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EDDIE IZZARD, DYLAN MORAN AND REGINALD D HUNTER. THREE GIANTS OF COMEDY TOGETHER ON THE UK’S FIRST PURPOSE BUILT OUT DOOR STAGE

VERULAMIUM PARK, ST ALBANS

SEPTEMBER 24TH 25TH and 26th 2010

On September 24th 25th and 26th 2010, three of the UK’s best loved comedians

EDDIE IZZARD, DYLAN MORAN and REGINALD D HUNTER will take to the stage together in the glorious surroundings of St Albans Verulamium Park.

For those lucky enough to secure tickets this will be a chance to enjoy one of the very last evenings of the summer in historic style. Tickets for just one of these acts are difficult to come by, but the chance to see all three on the one stage on the one night is a unique, rare and magical experience.

This is history in the making. The three-day event which will take place on the UK’s very first purpose built outdoor comedy platform will take 17,000 man hours to stage. A staggering 66 trucks of equipment will deliver 1,879m square of temporary roads, 2,235m of fencing, 2 miles of cabling, 28,186m of steel pipe (the distance from London to St Albans) 167 portable toilets, 5361 amps of power, 471,040 pixels of screen and a 450 man crew in hard hats. (And that’s the equivalent of 41 football teams or 90 five-aside teams, in fact more than the total world cup players put together)

Outside bars and food stalls will set the scene for what promises to be three unforgettable, hilarious shows.

LAUGHS IN THE PARK

Venue: VERULAMIUM PARK, ST ALBANS

Date: 24/25/26 September 2010

Tix go on sale 10am Friday 18th June

Tickets: 0843 221 0100

hmvtickets.com

Doors open 5.00pm

Show starts 7pm Friday

6.30pm Saturday and Sunday

Now on showtime…Eddie’s on the panel.

[Thanks Jean!]

[thanks Kathryn!]

“He performed in a few games with a British Improv troupe last night at Webster Hall…They were all playing nuns!”

[from Ottawa Citizen]

The World According to Eddie Izzard is furnished with its own comedic logic.

It is a linguistic playground where he juggles with words and groups of words.

Occasionally, he meanders aimlessly to a dead end and finds there is nothing either meaningful or funny left to say. Whoops. He mimes the writing of a note to himself on the palm of his hand: “Don’t go there again, Eddie — at least not until you can find a punch line.”

Izzard graced the stage of the National Arts Centre on Friday dressed in jeans and tails — stiletto heels on his feet, extravagant makeup on his face and bright red polish on his nails; a drag queen without the dress, hair and other accoutrement.

The drag/transvestite shtick has served him well, but lately, he has been appearing sans dress — one stiletto in, one stiletto out, perhaps a deliberate weaning process for the segment of his loyal audience who prefer to see him in gowns.

He says repeatedly that he’s a transvestite but like many Englishmen who have made handsome livings dressing up onstage as flamboyant women, he has borrowed from a theatrical tradition that dates back to when Shakespeare was a lad.

He has been deliberately vague about his sexuality, referring to himself as a straight transvestite or male lesbian or a complete boy plus half a girl — it’s all on his Wikipedia page. He is what he is; whatever he is.

Most important, of course, he can be very funny.

Like all skilled and seasoned stand-up comedians, Izzard tethers himself to a theme and floats on a stream of free association.

Sometimes he’s brilliant, buoyant and side-splittingly hilarious; at other times he struggles and sags.

He was trying out some new material.

“That’ll be funny in a couple of days,” he said, after one of his riffs petered out.

When it didn’t work, he did the “note to self” thing, made a joke of it and everybody laughed. A smart safety net to save a wounded gag from death

Izzard’s theme on this short Canadian tour is ‘Eddie’s History of the World’ from start to where we’re at now. As a warm-up he digs weakly at the Royal Family — an easy target in the colonies — and moves on to God before delving into creationism and Darwinism.

He got into his stride and seemed more comfortable after the intermission. He was at his funniest and smartest during a 15-minute or so ramble about the evolution of language, replete with pidgin Latin –pidgin everything really.

