Comedian Eddie Izzard made a dramatic arrival at the re-opening of Bexhill Museum in East Sussex this week.
As guest of honour at a ribbon-cutting ceremony on November 25 to mark the completion of the ten-year, £2 million-plus building extension campaign he had been due to arrive in style in a pre-war Rolls Royce New Phantom II.
Instead, he opted to ignore the rain and run the half-marathon course from Eastbourne, where he was due to appear that evening before a sell-out audience as part of his UK tour.
Demonstrating the fitness that allowed him to complete 43 marathons for Comic Relief last summer, he launched into the kind of verbal flow that has endeared him to millions without even pausing for breath.
Bexhill-on-Sea’s new-look museum was a “brilliant” effort, he told crowds lining the town’s Egerton Road.
Having been brought up in the town in an era when there was little for young people to do, he applauded the efforts of the Society of Bexhill Museums in providing a vibrant, active, new centre.
Izzard, 47, currently needs to keep running in order to wind down after his highly athletic summer.
But before cutting the ribbon he confessed that the main reason for choosing to do a half-marathon run-up to the ceremony was to attract as much media attention as possible for the hugely-improved museum.
The extension has been made possible by grants from the Heritage Lottery Fund, building owners Rother District Council and the Biffa Awards scheme.
Curator Julian Porter, the Museum’s only paid officer, had earlier given local dignitaries and key council figures a guided tour.
The Museum, which was opened in 1914, has had one of its original exhibition galleries re-named the Sargent Gallery in memory of Henry Sargent, who devoted his entire working life as curator.
The former Bexhill Museum of Costume and Social History collection amassed by Christine Portch and Isobel Overton has been incorporated into the first of two new galleries.
A new motor heritage gallery stars three cars featuring three methods of propulsion and unique links to Bexhill.
A replica of the steam car on which M Leon Serpollet won the 1902 Bexhill Motor Trials marks the first international motorsport event in Britain.
The Volta electric car was built by students of St Richard’s Catholic College in the town and holds a class world land speed record which, due to the classification system changing since, can never be bettered.
Veteran craftsmen from the former Elva car company, founded by Bexhillian Frank Nichols, have restored a Mark III Elva sports-racer, built in the town in 1958.
“It’s the first time I’ve had Eddie Izzard as my warm-up act,” quipped Jane Weeks, regional manager of the Heritage Lottery Fund, speaking at the opening.
She said volunteers, many of whom had often worked into the small hours to arrange the galleries, had done “a great job”.
“The museum is great,” Izzard told Culture24. “Museums are the stuff of history. I do believe that if you study history you can look at your future in a positive light.
“I love it. They have a shop here, which I love. Most of all, it is great for young people. They can bring their finds in here and fire their interest.”
Izzard’s first job was running a council kiosk in Egerton Park, behind the Museum.
“Bexhill needs tourism,” he argued. “People now go to Spain and the sun. A museum like this is one of the ways of attracting them to the South coast.”
[from denofgeek.com]
Stripped isn’t Eddie Izzard’s best DVD release. But it still demonstrates a superb comedian delivering inspired material…
Jam, bees, make-up and more jam. For years Eddie Izzard’s bizarre yet profound mumblings have entranced and delighted audiences the world over. But after so long out of the comedic spotlight, can Eddie’s new DVD, Stripped, delight a devoted audience? Or is it fated to land jam side down on the kitchen floor of stand-up comedy?
Eddie strolls onto centre stage with his usual British gentleman grace, resplendent in a flamboyantly dramatic, circus ringleader’s coat and…jeans? Ok, so the costume’s toned down from his usual, but the content and delivery is still as eccentric as ever.
Attempting to paraphrase the history of everything, Eddie comments on the beginning of existence, the moralistic and religious views of humankind and zoom lollies, implanting his own off the cuff observations in as he goes.
There is some content repetition from the old shows, like Christian beliefs taking another whacking for their pagan roots, while Hitler and Co. receive a familiar but, quite deserved tongue-lashing. Once again Latin scriptures are seen in a humorous light too, but it’s important to note that, whilst the subjects maybe the same, the jokes are all new. Indeed, some are a bit too new, such as Eddie’s misplaced favouritism of Apple Macs (boo, hiss).
