Subject: Messageboard Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1999 13:28:43 +1000 From: Mark Longmuir To: longmuir@labyrinth.net.au Michelle: Comedy Store Players news and Eddie Izzard article.... (17-Jul-1999 23:50:07) Jessie: Ta Shell!! (n/t) (20-Jul-1999 00:04:05) --------------------------------------------------------------------- [Image] [Image] Whose Board is it, Anyway? Comedy Store Players news and Eddie Izzard article.... Saturday, 17-Jul-1999 23:50:07 203.101.15.130 writes: From The Sunday Times , reprinted without permission (um-ahh): THE CRITICAL LIST Pick of the week The Comedy Store Players at the Globe This group of improvisers are an institution at their home base, where they have performed for 14 years, but here is a chance to see how they make out at a much bigger venue - one holding 1,500 people, no less. If it all goes well for Josie Lawrence, Paul Merton, above, Neil Mullarkey, Lee Simpson, Andy Smart, Jim Sweeney and Richard Vranch, the atmosphere should be electric. Globe Theatre, 21 New Globe Walk, Bankside, SE1, Tue ************************************************* As he prepares West End stage, Eddie Izzard tells BRYAN APPLEYARD why the American firebrand remains the 'godfather of alternative stand-up' The king of comedy Eddie Izzard was born in Yemen to English parents; Lenny Bruce was a New York Jew. Izzard is a transvestite; Bruce was not. Izzard is nice; Bruce was not. Izzard likes to look on the bright side; Bruce did not. Izzard is a surrealist; Bruce was a satirist. It would be hard to find two people with less in common, except for one thing: Izzard is the finest stand-up comic of his day, and so was Bruce. Which is why Sir Peter Hall's decision to cast Izzard as Bruce in his new production of Julian Barry's play Lenny is, in spite of everything, a brave and honourable act. It is a statement that, across the generations, the uniquely weird, high-pressure art of stand-up unites more than it divides. Izzard - the stocky, languid embodiment of a fine and exotic English whimsy - can, indeed, become Bruce - the thin, nervy expression of Jewish fatalism and anger. Izzard wanted the part badly. "I heard it was being done and I knew this was the part I'd been looking for. It brought together drama and comedy. I talked to a bunch of people, I had to get to Peter Hall. I knew how to bulls--- my way through. I said: 'I can do this, let me do it.' And he said: 'Well, we want you to do it.' " In fact, Barry, having seen an Izzard video, had already suggested him to Hall. "I wanted to do it with a stand-up comedian," says Hall, "because stand-up is not acting and I don't think an actor could do it. That thing about sharing yourself with an audience - it's the most exposed thing in the theatre." Bruce - "The godfather of alternative stand-up," says Izzard - exposed himself by exposing what he saw as the obscene iniquities that lay concealed beneath the smooth surface of America in the early 1960s. ("I'm just pissing on velvet," he said.) He discussed sex, religion and politics in ways that made him a hero of the nascent counterculture, twice had him expelled from Britain for being a threat to public order and finally had him brutally prosecuted in the US for obscenity. He was unhinged - his last performances ended with unfunny, rambling accounts of his court case - but inspired. He abandoned jokes, inventing instead the angry sideways take on life that was to dominate the energetic British stand-up scene of the 1980s. He died of an overdose in 1966. Some said he was killed by police persecution but, in truth, he was killed by the ruthless nerve-shredding demands of stand-up. The height of his success was in New York in the early 1960s. He appeared, briefly, in Britain at Peter Cook's Establishment Club in Soho and his work was spread further by a few records. But his real fame came after his death, when he was embraced as a hero of the alternative culture that flowered after 1967. He was the first man to establish comedy as the new rock'n'roll and he was the model for every young, angry or just weird stand-up who came after. Bruce is the patron saint of stand-up. The infinitely gentler Izzard doesn't do jokes, either. He only ever knew one - When is a door not a door? When it's ajar - and he simply can't get into the dynamic of using other people's stories and delivering punch lines. And, like Bruce, like every good stand-up, he exposes himself, but through life rather than satire. He admits his audience into the child-like banalities and wonders of his mind. His mother died when he was six and, byseven, he had formed the conviction that he must become an actor. "It was desperation for the love of an audience. When there's no love coming, you thirst for it." But there was no obvious route to stardom, so he moved fairly soberly through his schooldays and ended up reading accounting and financial management with mathematics - "It was the longest course name I could find. I thought it would look impressive" - at Sheffield. That lasted a year, then, having been inspired by Monty Python, he started doing sketch shows at the Edinburgh Festival. "I failed and failed. I was confused. I'd played my big card. I just thought I'd do that Python thing and get into TV." Then he failed again when, for two years, he did street shows in London with a student friend, Rob Ballard. Finally, he realised he had to do stand-up. London was, at the time, becoming the world capital of the art. "I'd never considered it. I'd always admired Billy Connolly, but I was too scared to do it myself. I had developed this 'me' character on the street and I could talk to an audience. I started trying to write stand-up stuff. But it was very difficult so I just went ahead and booked a gig. That failed." He worked earnestly at his style in comedy workshops - not good training, as everybody laughs at you in the hope you will laugh at them. Then, one day, he took apart a sketch he had written for two people about a man who was addicted to breakfast cereals. This was pure autobiography: Izzard loves cereals, adores Twixes and mistrusts fruit - pears, in his world, spitefully stay rock-hard for days and then suddenly go rotten when you're not looking. He rearranged the sketch for one person, did it himself and it worked. He had found the style that was to blossom into its mature mix of surrealism, inspired banality, history lessons and religious and political