The capacity crowd greeted him with a rapturous standing ovation and bid him farewell with equal enthusiasm.

That’s gold for any performer and Eddie’s earned it.

[from Vancouverobserver.com]

I can’t say I’ve ever been to a performance where the standing ovation happened at the beginning of the show before a single word had been uttered, but that’s exactly what happened Friday night when Eddie Izzard stepped onto the stage at the Queen Elizabeth theatre. Now that’s what I call an entrance.

His reputation obviously precedes him and Mr. Izzard does not disappoint.

Strutting onto the stage in red satin lined tails and stilettos for his newest show Stripped, he was in top form, his natural wit and intelligence undeniable.

The crowd roared as Mr. Izzard crossed the stage telling his version of the history of evolution.

His timing was impeccable, bantering with the audience as he moved through his routine, some of it rehearsed, some not, all the while intertwining the stories as he went along.

It wasn’t until I turned to my left to catch my date sliding down his seat in a fit of laughter that I noticed the audience around us. People leaning forward in their seats, hanging on every word, hankies dabbing at their eyes, the whole room was alive with laughter.

It was a remarkable night. The amount of joy this one man was giving all these people was tantamount to his talent and expertise, and a lesson to anyone wishing to unite an entire group of people regardless of age, sex, race, or religion.

Humour is an extraordinary gift. A gift that can bring a room of strangers together in an instance and hold it there ’til it pees its pants before it’ll miss a word it has to say.

Funny, we could change the world with that.

[thanks Jean]

“Glee” star Jane Lynch has been tapped to host the 2010 Do Something Awards for VH1.The awards honor five nominees for their commitment to social change.

Each nominee is honored for their commitment to service with a community grant of $10,000. Of these five nominees, a grand prize winner will receive a $100,000 grant for their cause during the live broadcast from the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles.

DoSomething.org also announced the 2010 celebrity categories, honoring the entertainment industry for its continued dedication to activism and charity projects. All voting for these categories, including influential celebrities, musicians, comedians, and athletes, inspiring films and television shows, and social media initiatives can be done by the public at DoSomething.VH1.com.

The 2010 Do Something Awards air live on VH1 July 19 at 9 p.m. ET.

5. DO SOMETHING COMEDIAN NOMINATIONS
• Eddie Izzard
• Ellen Degeneres
• Ben Stiller
• Stephen Colbert
• Kathy Griffin

>> READ MORE

[from the Vancouver Sun]

Eddie Izzard is many things: actor, marathon runner, charity fund-raiser and, yes, self-proclaimed transvestite.

He’s also a first-rate comedian. Now more than halfway through the Canadian leg of his Stripped Tour — he’s not in drag for this one — Izzard brought his sharp brand of comedy to Vancouver Friday night for the first of two shows at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre.

The British comic isn’t everybody’s cup of tea. Often absurd and tangential, Izzard’s stream-of-consciousness approach doesn’t follow a traditional comic trajectory. It’s observational, to be sure, but it’s far removed from the material of an everyman’s comic such as Jerry Seinfeld or the oft-hilarious and occasionally offensive Chris Rock.

Izzard instead takes his audience on a nonsensical adventure where the journey is the destination. It’s easy to get lost in his mumbled minefield, which offers plenty of explosive material along the way.

Wearing a black tuxedo jacket with tails, black T-shirt and jeans– with a healthy dose of eyeshadow on his heavily made-up face — Izzard localized things immediately with a quip about Captain Vancouver, “Canada’s first superhero.”

Religion provided a rather large target for Izzard in the early proceedings. It’s not mean-spirited stuff, though; Izzard prefers to comment on things like gods living up in the clouds, where visibility is poor. “Who would live there?” he asked rhetorically.

There’s no fog when it comes to his overall view on religion, though his description of himself as a “spiritual atheist” might confound some in the holier set.

Where Izzard shines, though, is in his ability to make a polished act seem completely spontaneous in its delivery, even pretending to get lost occasionally. He’s so good at it, in fact, that when he wondered aloud where he was, a few folks in the audience felt compelled to shout out verbal cues to help jog his memory. “Thank you, script supervisor,” he said after one gentleman offered some unwanted assistance.

