Izzard has toned down the wardrobe but not much else By Chris Jones
Tribune critic
May 17, 2008
He has ditched the high heels but not the accompanying totter. The show now has an arty little video screen encased in the backdrop, but it still opens with a campy gasp of glam-rock and stage effects. And Eddie Izzard still staggers out, blinking into the spotlight and ready to ramble on about everything and nothing for two hours. The chap changes less than the package.
Whether dressed to kill or stripped down, Eddie Izzard is what he has always been, a restless but perennially upbeat comedic intellectual who has found a sweet spot between flamboyant sociopolitical educator and ultra-hip ironist. On his previous visits, Izzard attracted mostly male, Anglophile fans of the alt-comedy scene in the early 1990s. But thanks to his TV dramedy "The Riches," Izzard now also snags a different crowd—older and demonstrably less familiar with his years of live shtick.
Izzard has toned things down to promote his new career. The short skirt has been replaced by manly designer jeans. There's less chatter about transvestism and freedom of identity. Some of his "we" and "you" stuff about Britain and America feels a tad disingenuous from a guy who now lives much of the year in Los Angeles. And you can smell some of the typical cravings of a middle-age artist to switch from being known for nihilism to using his expanding platform for progressive social change.
So what. To see Izzard live is still to be reminded that the notion that the great American public likes only inane, personality-driven entertainment is nothing more than a creation of those who wish to keep us stupid so as to better sell us the people and stuff they want us to buy.
Right now, people are craving intellectual heft and substance. You could smell it in the packed Chicago Theatre on Thursday night. Izzard's fascinating latest show is mostly a caustic meditation on the illogicality of religion—it's like watching a live version of Christopher Hitchens' "God Is Not Great" or an unusually funny lecture by Richard Dawkins. Not that Izzard is a Rottweiler for Darwin. His sense of the deeply absurd is in fine shape. Watching the cogs turn in Izzard's well-coiffed skull, I found myself marveling at the restless determination of the human brain to make sense of the nonsensical. Which, in another show, would be an argument for religion.
Not here. During his two-hour monologue Thursday, Izzard spent time pondering how the only place a giraffe can hide is behind another giraffe and, in a rant against intelligent design, impersonated an appendix frustrated from the lack of grass to digest. And he ended his show with a side-splitting, Pythonesque routine based entirely on how the biblical commandment that one should not covet one's neighbor's ox is inherently incompatible with free trade. He'd have you think about that one.
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Sounds like he was in the swing of things for this review anyway... he's known for building shows as the tour goes though, which is a bit crap for the people who see the show early on.
Izzard finds edge on stage May 22, 2008
By John Benson
www.vindy.com
His current stand-up material concentrates on the notion of God. Despite wearing many hats, British comedian Eddie Izzard feels most at home performing his stand-up comedy before a live audience. Even though in recent years the 46-year-old funnyman has enjoyed notoriety in feature films and even as a television actor in cable network FX series “The Riches,” Izzard says the stage provides him with a real edge, which is based on an intangible confidence he learned dating back to his meager beginnings two decades ago as an anonymous street performer in London.
“I always feel I’m a street performer, and especially what I learned about street performing hugely informs my stand-up talents,” said Izzard, calling from Cincinnati. “It gives you this confidence that you develop standing on a piece of street where no one wanted to look at you in the first place, so it stays with me always. This baptism of fire or the ninja training you have if you’re a street performer, there’s no way you’d learn it if you got anything else going. It’s too hard. People say stand-up is hard; street performing is harder because you have to mangle and handle an audience. We used to physically move people around. It’s incredibly tricky. It teaches you about energy and how crowds work. It was amazing training.”
Izzard is now back on the road with “Stripped,” his first national tour in five years. The comedian, who returns to Cleveland for two dates Friday and Saturday at the Palace Theatre, said his current material is based largely around the notion of God. Specifically, Izzard said over the past few years he’s been transformed from an agnostic into an atheist and he’s using “Stripped” as a vehicle to present his argument.
“What’s kind of interesting is America really seems to be locked in step with God,” Izzard said. “I just see god and the devil inside of people, as opposed to being up in the clouds. And why would he be in the clouds, it’s so damp. Why would he have 4.5 billion years of the Earth and only develop language over the past 100,000 years? Because you can’t have religion without language. And if you look at the voting record of God, it’s (expletive). There’s too much death, pestilence, all of that hell. Why did he do all that and if he didn’t do that, then what’s the point of that? He isn’t controlling everything. I’m sure the Jewish people prayed really hard during World War II and nothing seemed to happen. That’s my big conclusion.”
