'Maybe I was a bit of a cock in the past...'

The week's comedy trivia

We’ve got something of a theme to the comedy trivia this week. See if you can spot it…

  • Keith Allen: ‘I didn't like hanging about with comedians because they were always trying to be funny, which is horrendous.’

  • Keith Allen once performed stand-up at the Royal College of Art, but had trouble with people shouting at him. He says: ‘I told them I had three surefire ways of stopping hecklers. I produced a set of darts and continued in what I thought was a respectful silence… but there’s always one. If he hadn’t ducked, there’s every chance I would have spent the Eighties inside for malicious wounding.’

  • Keith Allen’s father was a submariner, who witnessed the detonation of the first H-bomb.

  • Keith Allen once hid under the snooker table in the Groucho Club, so he could spend the night there after they locked up. When the media hangout reopened, he staggered downstairs, took his trousers off and told everyone it’s No Trousers Day. Taking up the story himself, he says: ‘Stephen Fry walks in for a business breakfast. Orders sausage. Damien Hirst comes out with his cock on a plate. Stephen Fry doesn’t even blink. “I said a sausage, not a chipolata.”’

  • Keith Allen says he shagged Janet Street-Porter - once on a pool table, and again at her flat, where the ‘earth moved’… if only because her bed was on wheels

  • Keith Allen once went on stage after trying to drink a bottle of tequila in an hour ‘just to see what would happen.’ What did happen was that he got knocked out by a Grenadier Guard for doing a gag about the IRA’s 1982 Hyde Park bomb.

  • Keith Allen says he once saw God at Glastonbury – after taking the hallucinogen DMT. Apparently God ‘is a sort of mathematical equation’.

  • Keith Allen even tries to take credit for Little Britain. He reports how, in 2002, he rocked up for an NME karaoke party wearing a pink shellsuit and a leather bikers hat and told the audience: ‘I’m a gay. I drive taxis in Llaneli.’ Matt Lucas and David Walliams were in the audience, he claims. There's just one small hole in his story: the Little Britain radio show, featuring such characters as Dafydd and Victoria Pollard, had started two years previously.

  • Keith Allen: ‘Maybe I was a bit of a cock in the past.’

Given all this media coverage, it will probably come as no surprise to learn that Allen has a new autobiography out, called Grow Up. Click here to buy.

And in other pointless comedy news…

  • David Baddiel wants to join the growing number of people extending their house underground, with plans to add more rooms to his Hampstead house under his front garden. Maybe he wants to keep up with Jerry Seinfeld, whose $32million estate in East Hampton, New York, has topped a new poll of the best celebrity homes.

  • Never let it be said that an Edinburgh Fringe comedy will miss the chance to exploit anything for publicity. Barely had the flames been extinguished on the Glasgow airport Jeep – and its driver – than the people behind Jihad: The Musical issued a statement saying the terrorist attack ‘throws into sharp relief the need for such a piece of theatre’. Yeah, right.

  • Simpsons creator Matt Groening says he won’t ask Gordon Brown to follow in Tony Blair’s footsteps and appear in the cult cartoon. ‘One Prime Minister per century is enough,’ he said.

SOURCES: For the Keith Allen stories - IcBerkshire.co.uk, Metro, Daily Telegraph, The Independent, Metro, The Guardian, Wales On Sunday; For the rest - Camden New Journal/OK!, The Sun

Published: 6 Jul 2007

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