Gag falls flat at GQ awards

Rob Brydon has stunned an audience with an ill-judged joke about Stephen Fry’s suicide attempt.

The comic reportedly reduced the GQ Men of the Year awards to silence yesterday when he made a quip about the QI host’s bid to take his own life last year.

Brydon, who was hosting the ceremony, described Fry in a song as ‘the nation’s favourite dinner guest with charm up to the gills / what a shame he can’t be left alone with vodka and some pills’.

Fry laughed off the gag, however others took it more seriously. The Mirror journalist Natalie Edwards tweeted: ‘Something tells me Rob Brydon just crossed the line at GQ. Joked about Stephen Fry’s suicide attempt.”

She described the reaction to Brydon’s joke as “tumbleweed”, commenting: “And rightly so.”

On Richard Herring’s podcast earlier this year, Fry revealed that he had attempted suicide in 2012 while filming a documentary for the BBC in Russia.

Meanwhile, Russell Brand accused Boris Johnson of making light of the Syria conflict at the London bash, and reminded the audience of sponsor Hugo Boss’s links to the Nazi party.

He said: ‘Glad to grace the stage where Boris Johnson has just made light of the use of chemical weapons in Syria. Meaning that GQ can now stand for genocide quips.’

‘I mention that only to make the next comment a bit lighter because if you know a little bit about history and fashion you’ll know that Hugo Boss made the uniforms for the Nazis but you know they did look fucking fantastic, let’s face it, while they were killing people on the basis of their religion and sexuality. Genocide quips are okay.’

And in a slight over-reaction Daily Telegraph reporter Charles Moore, who won best writer for his work on Baroness Thatcher’s autobiography, condemned Brand – by comparing the dirty message he left on Andrew Sachs’s answerphone to the Holocaust.

‘I was very interested when Russell Brand chose to praise the stylishness of the Nazis,’ he said said Moore. ‘Because of course that fits with the fact that when they persecuted the Sachs family in the 1930s, Andrew Sachs who was only young then fled to this country. He was then persecuted by a Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross in their disgusting telephone call.’

Noel Gallagher, who won the ‘icon’ award criticised William Hague for attending the awards show during the Syria confict, saying: ‘Its nice to see the Foreign Secretary here while there's shit going on all over the world he should be sorting out.’

Published: 4 Sep 2013