A confession: In my grumpy, youthful naiveté, I used to view stand-up comedy as the domain of disgruntled heterosexuals who didn’t so much navel-gaze as fixate exclusively on their own pelvic regions. Then I discovered Eddie Izzard, who riffs on fruit and animals and languages. He (or she—Izzard uses both pronouns) can ricochet from the English Civil War to Jesus’s drinking habits to apps to Sean Connery in under 10 minutes. Izzard is capable of dropping phrases like “Yak dressage—very similar to British tai chi” into routines and coming off quite naturally, and impersonating God with the accent of a long-dead actor, James Mason, is one of his trademark schticks—not exactly a here-and-now kind of thing.
You’d think he’d be a fringe figure, yet Izzard is not just a long-cherished star of British comedy, but an internationally beloved pioneer of a wide-ranging, absurdist style. Nowadays, he’s also known for marathon running, which he took up later in life, for pro-European activism, and for throwing his hat into the 2020 race for Mayor of London. Wunderbar, Izzard’s first tour since 2015’s multilingual, 45-country Force Majeure, began as French-language improvisation on a floating theater in Paris called La Nouvelle Seine. (Don’t worry; in Anglophone countries, he mostly sticks to English.) I recently caught up with Izzard over the phone to advance his appearance at the Paramount this weekend. Here’s a condensed transcript:
How has your tour been so far?
Tour has been great. My father unfortunately died last year. So it’s great to be able to talk about mum and dad, in the show.
The description of the show on the website said that it also includes your theory of the universe, it’s 100,000 years of human history.
Oh, yeah, that’s all in it! Now that’s true, that, because the essence with mom and dad is standing on the shoulders of giants. Humans have come before us who have done amazing things. And my mom and dad were pretty good examples. Mom and dad were loving people, and dad lived to be in his 90th year and was a very funny guy. He made a level of solid surface for me to jump up on. Mom was performance; she loved singing and dancing, performance, amateur dramatics. And dad was more of a comedy guy. We get influenced by people, nature and nurture.
We do tend to progress from the ancient Egyptians to now. Human rights and stuff. Certain things get locked in and certain things don’t… And as someone who’s also going into politics as of next year, I’m interested in how we can make things better and stay better, and actually not have any of this hellish stuff that keeps bubbling up.
When you say certain things get locked in, what kind of things?
The best thing that we have done is stopping human sacrifice. Human sacrifice… We all used to do it. Someone said, “The weather’s bad, the crops have failed, the gods obviously hate us. We’re going to kill Steve. And once we’ve killed Steve, it’s going to get a lot better. We’re going to rip his body apart and blood’s gonna go everywhere and then crops are going to pick up to no end.”
But we got rid of that and no one, not even extreme idiots who are running this country, are saying “let’s bring back human sacrifice.” So we do have crazy people come in with stupid ideas, and take and repeal good laws, but I’m interested how we lock things in. Marriage equality seems to be there. Maybe they will come in and repeal it in different countries, but it’s in a better place than it ever was before. I’m interested in that. I’m interested in humanity in this century, the 21st century.
Actually a majority of people voting in America did not want Donald Trump who said, “Grab all women by the pussy” and “all Mexicans are rapists.” So, I just think there’s a cyclical nature in politics that swings one way, swings the other way.
But simplistic politicians get a long way using hatred. We’re doing 1930s politics all over again. It takes one person to hate… It takes two to do love. If you think of all the good things we’ve put together, they’ve been put together slowly, and all the hatred and negative things are done very quickly.
When I came out in 1985, at least we could get the conversation going about what it was to be transgender. The language has changed, but we know that people who are trans have been around since the dawn of time. We know that, you can track it all through history. It’s just that everyone was murdered before, imprisoned before. So if human beings could just [sings] “Accentuate the positive, elim-i-nate the negative…”
On this tour and your last tour you’ve been doing something really special: performing your shows in other languages. What do you love about doing that?
I developed this show in France, first of all. The work-in-progress shows I normally do in English, but I did it in French. So I was literally on stage in Paris saying “Bonsoir Paris! Je suis là pour parler, pour improviser en français!” So I did that in French for two months and developed 20 minutes of material. Then I translated the French that I had into German, and I did an extra five or 10 minutes in the German language.
It sends up a wonderful signal. And also, the Normandy 75th anniversary, I was there performing in German, then in English, then in French. Three shows in three hours in three languages. I did it for charity to celebrate all who fought for democracy and freedom during World War II and since WWII, including the Germans in there who tried to right what went so wrong for 12 years.
The language thing is a beautiful thing. I’m a radical moderate. I don’t believe in 20th-century definitions, and so I do radical things with a moderate message. I think I’ve already shown that… coming out as transgender, running over 80 marathons for charity, and performing in four languages.
After you do multiple languages in one night, how do you feel?
It does feel like an achievement every night. The more you do it, the more you break out of the mold. I make things easy on myself. I don’t worry about the masculine and feminine, I’ll just estimate it. I do love putting myself through this very extreme training. I’m doing special forces, civilian division.
It seems like you’re going to extremes in several different areas of your life, with the marathons, and the marathon language comedy.
You have to do the extremes; otherwise no one pays any attention. If you don’t put the radical in there, no one’s going to pay a blind bit of attention.
Since you’ve come out as transgender there have been massive changes in the culture. Have you seen that happening with contemporary queer stand-up comics?
I haven’t monitored that. You see, I sort of ignore the fact that I’m transgender. I think you should. Sexuality should have no part in life, really. When LGBT gets boring, then we’ve made it. You’re a librarian, are you a gay librarian? That’s not the issue. Are you a good librarian? Are you a good banjo player? Are you a good rocket scientist? These are the things which are interesting. Sexuality… forget it. In the old days, you never used to ask “Are you a good lover? Are you good in bed, librarian/rocket scientist?” And I hope that other LGBT+ people feel the small freedom out there to be yourself, to be honest.
Eddie Izzard brings his Wunderbar tour to the Paramount this weekend, performing three sets over three nights beginning on Friday. Tickets were still available at the time of this writing.
