'Women should be naked or cooking – or both'

The weekly trivia file

  • ‘I've seen stand-ups ask the audience, “Do you want the dark stuff?” You'd better be offering me Guinness. Write jokes. Don't write darkness and expect that to be funny in itself.’ Chris Addison

  • When stand-up James Dowdeswell played Cardiff Jongleurs, he was heckled by a shout from the darkness. His putdown was hardly brilliant: ‘And you can shut up,’ but the whole room went silent. Because it was boxer Joe Calzaghe who he’d just told to button it. ‘I came offstage, high-fived him and walked to the dressing room,’ he recalls. ‘That was a good one.’

  • Talking of boxers in comedy, how is Ricky Hatton’s stand-up? Well, let’s just say that his heckler put-down was: ‘Save your breath, mate – don’t forget that when you get home, you've got to blow up the wife first.’ But who’s going to tell him…

  • Isn’t it nice to be recognised? Ricky Gervais has been chased down the street by four Swedish tourists… who thought he was Robert De Niro. An onlooker said: ‘They seemed a bit confused. They kept yelling at him, “Are you looking at me?” Their broken English added to the surreal situation. They were obviously trying to speak the line from Taxi Driver but getting it slightly wrong. It was all very funny.’

  • Russell Brand admits: ‘I miss heroin.’

  • Josie Long played a gig last week in a place called the London Sketch Club, which she reasonably thought was a venue for comedy sketches. But when she got there discovered it’s nothing of the sort. ‘It's actually a private club for old men who like to draw naked young women,’ she said, adding that one manager told her: ‘The only women [usually] allowed in this building would have to be cooking or naked, preferably both.’ She performed on he plinth where the naked woman would usually be – but was allowed to keep her clothes on.

  • Simon Pegg on why he hated the idea of a Spaced remake: ‘I wrote Spaced coming off of a really serious relationship, and I sublimated a lot of my anguish into it. So to have some guy from Will & Grace rewrite it doesn't sit well with me.

  • Want to live next door to Billy Connolly? A five-bedroom house neighbouring his home at Strathdon, Aberdeenshire, could be yours for £395,000. Connolly himself is expected to out in a bid, given that he already owns three of the five properties on the estate.

  • Johnny Vegas was seen arguing with a homeless man outside The Groucho Club on Wednesday night – but explained he was just trying to get into the papers. Late last year, you may recall, Alan Davies got into a little trouble for biting a tramp in a tussle outside the very same London media hangout.

  • Bad stand-up of the week... any more suggestions welcome:

SOURCES: The Independent, Metro, The Mirror, Daily Star, Q, Daily Telegraph, Showbiz Spy.com, Aberdeen Press and Journal, thelondonpaper

Published: 11 Jul 2008

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