Eddie Izzard has cultivated a four-decade career in comedy by blending a gift for stream-of-consciousness improvisation with cosmopolitan cultural observations and a fierce determination to pay off a running gag.
Most American audiences first caught her work in the 1998 comedy special Dress to Kill, which was filmed in San Francisco and won three Primetime Emmy Awards following its broadcast on HBO.
Izzard’s international career had been on the rise for a half-decade by then, and she continued working in comedy while also landing roles in films like Mystery Men, My Super Ex Girlfriend, and Ocean’s Thirteen.
Neither was she short of acclaim for her dramatic work, landing a 2003 Tony Award for her work in A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, and most recently mounting a one-person off-Broadway production of Hamlet.
This month, the North American leg of Izzard’s global comedy tour returns her to New Jersey, with an October 7 date at the Count Basie Center in Red Bank and an October 11 show at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. Entitled, “The REMIX Tour Live,” it includes some of her favorite bits from throughout her 10 comedy specials and years of performing.
NJ Pen enjoyed a brief chat with Izzard in advance of her New Jersey shows. Here’s the recap, edited for clarity and length.
NJ PEN: Your comedy performances have always been up-tempo, somewhat conspiratorial, and even multilingual. You throw so much at the audience, daring them to keep up, and then call back to the various bits that emerge along the way. How do you keep it all straight?
EDDIE IZZARD: I tried to come up with stuff that would make me laugh, and hoping that some people would like that. It was self-policing: Anyone with an active mind who was cool enough would get it.
I’ve recorded and released in French; recorded, but didn’t release, in German. I can speak quite fast in Spanish, but I’m just confident in it. If you’ve got good French and English, the Spanish is very grabbable. We’ve got about 50,000 French words and 50,000 German words in the English language. There’s lots of people in every country and multiple senses of humor. You’ve just got to [reach the right ones].
NJ PEN: Have you ever lost your place in the middle of a bit, and couldn’t recover?
IZZARD: I noticed this thing when I was starting off. People would get together and say, ‘You have a 20-minute set, and that’s it.’ Twenty minutes! I found that the material would die like a prayer. No one listens to prayers, they just roll them out, like how no one listens to a song they’ve heard a million times.
Then in the 90s, we started ad-libbing and changing things over more. This thing of fluid material; I called it molten material. I never wrote it, I just developed it and workshopped it. Every time I did it, it would be a little bit different, and I could add the tangent on if the tangent worked. I could say that bit was just that night.
NJ PEN: After you’ve compiled 35 years of material, how do you decide which bits to resurrect for the REMIX tour?
IZZARD: There’s a bit I do called “Death Star canteen.” It’s Darth Vader going down to the canteen on the Death Star to order penne arrabbiata [but runs afoul of a controlling cafeteria worker]. It was basically a status play. “Do you know who I am?” “Do you know who I am?”
I do that sketch in the show, but I’ve changed some of the words to keep it live and living for me. That’s what I’ve done with most of the pieces. I use my own boredom threshold to change things. I never want it to get boring.
Some sections of certain vignettes and stories are quite old, but I like them. When I’m doing the story of Caesar getting assassinated — and Caesar is not a nice guy, so you can have fun with his death. He had no guards. Captain Hubris turned up that day on the Ides of March.
So when he sees the people coming towards him, “Brutus! Cassius!” it turns into “Seditious!” and “Fabulous!” — all these words that sound like Latin names. “Frabjous! Spatula? You’re not even Roman, are you?” Each night I would make it up again slightly, so it was never the same one. I think of lead guitarists when they’re doing their solos.
NJ PEN: If you’re having fun with the material, then the audience will find you entertaining.
IZZARD: At the base of it is having a career. I’ve tried to set it up so that it was the ideas I like in the first place.
Monty Python stuff works in their films and their sketches and their songs; certain things that make me say, “I want to see this again.” Cleese can’t get the notes right playing Beethoven, and there’s this myna bird sitting there mocking him, and eventually, he just shoots it.
