Surreally Saying Something

Fresh back from taking America by storm, EDDIE IZZARD comes to Brighton
to talk about clothes, cows and being a prostitute (sort of). EDDIE GIBBS
finds out why the bovine breed is inherently groovy.

If Eddie Izzard was to wear a T-shirt with all the dates of his current world tour printed on the back, rock band style, then it would have to be a very long T-shirt indeed. But that's okay, he would probably just match it with patent leather boots and leggings, and call it a mini dress. There are a lot of unusual things about Izzard, and after several years as an out transvestite, the fact he wears clothes originally designed for woman is now perhaps the least of them.
Izzard has just schlepped across Europe, from Paris to Copenhagen via Reykjavik, before finishing a three-week residency in New York. It is rare that a foreign comic can win over an audience in the United States, a country that likes to be self-sufficient when it comes to pop culture, noted the New York Times in a very favourable review of Izzard's show. Inevitably he was compared to Monty Python, one of the few British comic turns to have cracked America, but at least in New York performing in a dress is unlikely to cause much comment.

This time last year, circumstances were rather different. Izzard had just travelled to Lewis to play Stornoway Town Hall. Inevitably the local Free Church minister (equally inevitably called Reverend MacLeod) had heard of this abomination visiting the island and denounced Izzard in very Biblical terms. The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man and the man shall not wear women's clothing, quoted the minister from Deuteronomy, before threatening to haul any member of his congregation who attended the gig up before the Kirk session. Naturally Izzard responded in comic kind, referring to 'Pope' MacLeod on stage. Sharp intake of breath amongst audience.
Izzard is talking shortly before the start of his world tour, and appropriately enough he's looking pretty rock'n'roll in leather trousers and leopardskin print shirt, with a tousled hair-style which could probably be described as blondes-have-more-fun. At the risk of being sued by either party, Izzard bears an uncanny resemblance to Rod Stewart, though I'm not so sure about the green nail varnish.

As Izzard said repeatedly when he came out as a trannie, he's all for equal clothing rights, a pick'n'mix approach to clothes. What's slightly odd, however, is that he chooses to shop in frumpy old Dorothy Perkins; why fight for equal clothing rights when you end up looking like Judi Dench?
But enough of this dressing up chit-chat; what of the inner man, the comedian who can sell out a theatre in the West End of London for months but refused to translate his comedy onto television? Let's take the last point first. "I'm doing telly now and the thing of not doing telly, forget all that, I love it, I always did love it and I'm going to prostitute myself and do every show that's going," says Izzard. "I'll do Give Us A Fiver or something. I'm going to be all over telly."
Pencilled in for January is the hour-long pilot for the Izzard-scripted comedy which he has been talking about for so long now that people began to assume it was some kind of conceptual joke. And of course it is, he's just managed to persuade Channel 4 to bankroll the idea. According to Izzard, the show will be standard sitcom format, with a sofa, parents and three kids, and they live in a house, in a street.

So far, so suburban but, did I not mention this?, it's about a family of cows, who by some quirk of evolution have learned to talk, drive cars and many other requirements of late 20th century living. And in the kind of drug reference that underpins much of Izzard's strange, alternative-universe humour, they know where to score the best grass. He has always made great use of anthropomorphic animal references in his stage show, but Cows sounds as if it may have also been influenced by cartoonist Gary Larson's they're-smarter-than-us take on our bovine buddies.

By way of explanation, Izzard says only this: "Cows are inherently groovy. They're big and agrarian and vegetarian and they're not very good with technology, but they like it. They watch 24-hour weather programmes and they wear great wigs." Oh well, guess we'll just have to wait and see.
What he is determined to avoid, however, is a straightforward television comedy show and live performance remains Izzard's preferred comedy vehicle. His roots are in street performance, where he honed the twin skills of improvisation and holding an audience's attention.

On the opening night of his two-month residency at the Shaftesbury Theatre at the end of last year, it all came flooding back when a button fell off his jacket. Naturally he decided to sew it back on, while continuing his act. For a man who appears almost incapable of following a train of thought to its logical conclusion (he usually follows them brilliantly to very illogical ones instead), Izzard recalls the incident with absolute clarity.

"I impressed myself," he admits. "There was this Gaultier jacket which I had just spent a bundle of cash on, and the fact that the button fell off on the opening night was so crap. It had these threads sticking out, so I just thought, I'll talk about this, but the threads wouldn't come out, so I said 'Scissors', and scissors came on. Then someone threw a needle and thread on stage and everyone thought I'd set that up, but it was just a good heckle, and I couldn't back off.
"It was all happening in slow motion, so I was thinking, I'll make it double strand because that'll be easier to do the knots and I was thinking, I've got to keep the audience with me or it will really drop off. I threaded the needle first time on stage, which is amazing because normally you can't do it just on your own.

"But the knot pulled through so I had to do a bigger knot and it held, then through twice and round and round. Then I said to everybody, 'Do you do round and round?' I knew all I needed to do was get the button on, if I didn't get it on it would be a real fuck up. That's what I learned from street performing, all you had to do is finally do it."

This kind of analysis of the mechanisms of his comedy seem at odds with Izzard's apparently rambling, stream-of-consciousness style. The button incident also shows the way a trivial incident can be spun, no pun intended, into an extended routine. Little of what Izzard plans to say on stage is of any great consequence, honey bees, blue underpants in the white wash, but this universal humour is almost certainly why he can play theatres from Manhattan Island to the Outer Hebrides.

And it's not really even an act, just a projection of his own bonkers imagination. "I specifically want to be no different on stage performing stand up and off stage," he says. "When I ad lib, I sometimes stumble around trying to get the language right. I never realised it was so incredibly important, language is just so powerful, way mightier than the sword in the long term ... in the short term the sword's quite powerful."

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