In this latest instalment, Eddie proves he is more than just a two-joke comic. In fact, there’s always the slight impression that he might be ad-libbing a lot on stage and, it has to be said, it takes a certain amount of skill to make nightly repeated material seem that fresh. If only McDonald’s would take note.
Eddie, as ever, really is the thinking man’s comedian and while the scenarios played out are silly and the delivery is characteristically bumbly, the ideas behind it all are genius. In amongst the talking squirrels and jazz chickens, there are glimpses of a truly intelligent mind, albeit one that wonders off on bizarre tangents.
So the material’s similar and the delivery the same as his previous stand-up shows. Is there really anything new and worthwhile to be had here?
Well, yes and no. Although the wobbling, droning, mumbling genius is a formula that works and can be had in abundance in Stripped, it has been done better in his previous shows. Having said that, even if this DVD isn’t going to go down as one of his best, it may only be because its competition is pretty fierce.
So for all serious Izzard fans, you can count on Stripped as being another good addition to your Eddie collection, even if it’s not the peak. If he’s new to you, however, then I’d urge you to invest your money in the early shows of Glorious or Definite Article and go back to where it all began.
Cardiff-based homelessness charity, Llamau, was thrilled when comedian and Hollywood actor, Eddie Izzard, paid a visit last week.
Eddie spent time chatting with the young people that Llamau supports, whilst on the Cardiff leg of his current tour ‘Stripped’.
Staff and service users alike were entertained by Eddie as he found out more about Llamau’s work with homeless young people and vulnerable women in Wales.
Eddie, who spent part of his childhood living in Wales and attended school in Porthcawl, lent his support to Llamau’s annual Christmas Gift Appeal, recognising that Christmas can be a difficult time for many people.
You can join Eddie in supporting homeless young people and vulnerable women in South Wales by donating a gift for a young person this Christmas.
Danny aged 17, said: “Last year, thanks to Llamau, I received my first Christmas present in six years.
“It meant so much to know that someone cared.”
Llamau’s Chief Executive, Frances Beecher, said: “This year we hope to replicate the support we received last year both in financial contributions and with the donation of gifts.
“We would like to thank Eddie Izzard for helping us with our appeal. To know that someone of his standing is interested in our young people and the work that we do is incredible.”
For information about Llamau, please contact Rachal on 029 2023 9585 or email rachalminchinton@llamau.org.uk
AFTER running 43 marathons in 51 days, a 150-minute show must seem like a gentle stroll for the perma-breathless Eddie Izzard as he brought his first UK tour for six years to Bournemouth on Sunday.
In an effort to disprove the existence of God, Stripped finds Eddie taking a characteristic ramble through, well, everything that has happened since the dawn of time.
There’s a raptor in a porkpie hat with a penchant for driving too fast, Nazis with choc ices, the jazz chicken, a dog kneading a dough disguise, beekeepers and astronauts with tortoise-slow pulses, God with an alphabet of sons (including G-sus, obviously, but also the playful T-sus and P-sus who delivers to your door). It’s a wiki-world in which frog is an anagram of toad, the news is in hieroglyphics, Romans transport ducks, badgers can be choosers, Darwin and Dickens live a few doors apart on Dictionary Lane and Moses is making it up as he goes along.
Izzard’s random thoughts seem to appear almost as dyslexic ad-libs to the fine thread that runs through the show – some work, some don’t, but he’s the absolute master of his particular craft and even the silliest wordplay adds to the experience.
Hollywood stardom, a hit TV drama, good deeds and ceaseless support of the Labour Party would have left an indelible mark on any other comedian returning to their day job, but Stripped is vintage Eddie Izzard – gleefully teaming with life in all its absurd detail.
Emmy winner, multilingual orator, marathon master, “the lost Python”, and future MP? It’s difficult to encompass the towering ambition of Eddie Izzard and even a ten-minute conversation with him feels an all-too-brief invitation to experience the immense intellect of the greatest living comedian.
