'People who start stand-up are very crazy'
WTF: Weekly Trivia File
• 'People who start doing stand-up are very crazy. They really want it so badly, it's a very deep desire. When you start, you stink. There's no other way to do it. It takes some kind of mental illness to push against that, you know, to go onstage and just bomb horribly and then still do it because you love it' Louis CK.
• It had to be done. We used the How Old? bot on youth TV favourite Russell Kane…
• A statue of Bart Simpson has been erected in New York. Nancy Cartwright, who voices the character, will unveil the statue outside the headquarters of News Corp today. 'I like to think that art can change the perspective of the viewer and gives hope,' says the woman best known for saying 'Ay Caramba!'
• Defensive much? Jason Manford caused something of a stir in Sunderland after tweeting that he was having a 'nightmare' finding a decent serviced apartment in the city for him and his family to stay while on tour with The Producers. One tweeter responded to his innocent comment: 'Shame on you for your status which you must have known would have started debate bringing Sunderland down yet again.'
• Mackenzie Crook had an easy answer to remembering all the people he should have thanked when picking up his Bafta Craft Award for writing Detectorists. 'The people I'd like to thank are all listed in the credits at the end of the show,' Broadcast magazine reports him telling the assembled throng. 'Seriously. Go and buy the DVD and read those names out loud.'
• Matt LeBlanc says his Episodes alter-ego is so easily confused with real life that he has to take precautions that the lines don't get blurred. He tells Graham Norton tonight: 'In one episode my character goes to his ex-wife's house drunk and demanded to see his children. When she refused I shouted an obscenity at her. Before it aired I felt I should call my real ex-wife and preface it… and say, "It's not a dig at you in any way, shape or form, I don't feel that way about you, it's just a joke, it's nothing to do with you."' Her withering reply was simply to say: 'I don't watch your show.'
• Comedian Paul Harry Allen is offering to come and perform his previous Edinburgh shows in people's living rooms – to help pay for this year's Fringe. He charges £60 for an hour-long show or £100 for a double bill.
• You can now buy Al Murray beer. Gadd's Brewery in Ramsgate, Kent, where Murray is standing for Parliament, has brewed a Beautiful British Beer which features the comic on its label. Here he is plugging it:
• Vicars are being offered training in stand-up comedy to liven up their Sunday sermons as part of the Christian Resources Exhibition at London's Excel Centre later this month.
• Jongleurs founder Maria Kempinska now runs a pyschotherapy business offering programmes such as 'The puzzle of me: finding our hidden gold', 'Sword of Damocles', which uses the 'the Myers Briggs paradigm' to 'develop healthy understanding towards business leadership' and a workshop offering to use the techniques of stand-up to 'identify the route to your "self"'. Kempinska, a Jungian psychoanalyst with a lot of letters after her name (MBE, MA Psyche, MBACP, MNFSH, Dip Drama Therapy), says on her website: 'I believe in humour as the flash of light in difficult and dark times. It is the component in life which combines and collects conflicts and conflicting thoughts and feelings into a framework which is easier to assimilate.'
• Tweets of the week
Interviewer: "So where do you see yourself in five years?"
Benjamin Button: "Ah. Ok, this may sound a little odd, but bear with me…"
— Jason (@NickMotown) May 1, 2015Just formed a Green Day tribute band. We're called Bin Day and we play every second Tuesday of the month unless it's a Bank Holiday.
— David Quantick (@quantick) April 28, 2015NATURE FACT: If you piss on Sting, he turns into a Jellyfish. Or something like that, I wasn't paying attention to the documentary.
— James Martin (@Pundamentalism) May 1, 2015Published: 1 May 2015
