Rik Mayall was actually incredibly good-looking when he was young (the cheekbones of an underwear model), he just liked to hide it with manic facial contortions and repulsive characters. Even that didn't completely work; he was apparently baffled and discomfited when Rick from The Young Ones got a lot of swooning…

Not quite. Rik and some of the other alternative comics were a little bit younger and were still unknown when Not the Nine O'Clock News was on (Rik Mayall has talked about looking up to them) and considered the Footlights types to be part of the establishment with which they were in contrast. The Young Ones (written…

The part was written specifically for him with the expectation it would be exactly the kind of performance it ultimately was, and no one has ever said or implied that he went off-script. Ben Elton said they realised they needed something like that (an explosion to turn the whole show on its head) and he suggested Rik…

He has a stutter and has difficultly with plosive syllables, so he has to pause and overcompensate. Fortuitously, that makes his pronunciation of 'Bob' hilarious.

It's not a laugh track, it's a live audience. There was always a live audience for Blackadder (except series 1).

It's incredibly obvious that he's part Chinese, people don't notice because he's always been sold as white in films and assumptions are easy. Kind of like the reviewer thinking he's American.

It was a retcon that Chuck isn't the first human Intersect. Of course, that and the fact that the Intersect was originally never intended to be in a human at all was already retconned earlier on.

He was both way less attractive and far more obviously nerdy when the show started (he had bad hair, bad clothes, and fewer muscles back then).