If looking for insight into what makes Izzard tick, look no further than “The Riches,” which is currently in its second season. While Izzard has acted in many feature films, including “The Cat’s Meow” and memorable roles in the “Ocean’s 11” series, it’s “The Riches” that perhaps truly mirrors his personality and irreverent spirit like no other project.
“You sort of take what roles are going, but [‘The Riches’] is edgy because we’re sort of lying and cheating our way to the American dream,” Izzard said. “I don’t think that’s been on wholesome American television as standard fare. It’s maybe a post-‘Sopranos’ show, but we are lying, stealing and cheating our way to get it all. Usually it’s supposed to be working hard, praying to God, doing something very nice, and we’re not doing that. We’re just lying cheats, but we all love each other. So it’s good wholesome, family stealing and lying and cheating.”
He is coming to Tampa on 6/17, which is my brother's birthday. I bought tickets for he and I to go, so I hope the aforementioned was an off night for him. I love his stand up and most of his movie roles. I can't say that I was that interested in The Riches, but that was due to the story line, not Eddie. It just isn't a storyline I am interested in.
I wish Eddie Izzard would be coming to a area around me I would love to go see him. I could go to Houston but that is 4 hours drive and not wanting to see him that bad.
Well, went to the show last night, and after a bit of a slow start he was really on a role. We had an awesome time and he was dead funny. He covered everything from gas prices and the Stone Age to Giraffes and Shirley Temple.
I've watched his shows on DVD before and I can say being in the room with him is different. I had the feeling I was in the pub with a good friend who didn't know how to shut up but you didn't care because he was so funny.
The audience loved him. He was also gracious enough to give us an encore. When I read the review from his Wednesday night show here it was obvious that they got a similar show but that it was also very different. Which shows that he does have a lay out of what he is going to do but it changes.
The whole show was 2 1/2 hours and accept for maybe the first 10 minutes it was worth every penny and we were so glad we went.
I got to see him last night and I agree he was brill! Sky, did he start out with bits about Wikipedia? Our start wasn't too slow, he did some funny bits about Tampa and raved about the venue (Tampa Theatre is a real movie theatre from the early 20th century -- beautiful place) I took my brother for his birthday and we had a blast. It was actually me who got a present, because Eddie did a Q&A thing out in the lobby after the show (thank goodness I had to pee and couldn't decide what t-shirt I wanted!!) and I got to ask him a question!!! It was about football of course (he talks about the differences between American football and English football in the show) so I told him I was a Spurs supporter and asked who he supported (He is a Palace supporter). It was all very exciting!
Just go with the Izzard flow British comedian, actor to bring his constantly evolving routine to Vegas
Joe Brown
July 23, 2008
lasvegassun.com
Talking with comedian/actor Eddie Izzard — or rather listening to him — is like catching a working sketch for his comedy act. Izzard, who has been called “a human search engine,” “a one-man Monty Python crew” and “the most brilliant stand-up of his generation,” says hello and he’s off, taking a series of unpredictable turns and tangents, swerves and side alleys, somehow ending up where he intended to go all along.
It all comes out in a breathless blizzard of words, without punctuation, without even inhaling — you find yourself breathing for him. Everybody ready? (Take a deep breath every time you see the three dots.) Now here’s Eddie:
• • •
Momentarily back in England, on a brief break from his 31-city “Stripped” tour, which brings him to the Pearl at the Palms on Friday and Saturday, the actor/comedian is chatting on the phone while in a taxicab in London. “I’m having a holiday in my home country, which is quite weird,” he says. “I’ve only been here for two days, and I’ve been trying to do as little as possible. I’m not very good at it.”
Izzard has just learned he has been officially shortlisted for an Emmy Award nomination for his role on the FX noir drama series “The Riches.” (Shockingly, he ended up being snubbed when the nominations were announced last week.) “I just played at Radio City Music Hall for three nights, doing weird, surreal stand-up,” he says. “And then getting on the top 10 shortlist a few days later — for drama! — that’s classic. I was planning to do one of them years ago” — meaning comedy or acting — “but I couldn’t get either of them going. So I decided to do both of them.”
