Ricky Gervais Made My Friend Famous

This has got to be one of the coolest stories I’ve come across in a long time and I just had to share.

Last weekend I was on Twitter when my friend Jen started tweeting about Ricky Gervais mentioning an old website of hers during his stand up special on HBO.  I knew immediately what she was talking about (a) because I love the Rickey Gervais special so much that I actually have the DVD and (b) because this particular bit had for awhile become part of the vernacular with friends of mine at work.  What I didn’t know that she was the “Jen” that he referenced in his act. Come to find out, she didn’t know about it either.

Here’s the story directly from Jen Godwin, an entertainment reporter for E!

So…back in the day (1995 to be exact), my best friend and I compiled a bunch of “useless facts” that we’d been posting on a white board in our college dorm hallway and put them on a newfangled thingy called the World Wide Web.

We submitted the site to Yahoo! and they added it to their directory with “cool” sunglasses and “Deb & Jen’s Land O’ Useless Facts” was eventually named a Cool Site of the Year in 1996. We got submissions of more useless facts from around the world and built the site out and it was all very exciting.

Eventually time passed, we moved the site to its own domain after they kicked us out of college, we moved on with our lives, and we mostly abandoned the site, leaving it to become one of those bits of quaint Internet detritus from ye olden times (like animated “under construction” gifs).

Fastforward to last weekend, when I stumble out of bed on my way in my usual groggy way and the husband goes, “Um, there’s something you need to see…” I assumed from his serious tone that the roof had caved in or that crickets that live under our floor finally ate something important. But no, it wasn’t a crisis, it was a Ricky Gervais HBO standup special (“Ricky Gervais Out of England”) from 2008, and as it turns out, his closing comedy bit is partially inspired by our old website, which he names onscreen as “Deb & Jen’s World of Knowledge.” I think I double-taked three or four times before I believed it. Anyway, this is mostly awesome because Ricky Gervais is awesome, but he cites two facts direct from the site (re: polar bears and elephants) and that’s pretty cool, so we pirated the clip and posted it on Vimeo for your edification and amusement.

Deb & Jen’s World of Knowledge – Deb & Jen’s Land O’ Useless Facts – Ricky Gervais: Out of England from Jennifer Godwin on Vimeo.

I know I geek out over a lot of stuff, but I that ranks very high on my cool scale.