How can one person run 43 marathons in 51 days, sell out stand-up tours in the blink of an eye, share the big screen with Clooney and Cruise while simultaneously making no secret of his ambition to stand as a member of the British or European parliaments? Not only is the 45-year-old the most inventive, most popular and most globally marketable comedian of his generation, he’s also one of the most intriguing characters in British life. Sarah Thompson’s documentary Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story might shed some light on the man behind the freewheeling comedy persona while upcoming live DVD Stripped shows Izzard back to his absurd, astute best after a miniscule – and, compared to most of his peers, negligible – but discernible dip in quality since his Emmy-winning heyday.
As he takes the Stripped tour on the road in UK and Europe, Lewis Bazley is granted ten minutes with the heir to Python, discussing arena audiences, acting and his political ambitions.
How do you approach different audiences and venues? You’re touring UK arenas with Stripped at the moment but in January, you’ll become only the fourth stand-up ever to perform at the historic, cavernous Madison Square Garden in New York City.
It’s a very interesting subject, this. A lot of people, and I don’t know which side you’re on, but most journalists I’d expect to be on the side of the fence that says ‘Don’t play arenas, we don’t like it’. I understand that viewpoint but as you move up from a 100-seater to a 500-seater, to a 2,000-seater, intimacy is still what you want. I believe you can get it in arenas and that’s what I’ve been striving for.
Does it feel different for you onstage in one of these huge venues?
It does, you can see a lot more of the audience, obviously. My Twitter screens are playing before the show starts so people can actually Tweet at the show, and people from other countries can write messages in, so that’s a different aspect. The thing that [US president Barack] Obama did – if you watched the crowd at Chicago, the 100,000 of them, they were looking at these six screens, showing his head and shoulders, and he brought everyone into it. The trick is, don’t try and push all the energy out there because you’ll never do it – you’ve got to pull all the energy into you. If you think of the Beatles at Shea Stadium – it wasn’t a good gig, it was a great event but no-one could hear anything. It took time for these stadium gigs to get to the level of what U2 might do now and arenas are just standard fare now for rock ‘n’ roll now but before people might have said: ‘That can’t work’.
Are there a certain amount of arena shows you need to do for it to feel as smooth and natural as possible?
At least 100, I think. By the end of this tour, I’ll have done 60 and it’ll be 100 during the next tour. You need to have your material down – it doesn’t let you drop in and just busk it! (laughs) But the more relaxed and playful I get, the more I’m ad-libbing, the more I just forget there’s 11-15,000 people out there. I want [stand-ups] to be able to play [arenas] as well – I think it gives us a higher top-end.
In what sense?
We don’t have the biggest film industry in the UK but we have some amazing stand-ups and I want us all to go to America and I want there to be reams of European stand-ups going over. The Beatles had Hamburg and, if you want to find the best environment to do stand-up comedy in the world, it’s London. There’s 70-80 clubs and there have been for the last two decades. It’s an amazing number; New York only has about 15. It’s kind of accidental, but you’ve got South African, Australian, German, Dutch comedians coming over to play and I love that that happens. So I just want us to… not invade the world, but infuse the world, like a tea!
You mentioned Obama and you’ve always been very upfront about your views toward Europe, social mobility, class – are you still set on the idea of moving into politics yourself?
I said last year I was going to stand in ten to 15 years, so it’s nine to 14 now – that sounds a bit weirder, which I quite like. It might be better for me just to be an activist like Bono and stay outside it, because you do have to kill your career, or at least put it on some massive hold. Eventually when you get to a certain age you can’t be a politician because you haven’t got the energy… but then I could possibly, potentially, go back and do a final decade of gigs, and I intend to have energy. I intend to keep running from now on and I want to be at peak fitness at 90, this is the crazy idea I came up before I did the marathons. We should look at training as part of breathing, same as eating and drinking.
When you do embark on a political career, where on the spectrum do you think you’ll be positioned?
I don’t want to just leave it to the right wing, I’m going to stand up for social democracy, what I believe in, and radical moderates. The idea of ‘for the many, not the few’.
Where did your political ambitions stem from?