He veers into a conversational cul-de-sac about acting vs. comedy. Izzard, 46, has won plenty of recognition for both, including an Emmy for his first HBO comedy special, “Dressed to Kill,” a Tony nomination for his leading role in a Broadway revival of Peter Nichols’ tragicomic play “A Day in the Death of Joe Egg,” and acclaim for his role in the “Ocean’s” movies and the “The Riches,” in which Izzard plays the patriarch of a family of con artists.
Acting, by Izzard’s estimate, is “about 50 percent different or maybe 75 percent different” from comedy. “But there’s one big central thing in both, and that’s to be absolutely inside what you’re doing as much as possible. So if I’m talking complete rubbish and then becoming the king of Egypt or a giraffe or Moses, then I’ve got to be that person, that thing, that animal, that coast or whatever it is. And in drama, it’s exactly the same — you want to be your character, so people watch and just relax into it. But acting is so very different from standing on a stage for two hours and just nailing it and living it second to second with no lifeboat, no ‘let’s do that again.’
“So I do love them both. I wouldn’t choose between them. If I had to do one, I think I would do the filmed medium, because you can go anywhere in the world, and it is a lot of fun, you’re working with a lot of other people, and you can do comedy or drama. So that would be my cheeky way of doing one. Not that you asked that question,” he says, cracking up at his own relentless filibustering.
• • •
Izzard titled the current tour “Stripped,” he says, because “people got very confused with the clothes that I wear. So I’ve gone back to ‘boy mode,’ as I call it.” Izzard made his name as an unapologetic cross-dresser, appearing onstage in 2003’s “Sexie” tour in heavy makeup, dresses, fishnets and falsies. (Izzard has described himself as an “executive,” “action” and “underground” transvestite.)
“I say at the beginning of the show that I’m going to talk about everything that ever happened,” he says, chuckling as if the idea still tickles him. “I’ve been going around the Bible Belt talking about God, and having a sort of more European view on God, ’cause I think in Europe after two world wars we agreed that he wasn’t watching. I’m not trying to say I hate religious people or I hate religion. I’m just trying to say I think religions are philosophies with a mystical topcoat. And I prefer to remove the topcoat. Of course, you can’t just tell people what to think, but you can put out another point of view. Which I have found in America, going through the Bible Belt, talking to a lot of people coming to the show, that people don’t feel they can say out loud. No politician can get elected (in the United States), I don’t think, without giving at least a nod to religion, saying, ‘Thank God, praise the Lord ...’ ”
He excuses himself from the conversation to tip his cabbie: “Just keep that, mate.” And while climbing the stairs to his office, he starts up again, describing how he approaches playing an American character, as he does in “The Riches.”
“I don’t tend to see Americans and British and French and Angolans as all being vastly different; I always look for similarities,” he says, breathing heavily from the climb. “But I suppose there is an overriding ethos of an American culture thing, which is ‘Let’s go do it, let’s go build it, let’s go make it!’ Which Europeans, I think, didn’t used to have. Maybe the new, younger generation are getting it. But I’ve always felt that I thought in an American way — my mind-think is ‘Let’s go build it.’ “
That leads him to how his alternative, very English style of comedy goes over with American audiences, and particularly in Las Vegas, which is a magnet for mainstream comedians. “I design it to be universal,” he says, “so I can play in Iceland and Australia and America. I find that comedy is understood everywhere, even though a lot of references are to culturally specific pop culture figures or brands or whatever. But we just skip over that, just like ‘Monty Python’ was understood by Americans and not all the references were understood. Or ‘The Office’ — there’s tons of British references all over that. My stuff is not for everyone — it’s necessarily for the big mainstream audience — but America is a country of 300 million and you don’t need to have 300 million watching every show.”
• • •
Although he appears in Las Vegas in “Ocean’s 13,” Izzard has taken his time before bringing his stand-up to the Strip. “I’m intrigued by (Las Vegas’) beginnings, the whole Bugsy Siegel, Rat Pack thing,” he says. “But it’s generally not really my natural place. I come from a mathematics background, and the one thing I was taught was don’t gamble, because you very rarely hear of casinos going into Chapter 11, and there’s a reason for it. I find it intriguing and scary, and I do find that when you come down in the lifts — the elevators — that everyone is on those (slot) machines, and I just worry for them. I worry for their savings.”
So Eddie is finally ready for Vegas. “I thought if I got the mainstream audience turning up to see my stuff, it would be like, ‘Look at this guy, what is he, a transvestite?’ I thought I would die on my ass. So I thought I should get sort of well enough known that I could just go in there and bring my own audience, to an extent.”
