WTF: Weekly Trivia File

• ‘Naturally funny people don’t get into comedy.’ Margaret Cho.

• In an interview with Metro today, Tracy Morgan boasts:‘I’m the voice for a whole generation of people.’ Given how the 30 Rock star complains in his stand-up show about how ‘fucking women’ are ‘crazy’ and should ‘get yo ass in the fucking kitchen’, it appears the generation he represents died out decades ago.

• An Alan Partridge float will be among those at the Norfolk Lord Mayor’s Celebration Parade taking place tomorrow.

• And in proper Partridge style, Stephen K Amos has been telling the Daily Telegraph about his favourite parks. ‘There may not be any Wombles but Wimbledon Common has lots to offer,’ he opines.

• Omid Djalili has taken some credit for Robin Cook’s resignation from Tony Blair’s Cabinet over the Iraq war. ‘I remember the late Robin Cook MP coming to see me in 1999 and afterwards I got a message from him saying my show was inspirational,’ the comic said in an interview yesterday. ‘Then a few years later he resigned from the government over Tony Blair going to war in Iraq. I’ve still got a little handwritten message from him.’

• The PGA European Tour released this fun video of Rory McIlroy taking on a mechanical golf machine this week, and it’s already achieved more than 2.4million views. What’s not obvious, though, is that the robot’s wisecracks came courtesy of British comic Geoff Norcott, who ad-libbed a lot of them during the shoot in Miami:

• It seems someone on the Edinburgh Fringe Society’s participants’ panel had a sense of humour failure about comedian Gareth Morinan’s stunt of listing his 22-date run as 11 separate two-day shows in the festival programme. His listings take up nearly a full page in the programme and cost him £880 in fees – yet a quarter-page ad in the programme costs £1,200. ‘You do the maths,’ he explained. However Morinan – who is on the participants panel – yesterday told blogger John Fleming that it caused a fellow member to quit, saying in her resignation letter: ‘It shows a mean spiritedness towards the Fringe... I don’t think a person behaving in this way has the interests of the Fringe at heart and I don’t feel I can serve alongside him.’ Chortle understands that the person who quit was agent and promoter Marlene Zwickler – but when we put it to her she said only: ‘It’s a non-story.’

• Chris O’Dowd is not unhappy that Kirsten Wiig has ruled out making a Bridesmaids 2. ‘It’s great they are not doing another – sequels are shit,’ he said at the press launch of the new Christopher Guest comedy Family Tree today.

• Remember that episode of The Simpsons when Homer designed a mass-production car, whose extravagant impracticality made his long-lost brother Herb’s auto business go bust? Well, now it’s been made a reality. Procubimmer Motors made this monstrosity out of a 1987 BMW E30 for the 24 Hours of LeMons race. And it turns out not to be quite as you’d think, coming in fifth out of 150 cars in the 14-hour race:

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• Before the Edinburgh Fringe provokes the usual flurry of criticism and jokes about comedy reviewers not knowing what they’re talking about, how about the recent write-up of Jason Manford’s tour in the Westmoorland Gazette that began: ‘I have only ever been to see one stand-up comedian and that was Michael McIntyre.’

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• Tweets of the week
Utterben(@utterben ): Germany is full of weird ö's.
Christine, (@ EatMyHalo ): Manfred Mann named his son Juan Ted. The police will NOT leave him alone.
James Martin(@ Pundamentalism ): Just reading a book highlighting the main benefit of the whiteboard. It's remarkable.

Published: 5 Jul 2013