All this, of course, just provided more laughs.

Some of Izzard’s material veers into the realm of Monty Python. Quite silly, really. “Why weren’t there any dinosaur poets?” got a good laugh, though often it seems to be his frenetic delivery that drives the crowd’s positive reaction to the jokes.

But that’s comedy, isn’t it? “Ten per cent content, 90 per cent yelling,” Seinfeld told talk-show host Jimmy Fallon this week, the point being that the method is often as important as the madness behind it.

Izzard’s method is madness, of course, but there’s certainly a good dose of incisive intelligence in the mix.

Some jokes are too long, which can diminish the payoff: His Noah’s Ark bit felt like it floated aimlessly for 40 days and 40 nights.

Then again, comedy is a subjective enterprise. Izzard is rarely gutwrenchingly funny, but he’s genuinely entertaining to watch.

Although, to be perfectly honest, he’s sexier in heels.

[from timescolonist.com]

What: Eddie Izzard

Where: Royal Theatre

When: Last night

Rating: **** 1/2 stars (out of five)

Seconds after stepping on the Royal Theatre’s stage, Eddie Izzard announced he was confounded by our city’s name.

The popular British comedian had done usual “hello Victoria” greeting before stopping himself. “I shouted out the name of a queen from the 1800s,” he said slyly. “ That’s a bit weird.”

The Canadian leg of Izzard’s Stripped tour brought him here after stops in Toronto, Winnipeg, Regina and Calgary (tonight he embarks on a two-night stint at Vancouver’s Queen Elizabeth Theatre). As promised the comic, a self-proclaimed transvestite, was in “boy mode.” So… no dress. Still, for Izzard, dressing as a guy apparently means accessorizing ones tailcoat and jeans with high heels, eye-shadow and rouge.

For the first hour, Izzard — one of the globe’s sharpest comics — talked about God and the evolution of religion. This may not sound a laugh riot; and to be sure, one had to pay close attention to his clever patter. Yet payoffs were there in abundance.

Much of Izzard’s shtick revolved around the inherent absurdities of Christian lore. For instance, how could someone like God tolerant a nasty chap like Adolph Hitler?

“If there was a God, he would have flipped Hitler’s head off,” Izzard said. He then did a funny little routine about der Führer’s troops who, pleased about their leader’s ability to pop off his noggin, chant “Nazis… number one!”

What makes Izzard (who’s also a TV and film actor) different from other stand-up comics is the dizzying speed of his wit, his utter comfortableness on stage and, above all, his deliciously-honed sense of the absurd. The latter somehow seems a distinctly British sensibility — Izzard eschews the raw brashness of a Chris Rock, for instance, in favour of that loopy sense of surreal embraced by Monty Python.

Throughout, there’s a gentleness to what he does. One observer has called this approach “the velvet razor.” Put another way, the equally brilliant Billy Connolly slaps us on the back like a high-IQ pub companion on an absolute roll. Izzard is also energetic, yet there’s more of an eye-winking, subtle sense of style to his delivery; he’s like the Oxford undergrad shifting into high gear at a martini party.

Last night’s show included a potted history of the world, based on information Izzard cheerfully admitted he’d culled from Google and DVDs. Take dinosaurs roaming the earth for 200 million years. What sort of deity would allow this? “That’s got to be God on crack,” Izzard declared.

When following his idiosyncratic logic threatened to become wearisome, Izzard took care to pepper his act with crowd-pleasing bits. We were, for instance, treated to an impersonation of self-important dinosaur poets. Then he pretended to be a Raptor pulled over for speeding.

Later, Izzard pondered the precise moment when humans officially entered the Stone Age. He imitated a prehistoric man who, encountering a bison stuck in a swamp, suddenly decides to bonk his prey with a stone.

“Why have I never thought of this before? It’s so f—ing obvious,” Izzard said with a grin.

(Note: Due to deadline restraints, the reviewer left before the two-hour-plus performance ended.)