Fumbles down under

WTF: Weekly Trivia File

‘The day when I accidentally do a whole show with my cock hanging out is still ahead of me.’ David Mitchell.

Seems the comedy on offer at the ongoing Melbourne festival isn’t enough for some punters. Stand-up Mel Buttle reports that her tech noticed some odd noises coming from the back row of her show – and when she went to shush them, she discovered a woman giving her companion a hand job. ‘I don’t know if they finished,’ Buttle says. Apparently the same thing happened during comic Tom Ballard’s festival, too.

Louis CK has revealed that he is a Mexican immigrant to the US. Although born in America, he moved to Mexico as a baby and lived there until the age of seven when he moved to Boston. He told Rolling Stone magazine: ‘I grew up in Boston and didn't get the accent, and one of the reasons is that I started in Spanish. I was a little kid, so all I had to do was completely reject my Spanish and my Mexican past, which is a whole lot easier because I'm white with red hair. I had the help of a whole nation of people just accepting that I'm white.’ CK – whose real surname Szekely comes from from his half-Hungarian, half-Mexican dad – has retained his Mexican citizenship and he added that his example proved that you can’t tell racial identity just from appearance. He said: ‘My experience is as a Mexican immigrant, more so than someone like George Lopez. He's from California. But he'll be treated as an immigrant. I am an outsider. My abuelita, my grandmother, didn't speak English. My whole family on my dad's side is in Mexico. I won't ever be called that or treated that way, but it was my experience.

Doug Stanhope made an unusual appearance this week... at a city council meeting in his home town is Bisbee, Arizona. They were holding a vote to approve civic unions, and the comic was first to speak – after local pastor Warren Griffen prayed for God to guide them to make the right choice. Stanhope speaks just before the 3min mark:

Michael McIntrye is to perform what he calls ‘one of the biggest gigs Africa has ever seen’ when he plays Cape Town and Johannesburg next week.

In tribute to Margaret Thatcher, here’s a Sun cartoon from 1982, referring to the apparent offence the Greatest Show On Legs caused when they performed the balloon dance on TV (courtesy of blogger John Fleming). In Malcolm Hardee’s memoirs, the comic recalled doing the dance at the TUC Conference in Blackpool where Neil Innes of the Bonzo Dogs got booed off for being sexist. But they liked the Greatest Show On Legs ‘except we didn’t use balloons: we used photos of Mrs Thatcher to cover our genitalia and, after we turned round, our penises were sticking out of her mouth. They loved it.’

Here’s comic John Moses dealing with a drunken heckler at the appropriately named Wasted Talent comedy show. in Rhode Island. Then she plays the apparent trump card ‘my mum died yesterday’ to explain her interruptions.

Any punters wanting info about John Gordillo’s Edinburgh Fringe show, Cheap Shots At The Defenceless, won’t find much in the Assembly Rooms programme, which contains a few glowing quotes, then simply the industry-centric line: ‘No reviewers under 21 admitted.’ Is this a very public stance against student critics without experience? Or youngsters who might not understand the worldview of a man in his mid-forties? Seems not: ‘It’s tongue-in-cheek,’ says his publicist.

How to befuddle the YouTube closed caption software? Talk gibberish that sounds like English. This first example with John Cleese comes via America’s NPR... while it also works on the late Stanley Unwin, too. Click on the closed caption icon at the bottom and select automatic:

Australian comic Wil Anderson sums up why acting and stand-up are not always compatible: ‘Acting is about pretending to be someone else, and comedy is about trying to find out exactly who you are.'

Tweets of the week
Adam Gess(@ adamhess1 ): I wonder if at school fetes in the Caribbean they have stalls where you try to throw balls at potatoes on sticks and then you win a potato.
Quintin Forbes (@ QuintinForbes ): Q: Which former Brazillian footballer can impersonate a big bird? A: Pelé can.
John-Luke Roberts (@ jlukeroberts ): I would like to apologise for any offence caused by my actions when I officially opened the Hospital for Injured Ribbons. An honest mistake.