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Dressed to kill eddie izzard12/31/2023 ![]() ![]() “I just want to fuck around, take the audience one way, then back up on it,” he says, likening the madcap mosaic of mind which he delivers to channel surfing. Izzard does not tell gags he does not have a written “routine” he rarely invades his own privacy for material he does not attack the audience, or, conversely, try to “dig it up,” as comedians say (“Who here is from. ‘I told you it always comes back!’ I could always get it through to people.” He adds, “If they play with me, it makes it work, and everyone’s happy.” “By this time, somebody got the hang of it and chucked it back. “I’d repeat, ‘Wherever I throw it, the hippopotamus always comes back,’ ” he says. Wherever I throw it, it will come back.’ ” He would then throw the hippo tea cozy outside the ring of spectators. I wouldn’t do anything with them, except this one thing where I’d say, ‘This is a boomerang hippopotamus. People would look at them and think something was going to happen to them,” he says. No contemporary comedian is more adroit at calling the audience into play-something he learned to do in those early street days, when he had to work hard to “get an audience together.” He used to set out a series of tea cozies in the shape of various animals. When an idea registers-he calls this “hitting funny”-he makes a mental note and adjusts the moment when he relives it the next night. ![]() (“Our deaths for your entertainment” was the shill.) Izzard still improvises and expands his comedy material with his public. We lived in a shoebox in the middle of the road.”) But, unlike the Pythons, who went from university into theatre and television, he is a college dropout who got his comedy experience as a street performer, and became a masterly purveyor of what in the trade is called “comedy bollocks”-or, as he explains his particular brand, “take highbrow stuff, well researched, then talk shit about it.” In his busking days (he worked as part of a double act in London for about four years before briefly going solo on the street, in 1987), he “learned to be able to talk and talk and talk and just not stop.” He ad-libbed to audiences as he performed a water-evaporation trick, escaped from a woolly jumper while handcuffed and riding a unicycle, and engaged in heavy-duty sword fighting. We lived in one corridor.” “Oh, we used to dream of a corridor. Izzard, for his part, grew up listening to the Pythons and has committed many of their routines to memory he and a friend used to recite variations of the “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch, to pass the dead time in chemistry class. To the Monty Python veteran John Cleese, who has called Izzard “the funniest man in England,” the prospect of performing this kind of theatrical free fall “is more or less like being taken away by the Gestapo into a dark room.” Izzard’s imaginative high-wire act, a kind of standup equivalent of skydiving (“It feels like flying around in the air, just swooping and diving, being on top of it”), is tense, and games are more fun when they are tense. “I’m not driving I just let go.” In “Dress to Kill,” his nonsense manages to touch on the space program, James I, the Gunpowder Plot, established versus pagan religions, sci-fi movies, astronomy, anthropology, and computers, to name but a few topics. “My mouth and my mind are not in control of me,” he says. I just go on stage and go.” For him, it’s an out-of-mind experience. He says, “Even my standup is designed for the laziest way of doing standup. But Izzard, who has a mop of highlighted blond hair and a short, stocky body, considers himself “a very lazy person with huge drive,” which is why he fakes himself out by doing so many comedy gigs, West End acting assignments (the world premiere of David Mamet’s “The Cryptogram,” Marlowe’s “Edward II”), and now screen roles (this year, he can be seen playing opposite Sean Connery in “The Avengers”). At thirty-six, he is something of a cult figure in England, and is the first comedy act to make the difficult passage across the Atlantic since Dudley Moore and Peter Cook achieved it, in the early seventies. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen and then to New York’s Westbeth Theatre Center, where it’s now playing. ![]() Izzard was in Toronto on the second stop of his “Dress to Kill” tour, which would go on to the U.S. Typical thing they must say, would be, “I want to take potatoes to dangerous places.” What’s the point of being in the Merchant Navy? Lots of discipline and no guns or fancy uniform.Talk about bees and their wily ways /Do speech as an Australian who thinks he’s President of Austria because he’s dyslexic.Before that did the Grim Reaper just have a club? A Grim Clubber? Scythes however were only invented after the Iron Age. The Grim Reaper has been around since the dawn of time. ![]()
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