Allow Him to Digress

Wearing jeans, a bomber jacket and a Nike baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, Eddie Izzard slips unnoticed past the crowd milling about outside the Cable Car Theater. It’s 20 minutes before show time and Izzard has to change into his stage outfit: a Jean-Paul Gaultier “mandarin smock” and black polyvinyl pants, high-heeled shoes and makeup--lipstick, eyeliner, eye shadow, midnight-blue nail polish. He’s sold out another show, this one on a Wednesday night. The Financial District yuppies are still in their workaday suits. Faux Warhol paintings of Izzard adorn the stage, and synthesized dance music pulsates in the theater. It all conspires to make you feel that something painfully trendy is about to happen, but, no--Izzard, it turns out, is simply a stand-up comedian, and quite a good one.

In fact, in the 2 1/2 hours that make up his one-man show, “Dress to Kill,” Izzard’s cross-dressing is a red herring; fixate on it and you risk missing his comic trains of thought on Pol Pot, the Heimlich maneuver, the Crucifixion, Engelbert Humperdinck, rabbits, Queen Victoria, James Mason-as-God and anything else that happens to occur to him, standing there for hours in women’s platform shoes.

“Dress to Kill” opens at the Tiffany Theater on Sept. 15 after several nights of previews; at the end of its scheduled two-week run, Izzard, 36, will return to England to recover from the business of being discovered by the urban intelligentsia in New York, San Francisco and L.A. It’s been an exhausting but rewarding experience, during which Izzard has treated audiences to his tour de force shows, and America has returned the favor with one of its most precious native gifts: buzz. Buzz and new agents at the William Morris Agency, where Izzard signed in May.

This is no small accomplishment for a British comic; indeed, there’s not exactly a shuttle from London leaving on the hour with British stand-up comics on board. You have to go back to Peter Cooke and Dudley Moore, in the early 1970s, to find the last British act to cross the Atlantic via the stage with widespread success. Monty Python and Rowan Atkinson (“Mr. Bean”) came through television, while Peter Sellers and Lee Evans (“Mouse Hunt”) arrived via film.

But after years of building a cult following in England with concerts and videos, Izzard appeared at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo., this year and won best solo act. There was a profile in the New Yorker, in which John Cleese called Izzard “the funniest man in England,” followed by a limited engagement at the Westbeth Theatre Center in New York that turned into a five-month run, winning fans like Mike Nichols and Robin Williams. Williams, in turn, came aboard as co-producer of Izzard’s San Francisco and L.A. shows, putting up half the money--not the sort of thing the stand-up-comic-turned-movie-star ever does.

“Part of the reason I wanted to present him was to get good seats,” jokes Williams, who after Izzard’s opening-night show at the Cable Car hosted a star-studded party at his San Francisco restaurant Rubicon, where guests included Sean Penn, Robin Wright and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas.

Williams already knew Izzard--they had met two years ago in England on a film adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Agent.” Acting is something else Izzard does; in London, he’s had starring roles on the stage in David Mamet’s “The Cryptogram” and Marlowe’s “Edward II.” And following a nonspeaking role as one of Sean Connery’s henchmen in the film “The Avengers,” Izzard will next be seen in Todd Haynes’ “Velvet Goldmine,” a film set, appropriately enough, in the early 1970s glam-rock era in England.

But Izzard is still first and foremost a comic, and on “The Secret Agent” he pressed one of his videos into Williams’ hands and asked the comedy icon if he should come to America. Williams, a fan of another British stand-up export, Billy Connolly, thought Izzard had a good chance to make the transition but knew that it took strong word of mouth to get noticed.

It wasn’t until earlier this year, at Comic Relief 8, that he finally saw Izzard perform live.

“He came out and people were like, ‘What’s going on here?’ But he slowly got them,” Williams says.

Indeed, there is much in Izzard to shake up the stand-up comedy status quo, and it has nothing to do with the fact that he’s a transvestite. For one thing, his show lasts close to three hours; there was an audible gasp in the Cable Car Theater when, 90 minutes in, Izzard told his audience to go use the toilet and have a smoke and come back in a few minutes. Already, he had pontificated and riffed on genocide (“If you kill over 100,000 people, we have no way of tabulating that. We’re almost going, ‘Well done!’ ”), Easter, and the absurdity of the British anthem “God Save the Queen” (“She lives in a palace surrounded by armed guards,” Izzard noted, incredulous. “That’s one safe [expletive] queen”).

