Eldon and a puppet cow (voiced by Showstoppers! comedian Ruth Bratt) in a music video in support of the campaign against mega-dairies? Course you do...
  

• It’s probably the perfect condition for a comedian to have... Fringe performer Gill Smith has been told she has a little-known disorder called ‘amusia’. Sadly, it’s nothing to do with being funny, but an inability to process music properly, a sort of musical equivalent of dyslexia.

• Jerry Seinfeld has put his Colorado mountain home on the market ... for a mere $18.3 million. The 26-acre property has 11-bedrooms and 14 bathrooms. This bit of banter at a comedy show in Largo, Florida, starts off rather dull, but turns pretty nasty. Who would have thought engaging with the guy who boasts of spending all day, every day in a bar could possibly go wrong?
  

• Tweets of the week:
  Joel Morris ( @gralefrit): Brooks or NoTW? Murdoch's ditched the wrong red top.
  Graham Goring (@GrahamGoring): Waiting in for a late-running quantum mechanic. Phoned to say he knows where he is, but not how fast he can get here.
  Tony Cowards ( TonyCowards): This afternoon I'm going to recreate famous scenes from "Raiders of the Lost Ark", right, who wants to get the ball rolling?

SOURCES: Such Small Portions, Twitter, Sunday World , YouTube, Chortle, Twitter/The Independent On Sunday, Chortle, YouTube, blog.thejohnfleming.com, Wall Street Journal, YouTube, Twitter

Published: 8 Jul 2011