But is Vegas ready for Eddie? It seems the time is right — Saturday’s show is sold out. Certainly the Strip has never seen anything like him before: A manifestation of a roiling restless intellect, Izzard’s riffing routines put the physical in metaphysical, flashing with brilliant bits of mimicry, mime and music. And there’s true artistry in making it all seem spontaneous.
“I keep it as loose as possible — I call it molten,” he says. “I like to not quite know how a piece goes, so I kind of know, like, the motorway journey that I’m doing, but I can’t remember what I said yesterday. I discovered this thing when I was starting out,” he continues. “In the first few weeks of when you’re doing a piece on some subject, it’s really got this great life, this energy. And then you start to lock it down, cause you know where you want to go, you’ve got some punch lines. And then it starts to become like a prayer. And then all the life gradually just goes out of it. It becomes, like, stuck in concrete. So I got this idea, if I keep it constantly molten, then it would be constantly alive, and I can be constantly adding to it and subtracting from it. So that I’m not really quite sure what I’m doing. I still surprise myself, hopefully, every night.”
Here's Eddie at The Secret Policeman's Ball - originally this was the 2008 performance, but that's been snarked by copyrighting feckers, so this is the 2006 appearance...
Izzard takes Ludlow by storm Sarah Veall
15th November 2008
Eddie Izzard. One man, one microphone, stripped of all pretensions and back to doing what he does best - stand-up. For one glorious night at Ludlow Assembly Rooms, the audience was taken on a virtual tour of life, the universe and everything, Eddie-style. This one-off gig was part of a six-date warm-up tour for a West End run of his show 'Stripped' and it's not just his image (looking make-up free and goatie-bearded fabulous in jeans, t-shirt and jacket) to which that title applies.
The ever-challenging comedian strips away the layers of myth and legend involved in the big questions of religion, creation and evolution and debunks them in true surreal fashion. So we get chickens with trumpets stuck to their beaks, stoned squirrels and giant squid on the moon, and an hilarious look at just why Noah's Ark really wouldn't have worked... But the joy with Eddie's comedy is not the 'punchline', but how we get there and it's good to see that his success in his dramatic roles has not affected his ad-libbing and conversational style, which are as unique and brilliant as they have ever been.
The assembly rooms was a perfectly intimate venue - it was amazing to be sitting just feet away from someone I've admired for nearly 20 years - making the whole event feel much more personal and allowing great audience participation. This was one night with Eddie Izzard which will stay in the memory for quite some time.
Eddie Izzard: Keeping it surreal Fans of the adorable comic genius have had to be patient while he has pursued a straight acting career. But at last he's back with a new show By Archie Bland
Saturday, 22 November 2008
Independent.co.uk
Now that a comedian has called a venerable actor and left him a series of detailed messages about sleeping with his granddaughter, there are few heresies left in comedy. There is one that remains, though. If you say you don't like Eddie Izzard, you are going way beyond the pale.
Because everyone loves Izzard. Saying you didn't like him would be like expressing an aversion to chocolate, or puppies. He inspires the same manic affection among his admirers as he himself felt for the Monty Python team in his childhood, when he learned their scripts by heart to pass the time in chemistry lessons. Mention his name at the pub and your friends are likely to chime in with half-hearted versions of his rambling anecdotal style; casually let it drop that you are going to see him live and they will likely assault you in the hope of getting a ticket.
For that's the only fly in the Izzard ointment: these days, his live shows are few and far between. As far as most of his hardcore fans are concerned, there just isn't enough of him being funny to go round. Those DVDs of his 1990s performances are getting worn by now, and his insistence on straight dramatic roles – frequently far from hilarious, as in his role as the Nazi General Erich Fellgiebel in the forthcoming Tom Cruise film Valkyrie – doesn't leave much time for anything else.
"I actively try to be less well known in comedy," he explains. "If you get too well known in comedy, I think it blocks people from taking you in drama." In recent years, Izzard has worked mostly in America, in film and television, and he hasn't been seen in the West End since 1996. That is, until this week.
The early reaction to his new show, Stripped, is as adoring as ever. "Thank heavens for the return of Eddie Izzard," wrote one critic. "He seems to me to be one of the comedy greats, a modern stand-up who can bear comparison with such giants as Frankie Howerd, Tommy Cooper and Ken Dodd."
