It’s not uncommon to hear that a
comedian hasn’t changed enough of their American-focused material on
crossing the Atlantic. It is, though, quite rare to hear it of an
English comic. Eddie Izzard now lives in Hollywood for most of each
year, and his
Stripped tour
comes to Britain after four months on the road in the U.S. It shows,
not just in little things like saying “bok choy” rather than the more
Brit-familiar “pak choi” or engaging in Apple-computer chauvinism, but
in the very structure of the show. Its whistle-stop tour through the
history of everything seems tailored to an Obama electorate; indeed, he
opens the show with a paean to Obama and later remarks, “In the
election you’re the people who’re gonna be sifting ideas” – now, which
election would that be, Eddie?
Much of his material feels more set in its ways, too. Not scripted –
for Izzard, that would almost be heresy – but tried, tested and honed
through the tour. On the press night, I hardly ever got the sense that
he was letting himself zoom off on one of his characteristic
digressions... this, the man I saw generate nearly 15 minutes of
material in a previous West End show from sewing a button back onto his
jacket when it popped off mid-set. The godfather of the “surreal
rambling” style of stand-up isn’t rambling as much.
That said, he’s as surreal as ever. Some of the figures conjured up
over the course of two hours were a dinosaur priest, a jazz chicken, a
giraffe playing charades, super-tough Spartan sheep and Christopher
Walken in French; topics included the difficulty of being urgent when
you’re trying to remember how to inflect Latin, Moses’ draft
Commandments and members of the Order of Assassins carrying out a
contract while zonked on hashish. A running motif of atheism – would
God really have made so many things the way they are, such as the
appendix? – also no doubt plays more keenly in the States, like his
underlying, rather vague appeal to us to keep being progressive in our
attitudes. Back when comedy was the new rock’n’roll, Eddie Izzard was
its Hendrix; but now that there are high-speed fretboard-noodlers
aplenty in comedy as well as rock, the classical greats no longer seem
quite as colossal.
Written for the Financial
Times.