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A transvestite comedian with a penchant for improvising scenes in French and describing his cat drilling for gold. Such a sentence would never exist were it not for Eddie Izzard, the best stand-up comedian to emerge from Britain in the last decade. The man isn't so much a breath of fresh air in the world of stand-up as a tornado of high-heels, press-on nails, and skiing elephants.
Izzard began performing on the streets around London's Covent Garden, modeling himself on an amalgam of Lenny Bruce, Robin Williams, and a well-read dyslexic mime artist. He constantly had to invent ways to attract an audience, but certainly doesn't have that problem any longer.
After an unprecedented stand-up residency in London's west end, four immensely successful videos, an evening whereby an entire British television channel was given over to his control, a French tour in which he performed only in the native language, a hugely successful autobiograpy, a number of plays (most recently Peter Hall's "Lenny", playing Lenny Bruce), and several films under his belt ("Shadow of the Vampire", "Mystery Men", "The Avengers", and the forthcoming "All The Queen's Men" with Matt Le Blanc, and "The Cat's Meow," in which he plays Charlie Chaplin), Izzard finally toured America in 1998. Culminating his visit with a sell-out date in San Francisco, produced by Robin Williams and subsequently shown on HBO.
Izzard is an incredibly personal and personable performer; somehow it seems rude to refer to him by his surname alone. His material - what little of it there is considering the bulk of his shows are improvised - consists of sharply observed conflations of history, pop culture and language. His experience as an early-aware transvestite boy growing up in a middle class England provides much material, and he comes into his element with such subjects as the B-movie genre, the Bible, Europe's post-Empire blues, and America's ascendancy as a superpower.
A combination of incredibly physical mime-acting and a seemingly endless improvisational imagination communicate his boundless enthusiasm for life's absurdities and hair nets (really). For example, what would "Star Wars" have been like if the Death Star were populated by characters from "Sense & Sensibility"?
"'What is it, Sebastian?'
'Err, umm, I think it's the, er, Rebels, sir. ... They're here.'
'My God, man! Well, what do they want? Do they want tea?'
'Er, I, umm... I think it's a little more serious than that, sir.'"
Unlike many other stand-ups, Izzard doesn't put himself on a pedestal or throw acerbic diatribe at the audience, oblivious to whether it's funny or not. On the other hand, he remains his own person, never becoming cloying or insidiously conspiratorial. Eddie Izzard is what he is, and he knows how ridiculous that may appear. He's confident enough to care only in as much as it's funny.
Far funnier still, he proves to his audience, is to imagine his cat drilling behind the sofa, Saint Paul advising the Corinthians to "never put a sock in a toaster", and the cast of "Star Trek" setting their phasers on Limp.
Eddie Izzard's "Glorious" is available on VHS in America, and "Dress To Kill" is widely available in the UK.
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