Eddie Izzard

Eddie Izzard began his American tour, “Stripped”, at Boston's Orpheum Theater, April 28 - 30, 2008
Orpheum Theater
1 Hamilton Place, Boston, MA 02108

Intelligent, rakish humor that doesn’t rely on bodily functions, bathroom activities, or saturated sexual innuendo is hard to come by in America. Which is exactly why an Eddie Izzard show is so refreshing. When he walks onto the stage and gets around to saying. “Tonight, we’re going to talk about… EVERYTHING!” he means it. All 4 billion years of the earth's history.

The next two hours were spent with Izzard cobbling together an oddball pastiche of comedy, history, and general clowning around. Wrap culture, language, and religion in tinfoil, set it in the microwave, and you have an Eddie Izzard show.

Watch Izzard mime about God using a crème brulee torch to create the earth or boil down the Ten Commandments to its essentials. Marvel at his downright courage to say. “Y’know, all we need is one commandment: Be kind to one another.” There is slight pause while he makes sure you registered that. Then a sharp left turn in which he acts out Moses trying to hold back the sea, or dinosaurs with little hands singing from hymnals in church, or Darwin's theory of evolution - "Monkey, monkey, monkey, monkey, monkey, monkey, monkey, you!"

Eddie Izzard is an updated Monty Python, crossed with Steve Martin and Richard Pryor. The English actor has a general idea of what he’s driving at but is so busy looking out the window that he gets gloriously lost amongst the trees along the way. A conversation about the existence of God might be interrupted by whipping out his iPhone to look up the definition of soup - which might been on the menu of the Jesus's Last Supper, “It’s all here on Wikipedia, you know.” And we do.

Using part of that detour as a running joke for the rest of the night, he gets a nearly Pavlovian response of laughter when he’ll pause and utter, “Soup!”

This is the first stop of his three-month American tour of  “Stripped”. By the end of the tour he’ll have shaped and somewhat tamed the show into what will become his second HBO special. The first, “Dress to Kill” (in which the cross-dressing comedian sports lipstick and black pumps), put his name on the map in 1999 and won him two Emmy Awards.

Izzard plays dodge ball with the ideas that streak into his brain. His stream of consciousness delivery is a three ring circus in which he is the daring young man on the flying trapeze, the tightrope walker, and one of the clowns squeezing out of the tiny car all at the same time. That’s a nearly death defying trick for a comedian working without a net on new material.

He took dozens of detours on his 4 billion year history tour about Everything. Aside from a few well-timed F words, the show was muscled along on brain cells, not testosterone. You just don’t realize how starved you are for stimulating comedy until you’ve heard this man in concert.

Youtube has bunches of Izzard's stuff from "Dress to Kill"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiFq_nk8pE0&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ope-1Zb5t-k

Comments

[Lee]

I love Darwin's Theory of Evolution - this guy is great. Thanks for the review - which is funny in itself.

[Carolyn]

I wish I could see it. And as always, nice to be apprised of more
culture by PT.

[Susaan]

Wow. What an amazing mind. Just fascinating to watch the bizarre thoughts ricocheting hither and yon.