Amazon takes no shit

Company censors Brendon Burns DVD: WTF (Weekly Trivia File)

Remember the censorship row over show titles at the Edinburgh Fringe this year? Well now Amazon have baned the title of Brendon Burns’ new DVD – because it contains the word ‘shit’. This is apparently more offensive than the fact the company pays no corporation tax on its £3.3billion-a-year earnings. The company has asterixed out the final word in the show’s title: Y'Know – Love ‘n’ God ‘n’ Metaphysics ‘n’ Shit as it ‘does not meet guidelines’. The sleeve of the DVD, out on November 19, has also been Photoshopped to avoid offence. Other items that are available from Amazon that somehow avoided the censor's pencil include the DVD 18 Filthy Fuck Films, much of the back catalogue of the band Anal Cunt, and a T-shirt with the slogan: I Will Not Keep Calm And You Can Fuck Off.

US comic Katt Williams got booed off the stage in Denver last night after he launched his comedy show with ‘weird raps about killing people and killing himself’. Amid the chaos, a heckler tried to get on stage and Williams jumped down and started fighting with him, until security broker it up. According to one fan who posted online, after this incident: ‘He said some incoherent shit about everyone getting their money back, threw the mike straight up in there air, and walked off the stage. He didn't say one funny thing the entire time.’

Jason Cook is full of praise for fellow stand-up Chris Ramsay, who plays a fictional version of him in the BBC Two sitcom Hebburn. ‘He did work very hard,’ Cook told an audience at the Cofilmic festival in Manchester this week: ‘Mainly on the hair...’

A mysterious ‘international comedian’ has been signed up to write Christmas cracker jokes for the ultra-privileged. Society milliner Philip Treacy is making 80 of the decorations at £1,500 a pop (literally) – and each will contain a gag written by a top comic. He said: ‘I'm working on the jokes with an international comedian.’ but vowed that the punchlines will remain secret until the crackers, made for luxury brand Asprey, are pulled.

At the other end of the comedy scale, stand-up Luke Benson is so keen to save on the cost of getting between gigs that he decided to walk the 20 miles of sometimes dangerous Cornwall coastline to get between gigs in Porthtowan and St Ives last week, only just making it before nightfall.

Some Kiwi fans of Russell Brand got a bonus this week, when a box-office error put tickets for his New Zealand shows on sale for $12.90 rather than $129 – thus saving them more than £60. When the mistake was realised, Ticketmaster made the 36 fans who bought tickets for the Auckland show stump up the full price – while rivals Ticketek allowed those who spotted the cut-price seats for the Wellington show to keep their massive discount.

Chris Dangerfield tried to put together a tour of school halls, to make use of the empty facilities at night, while raising funds for the PTAs. Yet none were interested... except one in Poole, Dorset. He trotted down there with Trevor Lock last week, and decided to open by telling the audience: ‘I don’t use a microphone because I’ve got oral chlamydia because I get horny after a fuck and I had a fuck with this girl and then I was lubricating my cock with my hand so hand-to-mouth, mouth-to-hand – and that’s how you get chlamydia. So now you people in the front have probably got it as well…’ Safe to say it didn’t go down well, with plenty of walkouts. ‘It was horrible,’ Dangerfield admitted: ‘A woman heckled me and I just went for her so viciously.’ He apologised in the second half and won the room around – but perhaps explains why most the schools weren’t interested in taking a comedian best known for talking about being a sex tourist. (A fuller description of the gig was posted on John Fleming’s blog yesterday).

Stand-up Leo Kearse played to a sold-out Wembley Arena this week – which isn’t bad for a comic barely three years into his career. But he wasn’t cracking jokes, rather he was dancing in snakeskin spandex as a genuine part of a 12-hour David Icke lecture. Kearse said: ‘Everybody, especially David, was really nice and I got yards of material for my forthcoming show about campaigners. It was interesting being the “nutter in the room” as I was the only person not fully convinced that the Queen and Kris Kristofferson are shape-shifting alien lizards who control the holographic computer program that is our perceived reality via broadcasts from Saturn's rings. But then, as a criminal intelligence analyst an employee of the cyber-arm of BAE Systems, I'm very much part of the system, maaaaan...’