That’s not to say it all sings; the show lags at times, the result of Izzard’s desire to extemporize, to follow an idea that might, in the end, fall flat. If mainstream American comics tend to lock into their best 20 minutes and then polish the act to death, Izzard is more a slave to what he hasn’t said yet. His thoughts tend to come out in streams and tangents; at the end of half an hour he’s liable to stop suddenly, stare at the audience and with a deadpan look say, “And that proves everything.”

“He’ll segue from Rome to cats,” marvels Williams, whose own comedy was a similarly no-holds-barred sport. “He digresses historically, that’s what’s so great. I mean, to have a great 15-minute Bible hunk. . . . “

Bruce Hills first saw Izzard perform at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1990. Hills, the director of programming for Just for Laughs, a big comedy festival held yearly in Montreal, says Izzard’s greatest asset is his ability to replenish his material.

“There’s a whole different work process among comics in England. In North America, stand-ups can live off of the same 70 minutes their whole career. When it comes to Edinburgh, no one can come back and do the same show every year. The press crucifies them and the fans get mad.”

Izzard, amid all the hyperbolic blurbing from American critics ( “Britain’s special gift to stand-up!”), is trying to keep his head below the clouds.

“American audiences are coming and [saying], ‘I don’t know what the [expletive] it’s about, but he’s English so it must be culture,” he says with a wry grin. “You know, I get an extra throw-in, being British.”

In person, in the middle of the afternoon, Izzard exudes nothing so much as a rock star’s consternation with daylight hours. He arrives at the theater for an interview looking tired, in black jeans and a black James Bond T-shirt. Without makeup, Izzard looks like a cross between Kiefer Sutherland and a glaring Malcolm McDowell from “A Clockwork Orange.” His nails are still painted last night’s midnight blue.

With Izzard, you’re tempted to get the transvestite issue out of the way first. Yes, he often wears makeup and women’s clothes. No, he’s not gay or a drag queen, he says. It’s a contradiction in terms he’s been battling nearly all his life. Onstage, it’s difficult to tell whether he’s exploiting the issue or not. On the one hand, he doesn’t have a “My Life as a Transvestite” segment in “Dress to Kill,” but he’s also aware of the shock value his cross-dressing elicits.

“Everyone’s got such bad information about it,” he says. “It’s male tomboy. It’s male lesbian. People don’t understand this. I have to keep explaining it. . . . The thing is, I’m not a comedy transvestite, I’m a transvestite who happens to be a comedian. I need to get beyond that.”

Izzard’s cross-dressing began as a child, though he didn’t go public as a transvestite until he was 23. By then, he’d suffered through the requisite inner torment and hazing, although there were some surprises, too. His father, for instance, who when informed of his son’s predilection for makeup, said something like, “All right, then,” and went back to his dinner.

In interviews, comics have a disconcerting way of doing material as if twisting the knob of a faucet, but Izzard is refreshingly unfunny in conversation. It’s as if last night’s show was some drug-addled epiphany and now he can’t quite remember what got into him. That sense of spontaneity, of a man being wagged by his thoughts, is what accounts for Izzard’s singular style onstage.

“I know the rough order of things, but I change it around, because once you lock into certain arrangements, it becomes boring,” he says. “When I’m starting and stopping and making stuff up on the spot, that’s when I like it, that’s when it sparkles. It’s like a heightened version of a conversation.”

It’s also like watching one man perform all the parts in an absurdist, Monty Python sketch. Izzard, for instance, doesn’t just wonder how singer Arnold George Dorsey found the name Engelbert Humperdinck, he takes you to the office where a collection of Dorsey’s handlers are mulling stage names.

“What about Binglebert Hempledonk?”

“Bingelbert Humperdonk?

“Geldebert Hingledunk?”

“Engelbert Humperdinck?”

“Or Hinglebert Enkledonk.”

“Wait a minute. Go back one.”