I was always a political animal but I didn’t know what I politically felt – so I was very quiet politically all through my 20s. My dad voted Labour but he was really a social democrat; I was too, so I didn’t feel socialist. ‘Socialist’ and successful never quite went together for me, I couldn’t strive to be that and be socialist! (laughs) I like the safety net for everyone but I also like enterprise so I thought I must be a social democrat. I didn’t want to have to keep moving the goalposts in terms of where I stood – Churchill did that twice and I don’t think he actually did it well, most of his career was actually a screw-up, I think, but 1940 was a brilliant year.
What do you think of the assertion that “If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain”? Often attributed to Churchill but thought to paraphrase a quotation from 19th century French historian Francois Guizot.
Well, Thatcher certainly didn’t have a heart, that’s for sure! (laughs) She had a stone for a heart because God shoved it in there when he’d run out of time! (laughs)
Well, you’re in your 40s now…
I am… I didn’t do either of them, really – I had my midlife crisis in my 20s because I came out as being a transvestite (laughs). I will always, I hope until the day I die, want everyone to have as good a chance as they possibly can. That seems to be the most logical thing to do. I think the Conservative thing to do is to let the people who can make money go and do that and then it will trickle down – and I always think:’ Why trickle down?’ Who the hell said trickle was great? Surely it should be flow down! People making money, being enterprising and creating wealth – that’s great – but have the safety net because a lot of people start out in a very tough situation, unlike, say, Mark Thatcher! I think I’ve stayed exactly the same and always tried to analyse where I am – I’ve always been into enterprise but I’ve also just raised a large amount of money for charity, so hopefully I’m putting my money where my mouth is.
With the marathons, and your admission that exerting yourself is a vital part of life – do you think you set yourself different challenges every year? You’ve done the shows in French, the stand-up in America, the acting, now the running – is there a desire to continually meet a new challenge?
I didn’t have the running as an ambition, but the rest of it all was just ambitions when I was a kid. You want to be a fireman, an astronaut, all this multiple thinking you do when you’re a kid, and at seven, acting suddenly became a passion. It was due to the loss of my mother, I think, and the substitution of an audience. But I couldn’t get the straight acting going, they weren’t giving me the roles, so I discovered Python and writing, and giving yourself the roles, so I thought: ‘OK, comedy, that’s what I’ll do’. And that’s all I was going to do, I was trying to get a TV series at 25, and be a comedian forever… and that then didn’t happen, so when it eventually took off, I decided: ‘No, I’m going to do acting too’.
Do you view your acting career in a different way to your stand-up?
That hasn’t been an easy run. That’s been 15 years of pushing on that and now the roles are getting better, and now I’m getting better at the roles – which is a logical chicken-and-egg thing.
We’ll see you on screen in the new year in the TV adaptation of John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids – how was that experience?
I play a character called Torrence, who’s a sort of flirty sociopath (laughs). I hope I’ve delivered it right – it’s the weirdest thing I find with acting: with stand-up you know you’ve done something right…
Because people laugh?
Yeah, and within half a heartbeat. But with [2008 film] Valkyrie, it was a year-and-a-half before I knew how I’d done, with Triffids, it’s going to be about nine months, so I really just like to see my scenes and think: ‘Oh, that’s alright!’ (laughs) My problem in the past has been to think: ‘Right, I’ve nailed it’ and then go back look and realise: ‘That is not nailed’ (laughs).
Eddie Izzard has admitted to being afraid when he first saw the 1962 movie adaptation of The Day Of The Triffids.
The stand-up comedian and actor stars in a new BBC One version of John Wyndham’s 1951 post-apocalyptic novel.
Izzard told The Last Broadcast: “My character, Torrence, spends half his time trying to get off with Joely Richardson’s character, which was fun!
“It’s just a great story really, a great sci-fi thriller. The film from way back when really scared me, with the clicking noise that the Triffids made.
“I think I’ve done good work on it, I’m still waiting to see, it’s like waiting for exam results! I had to wait 18 months for my ‘results’ for Valkyrie. I think I was about a B+ in that, in an A+ film.”
