Special issue launched

April’s edition was out yesterday, priced £3.99, but here are ten things we have learned from it:

1. When Simon Pegg was starting out, he was booked fro a stand-up show at a homeless hostel in Bristol ‘performing quirky poetry in front of 12 old men, most of whom were fatally drunk’. One of them kept shouting ‘Give us a song’... so he did something by Pulp.

2. Stephen Merchant is a fan of Big Bang Theory. ‘I’m not embarrassed because I think it’s a funny show,’ he says.

3. But Noel Fielding has no time for The Office. ‘It’s not that I don’t get it,’ he says. ‘It’s that I find it boring.’

4. Green Wing was filmed in a working hospital. Director Tristram Shapeero said: ‘We’d often have to stop because someone was being rushed to an emergency room. You’d be shooting a scene with someone saying, “you’ve got a rubbish vagina!” Then we’d have to go “Clear guys” and these poor parents would walk past crying behind their kid as they go into surgery.

5. Modern Family co-creator Christopher Lloyd says he’d go for a story that put feelings over laughs every time.... but it caused him problems early on, when a preview screening of the first episode was greeted by an awful silence from the 300-strong audience. At the end they told him the didn’t ‘feel the need’ to laugh, but were delighted with the show. So it wasn’t tinkered with. ‘Maybe we’re simply making them happy,’ he said.

6. Shappi Khorsandi says: ‘Female comics don’t get nearly as much post-show glory sex as the men... We do get hit on, though. Mostly by our male counterparts who, out of professional respect, only drunkenly hit on a female comic if there are no other options. It does not do to take them up on their offer.’ Nonetheless, Khorsandi admits that her ex-husband and two subsequent boyfriends were all comics she met on the road.

7. Russell Brand gave Steve Martin a putdown when they met at a 2010 post-Oscars party. As Martin was leaving at 1am, he passed Brand and said: ‘Oh, I’m just going out as you’re just coming in.’ Brand said: ‘It’s a metaphor.’ Martin concedes: ‘That’s one of the fastest ad-libs ever.’

8. At the 2002 Just For Laughs festival, Zach Galifianakis walked on stage posing as a stagehand who needed to fix the lights. As he began his repair, his trousers slowly fell, exposing his naked backside.

9. Isy Suttie knew she had a career in comedy ahead of her when she performed an earnest love song at college that was meant to be serious ‘but everyone laughed as it was cheesy and stupid’.

10. Girls star Lena Dunham follows Rihanna on Twitter ‘because I like seeing naked pictures of her ass’.

Published: 8 Mar 2013