That's exalted company indeed, but few would dispute it. Unfortunately, it is hard to say exactly why Izzard is funny without reference to the man himself: to rehash his jokes in the explanatory effort is a bit like trying to explain what a Picasso looks like by saying it's a picture of a jug. His self-consciously virtuosic style leaves no room for mistakes, and no chance at paraphrase. "Really I'm just a bloke talking crap," Izzard says. "I'm a child of Python: I'm just talking nonsense."
In Stripped, he speaks about his passion for Wikipedia, gleefully detailing his pursuit of obscure subjects through the endless rabbit warrens of embedded underlined links, and it isn't hard to see his brain as a kind of synaptic Wikipedia, making hypertextual connections that the rest of us would miss in the blink of an eye.
His own entry in the online encyclopaedia is full of exactly the sorts of fascinating, clickable phrases that indicate a remarkable life: "accountancy", "street performer", "transgender lesbian". It begins in Yemen, where Izzard was born in 1962, and where his father worked for BP. Before long, the family had moved to Bangor, Northern Ireland, and it was there that the defining event of his early life took place. When he was six, his mother, Dorothy, died from cancer. The impact was profound. "She was great and I didn't want her to go away," he once said. "I just thought she was ill and she would get better. And then you come home one day and she isn't there, and you don't see her ever again."
Some psychologists draw a connection between transvestism and the need to replace the need for a missing mother, but Izzard says he first felt the urge to dress in women's clothes a year earlier. Whatever the truth, what is undisputed is that his love of performing can be dated to that familial catastrophe. Ever since, he has given everything to audiences in a frank bargain that demands their affection in return.
He explained it thus to Bono in a conversation for The Independent two year ago: "A mother gives unconditional love, but an audience's love is totally conditional. You have to deliver. Consequently, I believe my desperation to deliver is to get this love out of an audience. That is what keeps pushing me."
At 16, after a quietly unhappy childhood at a series of British boarding schools, Izzard decided he wanted to be a performer. But he then went to study accountancy at Sheffield University (the director Stephen Daldry, who went there with him, is as effusive about his manner as everyone else: "He has always been a good bloke," he said. "There has never been any edge to him."). Once Izzard was there, it rapidly dawned on him that this might be an odd career move for a wannabe actor and, after a few undergraduate shows (Sherlock Holmes Sings Country; World War II: The Sequel), he dropped out in favour of making his own way as a street artist.
It was this experience, and the need to keep an audience engaged, that Izzard credits with the birth of his meandering style. But it took a few years for his efforts to pay off. His first performance at the Comedy Store wasn't until 1987, when he was 25; only in the early 1990s did his comedy begin to draw acclaim.
To his new-found fans, it was soon apparent that he was a true original. Nothing was familiar about these performances, from Izzard's defence of the European Union, to lengthy imaginings of evil giraffes, and how Jesus might tend to the dinosaurs. Most unusual was his dress. A male comedian in woman's clothes outside panto was rare; one who was straight and didn't even dress terribly stylishly was even more of a shock.
Izzard didn't come out as a transvestite until he was 21. When he made it big, he lost his concern about anyone else's response to his clothing. "I'm not saying anyone else needs to do it," he said. "I'm just saying this is me." Who Izzard is away from performance is something of a mystery, his relationships a closely-guarded secret. "He just doesn't talk about any of that," his publicist on Stripped says.
In his 1999 show, Dress To Kill, he ruminated (in full drag) on the difficulty of making it in America as a transvestite comedian – and on Hollywood's propensity for ruining its imports. "If Room With A View did any kind of business in America," he mused, "Hollywood would remake it and it wouldn't be anything like the original. It would be Room With A View Of HELL!"
Izzard's own efforts at crossing the Atlantic were to meet with success. Today, he is not just a transvestite but a leading man, playing the loquacious grifter Wayne Malloy alongside Minnie Driver in HBO's The Riches; he is not just a comedian but a character actor, as his forthcoming appearance in Valkyrie attests.
The Riches was recently cancelled, and so fans would be forgiven for thinking that this trip home might be a sign of blissful stand-up tours to come. But Izzard insists that is not the case. His determination to work as a straight actor as well as a stand-up remains undimmed, and seems most likely to be fulfilled in America. There is no way round it: he has moved beyond us now. Those who love Eddie Izzard have another three weeks to catch him. After that, they are going to have to let him go. n
A life in brief
Born: 7 February 1962, Yemen.
