Izzard, who was sixteen when he decided to become a performer, thinks that performing for love is a good trade-off. "you do have to give. You can't just stand there and they give it to you," he says. "You go out and you perform your heart out."  There is a kind of fierceness in his focus on an audience. "They gotta commit, big time, " he says, choosing his verb carefully. "Or just bugger off." The primary appeal of this act is "to make myself laugh," he says. "The second one is to make them laugh." Izzard's laughter engineers a kind of emotional equipoise in him--it's about having all the information and yet not really knowing anything. His humor, he explains "is informed but not informed." He's aware that in life, as he puts it, "Shit happens. There is no answer." This is reflected in his act, where history begins in earnest and ends in fiasco. "Easter. There's a ceremony.  It's got a pagan ceremony just sitting underneath it. Easter. Tough time for Jesus. Not a happy lad. All the disciples there saying, 'He's dead. Our leader is dead. How will we remember this day?'  'Well, uh, I was thinking chocolate eggs. That could work.' 'Wrapped up in crinkly paper?' 'Yes, and you can put more chocolate inside when you open it up. A second amount of chocolate inside!' 'Very good, Zebedee.' (One of them's called Zebedee). 'Yes, that's it! And a bunny rabbit shall give it out. A bunny rabbit! With big ears, for the bunny rabbit will be the symbol. For when the ears are down and out, it is a cross.' "

A gentle snow was falling when I rolled into Aspen around dusk, a week after Izzard’s Toronto gig. The town was full of city folks who were spending the week listening to comedians and honoring the giants of the craft, including Larry Gelbart, the cast of "Cheers", and the cast of "Monty Python’s Flying Circus," whom HBO had flown over to be reunited on stage for the first time in almost two decades, in a show taped at the Wheeler Opera House, a local Victorian theatre. At night the silence of the mountain world and snow-silted frontier storefronts that had been turned into designer boutiques gave the place a dreamy sense of unreality.

Izzard, who had spend most to the day snow-boarding and had banged his head, also seemed a bit dazed, but not from his fall. Almost the first words out of his mouth were "I’ve just been asked to do something at the top of the Python Show. I can’t believe it. I’m talking to Michael Palin about the Huguenots. I’m going with Palin and Terry Jones and Eric Idle to Steve Martin’s one-act plays. I can’t really take it in."He was at the Python rehearsal promptly at two-forty-five the next afternoon, his backpack crammed with ski clothes for a gag that the Pythons were cooking up. The Flying Circus team, including the ponytailed Terry Gilliam (the American cartoonist who has since become a director) and a mock urn containing the "ashes" of the late funnyman Graham Chapman, were already up onstage and seated in a row of lounge chairs like so many smiling trophies. A scrum of TV technicians, talking continually into headsets, surrounded the troupe, who kept up a show of professional jolity while lights and furniture were being adjusted around them. Izzard was standing in the aisle admiring the spectacle when a functionary came up to him and told him he’d just won the festival’s Amstel Light jury prize for best one-person show. Izzard turned the moment into a little comedy. ("I’ve never won anything, really," he lied. "I’m casually bitter about it, but in a very relaxed way.") the, tentatively, he joined the hubbub, moving across the stage to the far right, where John Cleese, the grandee of the group, was sitting and inhaling oxygen as an antidote to the thin Colorado air. At the sight of Izzard, Cleese put down his mask, hauled his famously gangly six foot five torso to its feet, and sort of beckoned Eddie into his outstretched arms. On royal occasions, such moments of conferring honor are called "elevation", but the embrace of the Old Turk and the Young Turk seemed to confirm the Pythons as much in their power as it did Izzard in his. "They’ve decided to give me an award for being British," Izzard told Cleese, who laughed. "You’ve got one for being British, too."

"Eddie, I’m English, in case you hadn’t noticed."

"Well, I’m Yemenese, really."

"A Yemeni comic. I’d forgotten that."

Cleese quickly got down to business, suggesting that Izzard come onstage as an imposter at the opening of their segment—that he insinuate himself among the Pythons and start answering out of turn when the interviewer, the comedian Robert Klein, began questioning them. "We come on without you the first time. There’s one too few chairs. We then go off, and then come back on slightly chaotically. You should come on at that point. In-ski up, you see what I mean. With your own chair. You should put it down and sit there. After we begin, you answer. Make up any fucking rubbish you like. Then we come over and unmask you and tell you to piss off. We’d like you to go down the stairs there." Cleese pointed to the carpeted red stairs that led into the auditorium and down the aisle.