I can watch that again and again because it works. There’s certain pieces that are just so fun and weird and twisted that they can live and live on. I’ve got to have joy doing it. I’ve got to have a good time.
NJ PEN: There’s a lot of cultural analysis on display in your routines. They almost have the feel of a lecture, except you find a way to dig out the ridiculous in the mundane from the most devastating chapters of human history. Has this gotten harder in recent years? Do you think audiences still have an appetite for learning?
IZZARD: I assume intelligence. It’s not that it’s rocket science. Caesar never knew he would end up as a salad. People should know that reference. Chicken Caesar salad is because he was advised by chickens, so Mark Antony becomes this chicken advising him. [Clucking noises].
Of course it’s all bullshit, but then we go through the actual battle of Elysia. Caesar fought hard in that battle, and won that battle. I assume that people can get it, and sometimes they get lost. It’s not for everyone. I have chosen to drive it in a way where it’s self-policing. The people who are cool will know who’s got the sharp sense of humor. It’s very Python-driven.
NJ PEN: In an interview with Jimmy Fallon, you credit Richard Pryor’s conversational comedy style with influencing your own work, as well as Monty Python. I pick up bits of Robin Williams or Jonathan Winters as well as maybe a little bit of Bob Newhart. Who are your comedy influences, and to whom do you look now?
IZZARD: Above all, Richard did fantastic character work. He’d have two people talking to one another, and he had the mic stand in the crook of his arm; this skinny Richard Pryor is represented by the mic stand. There was one point where he had two guys going hunting, and they’re just turning back and forth to each other, and I thought, “I could do that.”
I wasn’t so influenced by Robin’s stuff because I’d already started when I discovered his tape. I just accidentally developed this thing, and just thought everyone else was doing it. It works in drama as well. If you don’t know what’s wrong and what not to do… [it’s liberating].
Mine are stories. It’s slightly different. I was doing stand-up workshops, and the instructor was describing comedy archetypes. You can be the buffoon comedian, the political comedian, one with props, and the all-around genius one. Robin Williams is in the all-around genius category.
NJ PEN: And Monty Python are your favorites.
IZZARD: I got backstage with Python for seven performances. For some reason they allowed me to go along. At one point, I’m standing there with Python in a service lift; they had to do a photo shoot in front of a big, dead parrot. And I said, “I’d like to thank you all for my career.” And right away, [Terry] Gilliam said, “We want it back.”
NJ PEN: That’s hilarious.
IZZARD: That’s what you want in a career: people whose stuff you like, if they like your stuff, it’s great. [John] Cleese called me “the Lost Python.”
I never thought I was going to be a solo performer. I used to watch Billy Connolly and I thought, “this is fantastic stuff, but I could never do that.” Because I couldn’t get a career going the other way, I had to invent a way of doing standup that incorporated my sketch character. I’m a sketch comedian doing standup. That’s where the narrator came from.
And from street performing. When you’re on the street, the audience is wild animals. You try to get an audience to come forward, and build up an edge, and then you can do it. Me and my partner were a double act. I started developing this character, “Hi! I’m here, I’m going to be doing this show. But I wouldn’t watch it. It’s going to be terrible, you should run far away.”
If you tell people to stay, they go away. But if you don’t seem to care, they stick around. I developed that voice on the streets, and took that voice in; before that, I was just characters.
NJ PEN: Gender politics have only grown more complex since Dress to Kill, in which you introduced yourself as “an executive transvestite.”
How do you manage living in gender-fluidity as it becomes more of a political football?
IZZARD: I know I exist. It’s better to be honest. Honesty in this world of lies upon lies, and silly lies; telling the truth is certainly better than lying.
I thought, if we get a discussion going, having a chat, that’s good.
Culture is not war; there’s no invasions of land mass. It’s disagreements. I exist, and I come on and I do my gigs, and I’m trans, and some people go, “I’ll never come see you,” and other people say, “Okay.”
And the younger generation don’t care. I’m with the people who are positive, and I’m heading forward.
Remember gay marriage and marriage equality? The vast majority of the world people are like, “live and let live.” That’s how I roll. Be honest, come out, and be your authentic self.