Family: His father, Harold, was an accountant. His mother, Dorothy, was a nurse and died when he was six years old. He has one brother, Mark.
Education: Attended St Bede's Preparatory School in Eastbourne and Eastbourne College. Was kicked off his accountancy degree course at Sheffield University after one year.
Career: Regarded as one of the finest stand-up comedians of his generation, he started out performing street comedy before moving on to the UK stand-up circuit. His 'Dress To Kill' show won him two Emmy awards. His film credits include The Avengers, Ocean's Twelve and the forthcoming Valkyrie.
He says: "I definitely have breast envy. When teenage girls were saying 'I wish I had breasts', I was thinking the same thing."
They say: "Gentle cutting edge, kind of like a velvet razor." Robin Williams on Izzard's comedy.
Straight talking After years focusing on being an actor, Eddie Izzard is back with a sellout stand-up tour. So why the long break from comedy? He talks to Aida Edemariam about his enduring belief in Labour, how he conquered the US and why he loves drama Aida Edemariam
The Guardian,
December 2 2008
After 12 long years Eddie Izzard is back in the West End, and when, finally, he shamble-stalks on to the stage in jeans and tailcoat, the sincerity of the welcome is unmistakable. Comedy has changed a great deal since he was last headlining here - got crueller, for one thing - so when, after a few preparatory "um, yeahs", and some remarks about how pleased he was Obama won, he launches into a riff about Strictly Come Dancing, you can feel the whole audience settling in, thinking, "Ah, that's more like it." By the time he is threading his way through the proposition that the embroiderers of the Bayeux tapestry were the paparazzi of their day ("Over here, love, over here ... Just shoot King Harold in the eye, would you? We've already drawn it in") he is surfing billowing waves of laughter.
It's not entirely plain sailing: a couple of digs at Sarah Palin get mildly booed - not, one feels, because anyone disagrees particularly, but because that's not what they expect of him: much more interesting are his inspired rummages through the historical sections of Wikipedia; his impressions of giraffes who can only cough, not scream, warnings of tigers; his not-quite-faux-innocent poking at received ideas until they reveal their original strangeness; his merry travel through space and time and register, like a 4D picaresque.
A couple of days later, sitting in the empty auditorium of the Lyric, Shaftesbury Avenue, he admits he's still settling in - getting the measure of the space, apart from anything else. There's a wary stillness to him and to his beautifully manicured hands, a tolerant world-weariness, a willed tolerance, more evident in person than on tape, where his low slurry voice sounds more engaged.
This paper had just run an editorial claiming him as "a national treasure - the David Attenborough of stand-up comedy", and while he was mildly puzzled by the Attenborough reference, he was pleased, particularly by a mention of his decades-long support for the European Union, because "it's not a place that a lot of performers go to - they either do political comment and that's what they do, or they don't really touch politics". There is less overt politics in the current show than there was, say, in the mid-90s (if only for the entirely hard-headed reason that it dates so fast on DVDs) but Izzard is a Labour member and major donor who has defended the cause on Question Time and on Newsnight, appeared with Neil Kinnock arguing for a federalist Europe, recorded a podcast with Tony Blair for the Downing Street website, and was spotted at the last Labour party conference engaged in a fierce argument with James Murdoch. He's a social democrat rather than a socialist; when pressed (a tricky thing to do - one interviewer, memorably, compared "trying to get all Paxman-like on Izzard" to "round[ing] up bush babies with a cattle prod") he describes himself as more Blair-ite than Brown-ite, but Brown "is the leader of the Labour party, and I want the Labour party to get in".
"I just believe in the goodwill of people, the power of people to do something positive. And that's why I'm in the Labour party. The Labour party believes in fairness, and the Conservative party is more about getting the country working well and rewarding high-flyers, and ... there's this trickle-down theory. Why do we have to have a trickle-down theory? Why does it trickle? Why can't it be a flow-down theory? Why can't it gush down? Trickle implies that someone's got bazillions, and someone else might get pennies."
Most comics would do politics cynically; one of the most striking things about Izzard is that he doesn't. "Well, comedy is a great weapon of attack. It's not a great weapon of support." In Izzard's hands it's also a vehicle for exploration: he describes his method as starting on the motorway and then going off on different B-roads every night, which is probably another reason why people like him so much; they know they're getting boutique comedy, not a polished stump speech. At the beginning of this tour, in New York, he discovered he was no longer agnostic.
