This evening actor Jeremy Piven is set to appear on The Late Show with David Letterman and there will no doubt be a laugh or two had about Piven’s claims of mercury poisoning and maybe even a mention of the victory handed him by an arbitrator in his contract dispute with Broadway producers.

But when all the chuckling is done there are still some serious questions Dave should consider asking Piven about his claims, here are a few of them:

• Are you aware that your claims would make you the only case of a person coming down with mercury poisoning from the normal consumption of commercial seafood in this country ever?
• Why is it that people in Japan eat far more fish than you, yet don’t suffer from mysterious “mercury poisoning?”
• On Good Moring America you said your mercury levels were 6 times above average but on the same show a doctor said you would have to have levels hundreds or thousands of times the average to become “objectively ill”- You dodged the question then, do you feel like addressing it now?
• You told Dianne Sawyer you hadn’t had a piece of fish in “five months” just weeks after you bailed on your Broadway show, care to explain how you got mercury poising from eating fish when you apparently weren’t eating fish?
• You claim you were “diagnosed within the first week of rehearsal with Epstein-Barr (virus),” a virus that’s symptoms include “fatigue,”– one of your main complaints. Could that have played a role in your sudden departure from the play?
• You’ve insisted that sustained partying had nothing to do with your fatigue and subsequent exit from the play but the New York Post reports that you were a regular during the show’s run at a Lower East Side bar called the Eldridge. Case of repeated mistaken identity?