Comedian Rumors That Turned Out To Be True

In recent decades, comedy has become as big as rock 'n' roll. It's huge, with big-name comedians filling out stadiums and bagging themselves lucrative specials on streaming platforms worth millions of dollars. And with that kind of global stardom comes the same baggage and behavior that has made the lives of rock stars and Hollywood actors something that fans obsess over: the scandals, breakups, feuds, and legal battles.

For the tabloids, this has meant a new cast of characters to spin tales about, speculate over, and investigate the lifestyles of, knowing that there's a receptive audience for nuggets of information about the performers who seem to offer so much of themselves onstage but who also readily admit that the divide between what is real and what is part of their comedic personas may be difficult to distinguish. Stand-up comedy, especially, invites us to believe that we know the performer personally, which makes insights into their privates lives — and the potential confirmation that we were right in our assumptions about them — even more irresistible.

But whether comedians really do turn out to be who they say they are onstage, the stories that arise about their offstage antics are always of interest, whether you're a fan of their particular brand of comedy or not. Here's a roundup of a few of the most revealing, shocking, and entertaining rumors about comedians that were revealed to be true.

The downfall of Bill Cosby and the string of atrocious crimes that he kept covered up for years are such big news stories that it's almost impossible not to have heard about it already. But one part of the story is worth sharing: that, shockingly, Cosby had been openly discussing the drugging and assaulting of women for decades. The subject appears in a bit from a 1969 live album — unfortunately titled It's True! It's True! – that was unearthed by The Village Voice in 2014, material which has also appeared in recently recovered interview footage from 1991.

It is said that the past is another country, that they do things differently there. And maybe it has something to do with the fact that "America's Dad" had such a wholesome image at the height of his fame that if he were to discuss such issues, it was automatically assumed that he was talking about it ironically, or that what he was saying didn't seem creepy somehow. But it really does bend the brain of anyone listening to it today that Cosby could get laughs from joking about the use of what he called at the time "Spanish Fly" — quaaludes, as the drug turned out to be — that he insinuates makes it easier to sleep with women after dropping a pinhead-sized dose in their drink. 

Toward the end of his short life, Bill Hicks was looking to make greater inroads with American audiences. In the early days, the stand-up found that his cynical routines went down much better in the UK and toured the country extensively. But in 1993, Hicks found himself invited for his 12th and, as it would turn out, final appearance on Late Night with David Letterman. His set, as ever, was tight and outrageously funny, and his material toyed with subjects on the borderline of addressability. Most notably, he discussed abortion and joked about the kinds of people who make up the "pro-life" movement.

The set was well-received by the audience and, indeed, by Letterman himself in the short interview that followed. However, the set was pulled with little explanation, which Hicks discussed in a New Yorker profile weeks later, telling journalist John Lahr that the resulting fallout had given him "more attention than [his] other eleven Letterman appearances times one hundred." The tragedy of the amazing coverage that the incident would attract was that Hicks had, by the time of his interview, already been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and would die just four months later at the age of 32. 

Letterman finally apologized and admitted culpability only in 2009, on a show in which he finally aired the "lost" set, while Hicks' mother was on the show as a guest. 

Bill Murray has been a star of Saturday Night Live, huge blockbusters like Groundhog Day and Ghostbusters, and a slew of critically acclaimed arthouse films like Lost in Translation and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. In recent years, however, fans and news outlets have been increasingly drawn to reports of his outlandish behavior when he's off-camera.

From numerous photobombs to crashing parties, no one interacts with his fans quite like Bill Murray. Our favorite story is perhaps the time he was randomly invited to a house party by some Norwegian students who were living in the small Scottish town of St. Andrews in 2006. Murray accepted, to the students' astonishment, only to spend a good deal of the night in the kitchen doing the dishes, as photo evidence later proved. 

The story was the talk of the town before being picked up by national and international news. 

The cult of Norm Macdonald has only grown in recent years, due to the great success of his YouTube podcast Norm Macdonald Live, a much talked-about set on Letterman's final episode of Late Night, and an excellent recent Netflix special, Hitler's Dog: Gossip & Trickery. But it is perhaps Macdonald's role at the helm of the "Weekend Update" segment of Saturday Night Live in the mid-'90s for which he is still most celebrated, with many recent inhabitants of the role pointing to his example as what they were attempting to emulate.

But the fact is that Macdonald — as well as his Weekend Update co-writer Jim Downey — were both fired from the show in 1998 after three and a half years of writing and performing the segment. Discussing his firing during an interview with Letterman the week the story broke, Macdonald made light of the issue, claiming that he'd been fired because the president of NBC's West Coast division, Don Ohlmeyer, had decided he wasn't funny.

However, rumors began to circulate that it was Macdonald's near-weekly joking at the expense of O.J. Simpson that got him fired. Ohlmeyer was one of Simpson's oldest friends and most vocal defenders and took exception to Simpson being used as a punchline, according to The Daily Beast. That Macdonald returned as guest host of SNL less than two months later is a testament to the fact that his funniness was never really in doubt.

The Office (UK) was hilarious from its opening scene and heralded the arrival of a new comic talent in the shape of Ricky Gervais, who, until that point, had only existed on the periphery of our collective comedy consciousness. But it was the fourth episode of the first season — "Training" — which catapulted Gervais, in the guise of cringeworthy middle manager David Brent, to the status of a comic icon. After repeatedly disrupting a team training day by constantly undermining the authority of the external facilitator, Brent ends the episode with tales of his time "in a band" and treats his nonplussed (or, in Gareth's case, sycophantic) team members to a series of self-penned songs on his acoustic guitar.

As mortifying as Gervais and his writing partner Stephen Merchant intended the songs to be, there was no denying that Gervais had some musical talent underpinning his performance. It should come as no surprise, then, that media outlets such as Time have unearthed early pictures of Gervais — impossibly slim and impressively made up — as part of the unknown new wave pop group Seona Dancing.

Gervais is famously a huge David Bowie fan, and in the songs available online, the influence is undeniable. In what must have been a surreal moment for Gervais, Bowie later performed a derisive song about the comic on his US breakthrough show Extras.