WTF: Weekly Trivia File

• ‘All my life I have been an argumentative, contrary little shit and I am trying not to be like that so much.’ Rhod Gilbert.

• Joan Rivers was nearly arrested - after being mistaken for an illegal immigrant. The UK Border Agency received a ‘tip-off’ that a suspicious group of people were disembarking from two fishing trawlers at Harty Ferry, Kent, a well-known landing spot for those trying to sneak into the country. But when the agents got their, they instead found Joan, her daughter Melissa and a crew from her reality series filming the comedian as she paid a visit to The Countess Sondes – a friend who lives nearby. Rivers said: 'Even though we were innocent I am so sorry they didn’t arrest us.  I love Englishmen and they were very cute.’

• Builders working on a multi-million pound development next door to Jimmy Carr’s home in Swiss Cottage, North London, have taken to yelling: ‘Jimmy, pay your taxes!’ at the comic’s home.

• Stand-up Bob Slayer had a run-in with a police armed response unit, following his gig at London’s Alternative Comedy Memorial Society on Wednesday night. He was chatting to some punters outside in the street in King’s Cross, who asked him why I had a guitar case when I hadn’t played a guitar on stage. ‘I have long props,’ he told them... and they immediately wanted to see them. ‘So I got out my extendable fishing rod, which has a stuffed rubber glove on the end,’ Slayer told the Boswell of the alternative comedy scene, John Fleming. ‘These youngsters are laughing at my hand, and just then some pedestrians were crossing the road and I went Woooh! and cast my fishing rod so the hand shot out, as if to grab them. The oncoming traffic was a little way away but, as soon as I did it, I saw the lead car was a police Land Rover type thing which immediately pulled over while I’m winding my fishing rod back in and it was an Armed Response Unit. I had a big stuffed hand on my fishing rod and they had their arms. A policeman who was much younger than me came over and just looked me up and down. All he said was "How old are you?" very disparagingly. I told him and said "Sorree!" and they drove off...’

• A cracking heckler video this week. Comic Jake Weisman was performing at the Hell Yes Fest in New Orleans last weekend when he gets involved with a typically drunk, incoherent, idiot heckler. Wiesman brought him on stage for a bit of a wrestle... during which a bag of cocaine falls out of his pocket:
  

• ‘Nothing I say deserves repeating in posterity.’ Jon Richardson... in an interview promoting his new DVD

• American comedian  Janeane Garofalo has just learned she’s been married for the last 20 years, without knowing it. She drunk and jokingly tied the knot with her colleague Rob Cohen in Las Vegas in the early Nineties, not realising the marriage was legal. It was only when Cohen – who worked with Garofalo as a writer on the Ben Stiller Show – tried to register a genuine marriage that the earlier one came to light. Speaking at an event at the New York Comedy Festival, she said: ‘We got married at a drive-through chapel in a cab. [We thought] you have to go down to the courthouse and sign papers and stuff, so who knew? We were married.’

• Michael McIntyre has never voted.

• And on the same subject, you can now pretend you are Britain’s skippiest comedian in the privacy of your own home, with this commercially available Michael McIntyre mask.

• Car crash comic Katt Williams was arrested in the early hours of yesterday morning after allegedly breaking a bottle over someone’s head following a scuffle at a nightclub in East Oakland, California. He’s already facing a $5million lawsuit from his former assistant who claims he hit her. And earlier this month Chortle reported how he had an on-stage meltdown in Denver where the crowd started booing him. TMZ has the footage of his latest arrest:
  

• More footage from the same gossip website shows Russell Brand clearing up rubbish from an LA street. The comic and his entourage scrambled to help after accidentally driving into a homeless man’s shopping trolly, sending all his things flying. Brand is generally a friend to LA’s homeless, having recently treated a bunch of homeless people to breakfast and taking one guy home to use his bath.
  

• ‘I have realised that when I’m in my undergarments people don’t wince or run out of the room crying.’ Sarah Millican.

• A scene in Mrs Brown's forthcoming festive specials involves a Christmas tree being knocked down. But in a show never known for subtlety, the BBC hired an explosive expert to make sure it went down in a spectacular style, complete with sparks and smoke.

• Next year’s Bournemouth Comedy Festival has helpfully spilt itself up into four 'zones' which it believes all comedy naturally falls. Family comedy – that one makes sense, nothing to scare the kids. Then we have ‘general comedy’; ‘arts comedy’ for the weird shit; then - most bizarrely – ‘camp comedy’ indicated by a lovely pink logo. Admitting it’s ‘a bit of a controversial one’ organisers further make an exacting definition of what this segregation entails: ‘This means comedy of the more rainbow side of life, not out and out queens’. Thanks for clearing that up. We await the section for black comedy, but not 'out-and-out negro'.

• Tweets of the Week
  Gary Delaney(@GaryDelaney): If I ever find the guy who messed up my limb transplants, I'm going to kill him with my bear hands.
  Sanjeev Kohli (@govindajeggy): My mate's opened a pub three quarters of the way up Kilimanjaro. I can't help feeling he's set the bar too high
  Cluedont (@cluedont): Give a man enough rope and he'll have just the right amount of rope, which is good.

Published: 16 Nov 2012