The Pythons and Izzard were ordered into the wings to practice their entrance. The crepuscular gloom seemed to liberate a bit of boyish excitement in the cluster of Merry-Andrews. "So I’ll be the nutter fan who’s trying to break in," Izzard said. "I’ll just try walking in behind everybody," Cleese was telling Gilliam to go on first, and Palin was dibbing last. "I’ve gotta work out a Last Going-On Performance. Get a laugh early," he said. Jones giggled. Gilliam groused. Idle mumbled to no one in particular, "The is an improv. This is a Python improv."

After deciding on their entrance, they practiced Izzard’s exit. "We’ll let you go on a bit longer," Jones said.

"If I get into it," Izzard said.

"We’ll play it off the audience," Cleese called out as Izzard started to improvise the "Four Yorkshiremen". The Pythons stood watching Izzard carry on, their eyes as bright with delight as his. Afterward, he slumped back into a chair between Gilliam and Cleese. "Not exactly what I thought I’d be doing yesterday morning," he said to Cleese. "Being in Aspen. Being with you guys. Doing this." As he left the rehearsal, he said, "If I get too overawed, I’m fucked. I’ve just got to go on like I was at college again. And they were at college. And fuck about."

On the night, Izzard showed no sign of nerves. He strolled from dressing room to dressing room chatting up his idols before showtime. When Izzard was a student at Sheffield, he has once interviewed Palin for the university paper; now he and Palin were standing in the corridor talking about how you handle hecklers. "Say something funny" or "Boring" are the two worse ones that you can get," Izzard said. "You’re a cunt is fine." He expounded on his street technique of "positivizing" negative situations: "If someone says, "you cunt bastard,’ you say,
Absolutely. I’m king of cunts. I am the absolute cunt of all time I was trying to be a cunt bastard and you noticed it.’ You embrace it and take it to you; and you repeat it over and over again until you sort of take it away from being a problem. You’ve made it part of your space."

As they waited to go on, Izzard stood with Palin, Jones and Gilliam, watching a television monitor of a clip of Palin with Connie Booth, singing "The Lumberjack Song’ and old Python macho sendup where the lumberjack wants to be a transvestite. "I’ve always thought I should do that song and spin it around," "Izzard said. "I’m a transvestite but I want to be a lumberjack."

On the TV Screen, Izzard’s moment was well handled but brief. He managed to raise his quota of laughs and, in the process, to get pelted on the shoulder by Terry Gilliam with a well-thrown bread roll. But Izzard really hit funny that night in his own show, talking about the singer Engelbert Humperdinck. "How did he get his name? Were they all sitting in an office saying, ‘Look, we’re going to call you Bigelbert Hempledonk.’ ‘What about Binglebert Humperdonk?’ ‘I was thinking Geldebert Hingledunk. Hinglebert Enkledonk. Or Engelbert Humperdinck.’ ‘That’s it!’"

In his dressing room later, Izzard mulled over the joke. "My instincts tell me that I need to play more on things around ‘Engelbert.’ I need to go ‘Senglebert Bunderkink or Dinglebert Dingadonk. Engelbert Humperdinck. That’s the one!’" he said. "I’m not quite sure I know. When it comes out of my mouth, I’ll know, I’ll feel it’s right."

The next time I saw Izzard was on the small stage of the Westbeth Theatre, in New York. He was talking about Guy Fawkes and how he was "hung, drawn, and quartered." At the word "hung," Izzard tilted his neck and mimed a noose around it. At "drawn," he stepped back and pretended to sketch Fawkes.

"No, that’s not it," a man shouted from the audience.

Izzard’s eyes twinkled as he peered into the murky room. "have you only just worked out that that’s the first lie I’ve told you all night?" he said. "As it happens, there’s a constant lying that goes on through the whole show." "Instinctively, Izzard did a little of his "positivizing." "He put his hands on his hips and rolled his eyes to the ceiling , imaging that man’s bad review of the show. "The lies that were said in that room.’" He said. "’I wanted to go out for a good night of realism.’"