Beauty of Comedy

Eddie Izzard, the bloke with the roving wit and the heavy eyeliner, pranced his irreverent way into the laugh-track life of an appreciative industry-heavy Los Angeles crowd Tuesday night. And for more than two hours, he was glorious. Or rather, fabulous. No, absolutely fabulous! (Oh wait, wrong Brit import. So sorry.)

Actually, “Glorious” was the popular stand-up’s previous show. This one, presented by Robin Williams at the Tiffany Theater, marks his L.A. debut.

It’s called “Dress to Kill,” and in it, Izzard certainly does both--dress and kill, that is. The former, in black vinyl bell-bottoms, matching platform sandals, an ever-so-tasteful Chinese silk tunic and mucho makeup (more about this later). And the latter, with a wisenheimer routine that touches on topics as disparate as the Heimlich maneuver and Pol Pot’s genocide.

He makes a snazzy pseudo-’70s entrance, complete with throbbing lights and sound worthy of a solo Cirque du Soleil. Then soon, and not surprisingly, the impeccably manicured and pedicured comic launches into shtick explaining his penchant for female apparel (and sexually speaking, women themselves, since you asked).

His magnetic persona, which does feel fairly yang, is what Izzard dubs “male lesbian,” and he is an “action transvestite,” as in action superhero. This is not to be confused, mind you, with your standard-issue drag queen. Any dragging this fellow does would be on cigarettes, thanks much, which the British of course call . . . well, never mind.

Izzard doesn’t dwell on his own dress-up, though he does cut back to it now and then, especially when he runs into a dead end elsewhere. He doesn’t stay on any topic for long, for that matter, but rather skitters across an array of noncontiguous subjects, from inbred monarchs to miscreants who pose as cows when mail-ordering anthrax. Along the way, he displays a voracious inquisitiveness, agile delivery and a sexy presence that shows why he was a hit in New York and San Francisco prior to coming to L.A.

The material itself--which more closely resembles mainstream comedy club fare than what you usually see in a theater--is a combination of set bits and improv. He has scripted routines, and probably gets around to most of them in each performance. But thanks to his frequently inspired extemporizing, the order feels (and may actually be) random.

More important, Izzard conveys the impression that each thought is entering the cranium beneath his blond-frosted locks in the split-second before he shares it with you. Which is to say, Izzard, who is also a stage and film actor, does what only the best thespians can do: He makes it all seem utterly spontaneous and in-the-moment alive.

Rather than hide his process, he lets the seams show. Instead of gliding slickly from subject to subject, Izzard elevates the non sequitur segue to an art form. When he runs out of gas on one riff, he simply stops. Then he pauses for a second--flipping through his mental Rolodex of cue cards--before pulling up a topic sentence that launches him in a wholly different direction.

He goes from a bit about how, when he was a boy, he used to hide his makeup in a tree, and the squirrels would get to it, and he’d catch them with it and . . . to: “So, that’s very much like the Army.” Or, from a short bit about President Clinton’s extracurricular activities (one of only a blessedly few such references, plus or minus a couple of cigar cracks) . . . to: “So, mass murderers. . . .”

Some of Izzard’s brightest moments come when he pokes fun at his own country--everything from staid British film mores to imperialist exploits to the origins of the Church of England. And he nails a variety of American excesses with almost equal precision.

Speaking of excess, however, one quibble: The light blue eye shadow just doesn’t work with that red-brown lipstick. One or the other, as Oscar Wilde might have said, has got to go--as should anyone trolling to laugh to the point of wheezing, to Izzard’s show.

* “Dress to Kill,” Tiffany Theater, 8532 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. Wednesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends Sept. 27. $40. (310) 289-2999. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.