GagSlag: The week's comedy trivia

• As the old line goes: ‘Every morning I read the obituaries, and if I’m not in them, I get up.’ But US comic Sinbad DID find himself written up as dead this week, when his Wikipedia entry was updated to report he had died of a heart attack at the age of 50. Very much alive, the comic and his family received hundreds of phone calls, text messages and emails. ‘I rose from the dead,’ he said. Among those who fell for it was Black Star News, which proudly boasts it’s New York’s leading investigative newspaper, but still managed to report the death as fact.

• Lenny Henry says: ‘If you’re working class and you have an accent you’re more likely to be funny. When you get to white-collar work there aren’t as many jokes because posh people’s skins are too thin for it.’

• Alan Carr and Justin Lee Collins got mock-peeved when Simon Amstell beat them to the Best Entertainment Performance at the Royal Television Society award, then rubbed salt in the wounds by slagging off Friday Night Project in his speech. The pair were reportedly screeched: ‘Fucking cock-end, how dare he?”

• Jo Brand says she’s eternally grateful to Mark Lamarr for stopping her hitting a man over the head with a bottle. She had to be restrained from attacking a security guard who was heckling her ‘in a psycho-killer way’, by howling: 'You should be strung up.'

• Drunk, or just putting on an act? That's the question being asked of this clip of Saturday Night Live comic Tracy Morgan when he appeared a live US talk show last month - the same month he picked up a drink-driving conviction.

• Ardal O'Hanlon says he often gets so bored with press interviews that he just makes stuff up. 'I once said I was appearing in a musical in Las Vegas with Frank Sinatra,,' he says. 'We were two parts of a camel. I was playing the rear end. And it was amazing, they printed every word of it.'

• David Walliams went to Elton John’s 60th birthday party at the far-from-glamorous Shoreditch Town Hall this week.

• We’ve previous mocked some errors that made themselves into print in this column. So it was only karma that we referred to veteran stand-up Arnold Brown as ‘Arthur Brown’ earlier in the week. Red faces all round. And sorry, Arthur, whoever you are.

• Ruby Wax is completing an MA in psychology, and last week gave a half-hour session called Metamorphosis: A Journey From Comedian to Therapist. Attendance fee, a snip at £40.

SOURCES: San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday Times, The Sun, The Observer, YouTube, Sydney Morning Herald. The Sun, The Observer

Published: 16 Mar 2007