When asked if he was disappointed at the axing of The Riches, he added: “I was disappointed, yeah, but we might be coming back for a movie, though nothing’s confirmed yet – it’s looking hopeful.
“Just doing the TV show was a great experience, filming 45 minutes of drama in seven days, it’s a tough schedule.”
There’s an awful moment in a swanky hotel lounge in Amsterdam when it suddenly looks as if Eddie Izzard is about to suffer a nasty case of concussion – and it is, indirectly, my fault.
I’ve been firing questions at him – demanding to know the gruelling details of his recent epic run around the UK, asking for clarifications about his Labour-supporting politics, probing his childhood, inspecting his stand-up comedy career – when – ouch! – as he leads us off in the direction of another lounge to continue the conversation, he walks straight into an internal glass-door, smashing his head.
That sounds dumb of him but it’s a glass-door so sleek and shiny and five-star that it just looks like air. So there we all are: shell-shocked hotel-staff, one of Britain’s best-loved comedians clutching his head and me, feeling somehow guilty as hell. But then Izzard straightens up, grimaces, and, mustering his best sang-froid, says in that calling-card posh drawl of his: ‘It’s OK. I’m fine. You really should think about putting a sign on that door.’ It’s as if he has decided to kill the pain through a superhuman act of will.
The incident is emblematic of Izzard’s whole mind-over-matter shebang at the moment. Are men of 47 supposed to embark on a 1,100-mile marathon involving 43 runs in 51 days with hardly any training? Surely not. Few would have bet on a fairytale outcome for his charity fund-raiser but he made it, without ever being stretchered away in humiliation.
The lunatic ambition of that escapade is of a piece with his live comedy, which not only darts off in all kinds of daring surrealistic directions but is currentlyendeavouring to give us a whistle-stop, Wikipedia-inspired tour of the Earth’s entire history.Izzard deliberately uses universal rather than local references in his act, a big-tent policy designed to maximise potential audiences.
The aim of the Amsterdam dates – a stop-off for his latest vehicle, Stripped – has been to give Dutch audiences a taste of arena-sized stand-up for the first time, and embolden Eddie to ‘crack’ the European market. This coming decade, he won’t just settle for Paris, which he has wooed in the past: he wants Berlin, Helsinki and Moscow too. He’ll try and learn the languages, if he can, he tells me, not just trot out his English material, as he has done in Holland. It’s harder to do stand-up than master a new tongue, he reckons.
To ask him about his cartilage-crunching marathon-run – and how on earth he thought he could succeed – is the same as inquiring why he approaches comedy with a ‘could do bigger’ philosophy. He had no contingency plan for an injury sustained on the road, he reveals. Giving up simply wasn’t an option. ‘And that’s the way I work. I need to impress myself. I set things up so I can’t back out of them. If I had got injured, I would still have got myself round it somehow. What you do is burn your bridges backwards and then the path of least resistance is forward!’ He grins.
Though at times it was agony, the run appears to have left him on an almighty high. He does half-marathons before breakfast, here in Amsterdam, without even thinking about it. Maybe one day he’ll just run from venue to venue, country to country, like an Olympic torch-bearer. In the meantime there’s the Eddie-mobile, a customised coach that puts one in mind of an election campaign battle-bus. Behind-the-scenes he has an entourage of 45 people. Seven lorries transport the deluxe set and technical necessaries for his £2m show. And all this for a comedian who hasn’t built up his audience using the conventional broadcast channels. Izzard is the TV comedian you won’t see performing comedy on the small-screen.
At one point, after the gig, which was duly met with a standing ovation, Izzard thumbs through his iPhone to show me the latest Tweets of his million-strong army of Twitter followers. I half-jokingly suggest that he wants to become the first world-comedian. He runs with the suggestion in all seriousness: ‘I want to be a world-comedian? That’s it, absolutely!’ A child-like eagerness, never far from his stage-act, seizes him. Whatever the Rolling Stones or U2 can do, he wants to do too. Think big. Play hard.
