'Seriously, give me a clown on the table'

WTF: Weekly Trivia File

•‘Nothing that is mere wordplay is ever witty, so the man who makes puns must do all his own laughing.’ Clive James

• Sandi Toksvig recalls a trip to New York with fellow comic Mike McShane, when they drunkenly took a horse and carriage ride back their hotel. Wanting a memento, they asked a passer-by to take their picture. He duly obliged, posed for a group shot and left. A week later, Mike called her: ‘I got the photographs back from Boots. You know the guy with us and the horse? It’s Lionel Richie…’

• Jerry Seinfeld is selling three of his classic Porsches in March, in an auction likely to net him more than $9milllion. Going under the hammer at Gooding’s Amelia Island, Florida, are a 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder, valued at $6million, a 1958 Porsche 356 A 1500 GS/GT Carrera Speedster worth around $2million and a 1974 Porsche 911 Carrera 3.0 IROC RSR ($1.2million). The host of Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee said: ‘I still love these cars. But it’s time to send some of them back into the world, for someone else to enjoy, as I have.’ And you shouldn’t worry about him having nothing to drive; the sale will still leave him with 43 Porsches.

• Fun fact: All the episodes of Seinfeld are available on the International Space Station for astronauts to watch.

• Could computers one day take over writing sitcoms? Possibly, but it may be a while yet, as this experiment shows. Software developer Andy Herd fed every script of Friends into a neural network, and got it to start generating new dialogue based on what it learned about language from them. Suggested lines the software came up with included: ‘Chandler: Well, I proposed to my shoe…’, ‘Joey: Seriously, give me a clown on the table, that’s all’ and ‘Monica: Chicken Bob’. Still better than Two And A Half Men, though…

i fed a recurrent neural network with the scripts for every episode of friends and it learned to generate new scenes pic.twitter.com/RIPvYuzEJM
— Andy Pandy (@_Pandy) January 18, 2016

• Patrick Kielty has become a father at the age of 44 after his wife, Cat Deeley, gave birth to a son last week.

• Come the Edinburgh Fringe, she is the scourge of comedians… But now see Scotsman critic Kate Copstick dressed in latex performing a song about sex phonelines from The James Whale Radio Show back in January 1992. And if you enjoy that, she sometimes sings on her Grouchy Club podcast. The James Whale show also featuresArthur Smith as a guest:

• Australian comedian Greg Fleet has been spared a conviction after admitting stealing jewellery worth $2800 (£1300) from his housemate in 2014 to fund his heroin habit. He has been accepted onto a ‘diversion program’, which allows first-time defendants to have charges resolved without a formal trial, after Melbourne magistrates heard he had been clean for 18 months.

• Kevin Hart travelled to his gig in Manchester by private jet…