"If I go off on an ad lib and I like it, I just use it to open up some new section maybe - or it might not go anywhere. And I'm actually trying to make myself laugh. So I hopefully don't come to any show going, 'Oh, I have to churn this shit out again,' because I've seen performers get like that. And that's where religion has got to, I feel. It's got to the place where you can go [he recites the Lord's Prayer in a galloping monotone] ... and no one listens to that."
"I did 12 years of that at school. I mean, it was CofE, so it wasn't too heavy-duty. It wasn't like the Catholic church - kids brought up in the Catholic church have to really fight to separate their own minds from an indoctrinated idea. And yeah - I don't believe in organised God. He doesn't seem to be organised at all." The main argument in Stripped - if an Izzard routine has a main argument - is that if there is a God, he should have intervened in the second world war. Or got rid of the dinosaurs quicker. And if there is intelligent design, why do we have appendixes? There's a lesson for Richard Dawkins somewhere in there.
Izzard has said before that he'd like to run for political office, maybe as MEP, but realistically, he says now, "I don't know - maybe not. I mean, I've spent years getting this together. Years and years of hard, hard bloody graft, I've really slogged my way up the bloody mountain, so I'm kind of loath to chuck that all away." He's a candidate for Malcolm Gladwell's theory that so-called genius requires 10,000 hours of practice - since his first gig, 22 years ago, at the Banana Cabaret in Balham, London, when he got only one laugh for his whole set, he has worked and honed, and pushed himself, and scared himself, from street-performance to Wembley, dress-wearing to gigging in French, into the position of one of Britain's favourite comics. He is tactical, tough, single-minded. "I thought I could get America. I worked out I should probably play New York endlessly until New York gave in. I did that, they did give in in the end - and then I took that power, or that clout, and then I went to the west coast, they said, 'Oh yeah, this is good,' and HBO said, 'Well, if they're all liking it we're going to put you on,' and then I played 34 cities in three and a half months this summer. I mean bands have done that, but I don't think comedians have done that."
And as with his routines, so with his career: not for him a comfy reliance on what works (and boy does it work - the West End run sold out in under 48 hours); despite bafflement, and often a distinct coolness from many of his stand-up fans, he is determinedly chasing a similar level of achievement in straight acting, which is why he hasn't done a big tour for so long: "I've slightly downplayed the stand-up over the past 15 years, sort of held it back and kept pushing on the drama." This has encompassed everything from a well-received A Day in the Death of Joe Egg to the dire Ocean's Thirteen; a well-received (but now cancelled) TV series with Minnie Driver, The Riches (he is planning a movie), to the ambivalently awaited Valkyrie, with Tom Cruise.
Critics have in the past wondered why on earth he might want to trade being a first-rate comedian for a second-rate actor, but for Izzard that's just an issue of timing. "I'm trying to lead with drama, which I've done less of - I'm still playing catch-up. I'm still where I was in the late 90s with stand-up. So in another 10 years I think I can probably ..." He doesn't finish the sentence. He spends a lot of time thinking about craft. "It's the caring and not-caring balance that is the weird thing. You have to go up in front of a whole audience and not care. Well, you have to actually care, while pretending to your brain that you don't care. Because if you don't care you won't worry about things, and therefore you will be free, and you can make the interesting connections."
He has compared drama to a full nutritious meal, as opposed to the sugar rush of comedy. "I haven't seen Valkyrie yet. I did that a year and a half ago. I have no idea what I did. It's so odd, for a year and a half you're waiting to see - all the preparation you put into it - whether it came off or whether it didn't. In stand-up you get it a split-second after you say it."
American audiences are more gushing, he admits, more ecstatic. Does that make him softer? "Yes, it does. You've just got to know that that's going to happen." He now lives in the US for about half the year. Are there costs to that? Personal costs? As usual, he doesn't give much away. "It's not easy. Friends, relations - it's tricky. But there are certain things that are built in and part of the deal, and you just have to - deal with it."
Then again, when I ask when he has been at his absolute happiest, he says, "Ever since I went solo in 1987." Constantly? "Well, I've been content. Happy? Obama won the election. That was pretty damn good. When Nelson Mandela got out of prison. Having done two weeks of gigs in French. I don't know if that was happy, or a good sense of accomplishment ... yeah, so no one particular time." And it's always work? "Yeah. Because work is my life, you know. If you get anything creative going, then the work and play thing is the same thing, I feel ..." And his voice drifts away into a meditative growl.
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