‘Why not? I was an ambitious kid. It’s in all the school reports, “He really does seem to be a determined little child’’. That’s my way. I’ve always felt we have a post-empire view of ambition which is that we tried it but it meant we stole other people’s countries – as if there’s no other form of ambition. I really hate that.’ He likes to call himself ‘an action-transvestite’, although on this tour he’s not doing falsies and skirts, just a playful range of bloke clothing.
It would be easy to characterise Izzard as having evolved from a cuddly eccentric into a ruthlessly steely showman as time has worn on. When he dolls-up in drag – a proclivity part-attributable to his mother’s death when he was just six – he can look, well, slightly scary. Yet such a view rewrites the history of his success because being scatty and unfocused in the 80s, when he tried street-acts and the Edinburgh fringe, got him nowhere fast. ‘I found it helped me to have a game-plan,’ he says, affable and open about it. ‘Some people have this “everything just comes to me’’ attitude. That’s fine but I’ve noticed that with me, it doesn’t. So it’s better to have this endless grind.’
It’s not all about ‘me, me, me’ – even if it might seem that way. Izzard’s line is that he’s just showing us what we’re capable of achieving. ‘We can do way more than we think we can,’ he enthuses, ‘perhaps five times more’ . His big thing at the moment is getting people excited about the Olympics: ‘I want to encourage the entire country to go out and do something they used to enjoy doing as kids, whether it’s cycling or running or rowing – whatever the hell it is. It’s under a thousand days away. We should grab the opportunity – and go for it!’
In the meantime, he may be undertaking his most foolhardy mission yet: coming out fighting in support of Gordon Brown. He rallied round the Labour candidate Willie Bain ahead of last week’s Glasgow North East by-election, and is delighted by the ensuing victory. And he’s prepared to side with the deeply unpopular PM. ‘When the times get tough, you stand up to be counted,’ he says. ‘I still believe the Labour party cares about the many rather than the few. Have they made mistakes? Yes. Gordon Brown may not be the most relaxed person but he has strengths as well as weakness. If you get outside Westminster, you realise, as we’ve just seen in Glasgow, that not everyone wants the Tories back in. After 12 years in power, it’s right that there should be a fight but we will see what happens at the election.’ Given Brown’s hazardous position in the polls, it’s possible that Izzard – who describes himself as ‘a radical moderate’ – will wind up alienating his fans, but if it all backfires horribly that may only hasten his own entry into politics, a career-move he has been contemplating for a while. He could still return to stand-up at a later date, he reasons.
Needless to say, he has got it all mapped out. ‘When does your political career end? Say about 75? Well, we can live to 100 these days, so I could go back into comedy later. Groucho Marx played Carnegie Hall aged 82. I see that and think – that’s it! That’s the way to do it!’
Eddie Izzard has entered the 21st century. As we walk into the stadium at the SECC, giant screens feed live Twitter messages to the crowd, who are mostly posting up their favourite classic lines. Within seconds of coming on stage, he is Wikipedia-ing eggnog from his iPhone, leading into some of the strongest material of the show, about internet updates and iTunes.
To say the audience love him would be an understatement beyond measure. It’s a bizarre role reversal from the usual attention-craving stand up, as the 8,000 strong audience hang on Izzard’s every word. When he remarks on applause coming only from one side of the audience, the other side clap twice as hard. This must be a bizarre experience and it’s little wonder that this gives him a tendency to self-refer, as the laughter of recognition resounds around the stadium. He really doesn’t need resort to this, though. Adoring and unconditional support like this should give him the freedom to experiment. Recurring characters and themes are all very well (Steve, Jeff and Noah’s Ark all make reappearances to new and great effect) but other elements are appreciated only because they are so familiar. Overall this gives the show a feel to match the music as we walked in – classic rock and The Beatles – warm, comfortable, and very good, but not boundary pushing or genre-shaping. Perhaps that’s the effect of spending half his year in America, where the new, more political, elements that enter his show are risky and do stand out: the show has an overarching atheist theme, setting out to prove the non-existence of God. Controversial in the US, maybe, where he has lately been gigging, but in Britain it’s not really testing the limits.
