A briefcase full of pubes...

WTF: Weekly Trivia File

Bill Hicks would have been 50 today. In tribute, one of his anecdotes, plus another excuse to run *that* video of his run-in with a heckler. Hicks was once taking a summer course in Eastern Philosophy at the University of Houston with some less-motivated students. His professor enters the room and kicks off with the idea: ‘God is consciousness. We are all God trying to realise our full potential.’ A voice from the back the room yells back: ‘Do we need to know that? Is that gonna be on the quiz?’

Comic Jim Smallman has promised to tattoo the user names and profile pictures of three of his Twitter followers on to his arm. He has vowed get inked with the details of the best referrer and two other names at random if he can double his number of followers to 5,000 ‘even if it makes me look a dick’. The tattoos will be added to his gallery of body art that already includes such images as Ron Burgundy, a pair of trainers and video game characters Zelda, Chun-Li and a Pacman ghost. And it won’t be the first time he’s had a tattoo for a publicity stunt, either, as he has the title of his Edinburgh show Tattooligan inked across his stomach. He’s at @jimsmallman.

Hold on to your breakfast. If you haven’t already seen it Alan Carr has recreated Jodie Marsh’s bodybuilding pose for the current edition of Heat magazine. Click here if you feel up to it.

Meanwhile, Stewart Lee and Richard Herring are regretting stripping naked for their Nineties sketch show Fist Of Fun. The pair posed artfully for a couple of portraits that were shown briefly as subliminal flash frames in the first episode, too fast for viewers to really take in. But now it’s finally out on DVD, with its crisp freeze-frame technology. ‘Why were we naked? What were we thinking?’ Herring says on the DVD commentary, before asking Lee: ‘I can’t believe you did it. It’s not the sort of thing you do. It’s the sort of thing I do.‘ He added: ‘Now people have got DVDs.... people are going to be able to stop that and that’ll be them put up on the internet and flashed all over the world.’ Perish the thought.

Charlie Chuck once threw a briefcase full of his crab-ridden pubic hair out of the window of a moving car. According to the blog of his friend John Fleming, Chuck caught the lice while touring with a band as a teenager, and the doctor who gave him the ointment to treat it told him he had to shave himself... and he decided to ditch all the evidence as he drove along a country road near Lossiemouth. Only problem was he’d left his National Insurance card in the briefcase, so two weeks later got a call from the police saying they’d found his belongings...

PANTO CORNER: One year, Jim Davidson was once directing old-school Yorkshire comic Billy Pearce in Aladdin in Leeds, and was becoming increasingly frustrated at his reluctance to take instructions. Things came to a head when Davidson was trying to get him to kiss the princess at the end of the story. ‘He couldn’t grasp the fact that Aladdin was a love story and not just a vehicle for him to fuck about,‘ Davidson said on his blog this week. Getting exasperated, Davidson said to him: ‘Hang on a minute,’ and walked down the stairs, off the stage, down the aisle, into a cab, on to a plane and off the show.

Tweets of the week:
“Sebas” (@ OhLookBirdies ): I can't believe they fired me from the calendar factory after all the extra days I put in.
Alan Machnik (@Alan_Machnik): I just saw a group of children from the School for the Deaf doing a bit of carol signing.
Gary Delaney (@GaryDelaney): Eskimo intellectuals have 52 words for know.

SOURCES: Daily Mail, Daily Cougar/YouTube, Chortle, Heat, Chortle, blog.thejohnfleming.com, YouTube, Jim Davidson’s blog, Twitter

Published: 16 Dec 2011