speculation, all tied together by strange, dreamlike associations. Jesus, for example, could not run away from the Romans because he wore flip-flops; when Spock peered into that scanner on the deck of the Starship Enterprise he was secretly eating a Twix; Hannibal's elephants were good skiers - it's the momentum - and Noah, sawing wood for his Ark, is mysteriously metamorphosed into a man punching a baboon in the face. "I found" says Izzard, " I could talk stupid bollocks 'til the cows came home . . . it's bulls--- but it sort of works." Meanwhile, there was the transvestism. Since he regularly appeared on the stage and in the street dressed in women's clothes, he felt he needed to explain himself. He took this quite a long way, successfully proscecuting some lads who beat him up. But the key distinction he wanted to make was that he was not a drag queen; he was heterosexual, a male lesbian. "I really had trouble explaining this. I'm a pervert by most social definitions all around the world. So I just called myself an executive transvestite and everybody said, 'Oh, that's fine, then', and it was all right." And so he was, by the 1990s, a stand-up star, an exotic, heavily made-up cult. He had built a wall in his head to keep the fear at bay and he could confidently control big audiences for two hours or more. Yet he was not conventionally famous because he refused to do television. He was a TV but he wasn't on TV. It was all part of his continuing plan to become an actor. "If you do comedy on TV you pick up all this baggage. I mean imagine Paul Merton or John Cleese playing Hamlet. You can't because television has fixed them in this comedy thing. Mel Gibson had all this action hero baggage when he played Hamlet - but he was just trying to drag this career thing across to something else." But then: "To use a female empowerment term, I hit a glass ceiling. I could do all these shows with two or three thousand people every night of the year but I still couldn't reach as big an audience as I would with, say, an eight-minute slot on the Clive James Show." So, as he broke on to the West End stage in 1993 and, subsequently, film acting, Izzard began to trickle on to television - via Have I Got News For You?, numerous chat shows and even Question Time. He had become an actor so he now could afford the television. But, though he releases videos of his shows, he still does not do his full-scale comedy work for television. He is, without doubt, the finest flowering of the British stand-up comedy wave that began, heavily influenced by Lenny Bruce, in West End clubs in 1979. That wave, he is convinced, is as strong as ever. He has counted 85 comedy clubs in London compared to five each in New York and Los Angeles. And now drama and media studies courses at a number of British universities are offering courses in stand-up. The art is being institutionalised as a national asset. "In America," says Izzard, "the best just get snapped up by film and TV. We don't have industries of that size, so the best stay on the circuit." And he is, again without doubt, the most sympathetic star it is possible to imagine. "There is a sweetness about him," says Hall. Izzard works conscientiously at his craft and draws love from his audiences. He is, unlike almost every other comedian, always positive. "I'd rather be pro than anti. Of course, railing against things is an easier comic tool, but I want to create, build things. I'm positive about politics - I don't say all politicians are bastards. And I think Europe can work, it's a great idea after 2,500 years of war. But where's the comic spin on that? It took me ages to get there. I'm quite Buddhist in my approach. I don't hate people." Izzard overturns the old wisdom that comedy is all about cruelty and humiliation. For him it is about strangeness, puzzlement - what was Spock always looking at? - fantasy and fleeting incongruity - why is that dog food called Cesar and why don't Americans pronounce the "h" in herbs? It is about the fact that God probably would talk like James Mason and it is about his own compulsive autodidacticism - he uses a CD-Rom of the Encyclopaedia Britannica to fill his act with a startling range of documentary material. The theme is clear - this is comedy that springs from the perennial truth that normality always evades the normal imagination. And Izzard is, above all, normal. "I'm normal and boring, this is my problem. I'm not windswept and interesting. Some people at school you hate because they're so f***ing interesting and everybody fancies them and wants to shag them. But I'm just boring. That's probably why I'm keen to do things that scare me - like stand-up, or doing the whole thing in French in Paris or going to America. I suppose it comes from being a transvestite." Normal or not, he is a strange man to meet. In black T-shirt and black jeans - no make-up this time - he smokes his way through a lot of Silk Cuts as he tries earnestly to answer my questions. He is very proud of having subjected himself to intense self-analysis and this keeps emerging as very conclusive summaries of his own motives - the death of his mother crops up again and again. Yet I felt, at the end, that I knew this Izzard no better than the Izzard I had watched on the stage and on video. And that, I suppose, is the point. Modern, post-Brucean stand-up comedy uses the comic's life as its raw material. Inevitably, therefore, the life and the art become one. I cannot get to know an Eddie Izzard who isn't a stand-up because that is what he always is - and always will be, however good he gets at acting. "I'll do stand-up 'til I die. It's just too good. You've got to do it all the time or the fear comes back . . ." In Bruce and, latterly, Izzard, stand-up has moved on from jokes and clowning to become an existential continuum. Like thought itself, like Samuel Beckett's "eternal quaqua", it just chatters on, evading punch lines and climaxes, evading death. "Stuff endings!" cries Izzard as if - no, because - his life depended on it. Lenny by Julian Barry, directed by Sir Peter Hall, will be at the Queen's Theatre from July 27 to October 16 [Image] Stand up and be counted: Eddie Izzard as Lenny Bruce Michelle ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Message thread: Michelle: Comedy Store Players news and Eddie Izzard article.... (17-Jul-1999 23:50:07) Jessie: Ta Shell!! 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