It’s easy to criticise your heroes, though, and it has to be said that essentially, Izzard is still brilliant and still a leader in the field of surrealist but friendly comedy. He still has material that repeats on you for days and yet is mysteriously unquotable; it’s not what he says, it’s how he says it. Armed with a brand new cheeky grin to go with an overall older, more mature feel about him, he retains a brilliant clown-like physicality and can attract complete buy-in merely from impersonating a coughing giraffe. He is obviously having as wonderful a time as we are and despite the massive crowd, the gig feels intimate, like he really is doing a special and unique show just for us.
Personally, I found the atheist theme confusing as I have had the solid conviction since I was a child that Eddie Izzard is God. Tonight he proved not his non-existence, but perhaps his fallibility; showing that he is after all, 43-marathon runner and international acting, producing and comedy superstar aside, still human.
But humans, as he himself decrees in tonight’s show, are pretty damned amazing.
Izzard fan, Kate has 1 ticket for sale for the January 16th Madison Square Garden Show. She’s selling it for face value and it is an awesome seat (34 C 3). You can contact Kate directly HERE.
Like all great comedians, Eddie Izzard doesn’t tell jokes; he weaves funny stories. The well-honed skill that sets him apart is the art of presenting two people conversing with each other, even though he’s the only one on stage. Either that or he’ll suddenly stop and debate with himself about how a particular line should’ve gotten a better laugh but didn’t, or worse—one that shouldn’t have gotten one but did.
If I had to describe this hilarious stand-up concert, it’d have to be done in one very long sentence, because that’s how Eddie Izzard presents it. It used to be that Johnny Carson was the only man I knew who could get lost in the middle of a monologue and then make you laugh your head off listening to him try to dig his way back to where he started. Eddie has that very same talent.
I found myself unable to stop laughing; especially when he reveals and illustrates his conclusion that the legendary Greek and Roman Gods had to have been invented by a man with an extremely large bag of weed and an awful lot of time on his hands.
Other topics that are delivered in rapid-fire fashion include the similarities between transvestites and super heroes because they have to change clothes before they help people. He’ll get hopelessly distracted trying to explain what dark matter is while giving an astronomy lesson on the planet Mars complete with movie sound effects. That leads to a story of how archeologists in Rome dug a huge rectangular hole searching for ancient artifacts, but then didn’t find anything, so they announced they’d found a famous ancient swimming pool.
His admiration for firemen wanders off course when he speculates that they throw cats out the window of fire engines in place of a broken siren, leading to an explanation of the Doppler effect. That leads to his embarrassing problem of not proofreading text mistakes until after he’s hit send and by then it’s too late.
A great story of how to deal with attacking sharks somehow wanders into an even funnier tale of how to deal with houseflies—especially the ones with Klingon cloaking devices that show up in places you don’t expect. That leads to an observation of how racists are never as polite as smokers, which veers back somehow to how English hunters should stop hunting foxes and instead go after flies using flamethrowers.
Another great talent he has is for acting out all of the parts of a movie, which he uses with ease describing his idea of what Sigourney Weaver and the monster would do in the newest fictitious sequel to Aliens, which of course logically becomes a debate about what was more important: the invention of the wheel or the invention of the axle. James Bond makes an appearance in one of the worst impressions you’ve ever heard, which stops in its tracks when he relays that the French dub his voice anyway, so no one in France knows what Eddie sounds like.
He pauses to tell of how he’d recently gotten curious about exploring the Koran and how bad an idea it was to read it on a transcontinental flight to the U.S. He then explores his puzzlement over the sudden appearance of balsamic vinaigrette salad dressing; the evolution of the Neanderthal; Noah’s problems with the menu on the arc, especially when he has to hide from God that he’s eaten one of the cows; and then he ends it all up with his puzzlement over the question of why horses are measured in “hands” instead of “feet.”
This 90-minute concert is well worth the price and includes as a DVD extra the 40-minute Live at the Norwich which is an earlier version of this concert and gives you the opportunity to see how he writes and then hones his craft.
Cardiff-based homelessness charity, Llamau, was thrilled when comedian and Hollywood actor, Eddie Izzard, paid a visit last week.