“What’s nice about Eddie is the way he goes off into these fantasies,” says comedian and former Monty Python member Eric Idle, who has bought all 99 seats for one of Izzard’s Tiffany Theater preview shows. “He claims to be a Python freak, but it’s his own world which he goes into.”

In Aspen this year, Izzard appeared at a reunion of the Pythons. When host Robert Klein asked how the troupe had met, it was Izzard, planted onstage as an impostor by Cleese, who began to reminisce about how he’d met Michael Palin on a train in 1949.

“He’s very bright,” says Palin. “The cross-dressing thing has given him a slightly dangerous edge, but I don’t know of anybody who is as pleasurable to listen to.”

The son of an accountant for British Petroleum, Izzard was born in Yemen but lived all over England and Wales, packed off to a series of boarding schools after his mother died when he was 6. Growing up, he memorized Python routines and thought about becoming a performer, but he entered Sheffield University as an accounting major. He dropped out after one year, and hit the unemployment queue--a popular place to be, as the Sheffield steel mills had closed down. Many years later they would make a funny movie about this time in Sheffield, called “The Full Monty.”

Eventually, Izzard drifted to London and got involved with some sketch comedy troupes. But it wasn’t until he turned to street performing that he began to find his true comedic voice.

“It’s a punishing medium,” he says. “You’d get rained on and hassled by security people, just treated like scum.”

One of many street performers in Covent Garden, Izzard would sit on a unicycle and perform handcuff escapes and sword fights, trying to hold a crowd long enough that people would feel obliged to dig into their pockets before moving on. “I did escapology and talked a lot of crap around it,” is how Izzard describes this phase of his career. As a sidewalk spectacular, Izzard’s escapes couldn’t compare to the guys who wore spike-topped helmets and barbecued meat on their heads, but Izzard had something they didn’t--a twisted carnival barker’s gift for the shill.

“The building-up of the shows was actually more interesting to me, because I could just talk endlessly, and the energy of that talking would become a tenuous hold on people. I would say, ‘I’m gonna do a show here, and it’s going to be quite interesting. No, actually, it’s not going to be interesting at all, people hate it, but there’s going to be death and destruction and I’m going to kill small children. No, a line of small children. . . . ‘

“But in the end you just did those shows and nothing else. It was a period of stasis for me. I was trying to get off the street and into nighttime telly, but no nighttime telly people wanted to put a street performer on the air.”

By the time Izzard took his act into British comedy clubs, however, he knew what he wanted to do--an extension of “street,” the monologue without the unicycle and handcuffs.

“It was very Steve Martin-influenced,” Izzard says. “I found I could start a subject in real and then flip into surreal with a little twist, and the audience would be with me on the surreal. All of my material is like that.”

Flying into the surreal about, say, Christ on the cross also has the benefit of transcending cultural boundaries.

“I was afraid that it would be very British and that it wouldn’t fly for American audiences,” says Arnold Engelman, producing director at the Westbeth Theatre Center. “Not to put down Benny Hill, but I was afraid it would be that pantomime humor. But Eddie’s humor is universal.”

“People say there are different senses of humor, which I don’t believe is true at all,” Izzard says. “There are subtle differences, but [in England] we don’t watch ‘The Simpsons’ and say, ‘My God, this is so American, how on Earth could it be funny?’ As long as you get the reference points, it’s comedy.”

After some time off, Izzard hopes to return to the States, to bring”Dress to Kill” to new cities. There’s an HBO special planned for 1999. In the meantime, however, don’t look for Izzard, the comic, to star in a sitcom any time soon.

“Who would he play, anyway?” Williams asks. “The wacky transvestite neighbor?”

Izzard himself once tried to develop a sitcom in England. It was a show about cows, he says, that morph into bipeds and suddenly start demanding things, like the right to vote. It seems safe to say that Izzard would get about a minute into this pitch before Hollywood TV executives would begin to stare hard into the middle distance, and it seems just as safe to say that Izzard would keep going--an extended monologue that would take him from cows to voting rights to soccer to Princess Di, pausing finally to ask, “So what was I talking about then?”

*

“Dress to Kill” opens Sept. 15 and continues through Sept. 27 at the Tiffany Theater, 8532 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. Shows are at 8 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday and 7 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are $40. Call (310) 289-2999.