Monday, March 31, 2008

Comedy Review: Eddie Izzard

By Laura Seewoester

Eddie Izzard came to the Majestic Monday in a last minute show on his comedy tour after the original show (scheduled in June) sold out in less than a day. You'd think working at Pegasus I'd get some sort of insider information and all that, but I found out about this preceding show just like almost everyone else: I got a phone call from a friend saying "get 'em now or never."

The show had no opening act, it was all Izzard with his sporadic, ADD delivery. If you didn't pay close attention, all of a sudden you'd think, "What the crap is he talking about?" Unfortunately for me, I had a brain fart while Izzard was doing his bit about the Romans attempting to speak Latin.

Izzard touched on a laundry list of subjects, skipping around and jumping back, sometimes losing the audience but quickly gaining our attention again. The overall theme of his act was the dawn of man and religion, which always makes for good comedy. He started by pulling out his iphone and checking out the meaning of Dallas on Wikipedia. (apparently it means "resting place") After that, everything was a whirlwind. Ladies and gentlemen, I have for you here two hours worth of Eddie Izzard's train of thought in order to the best that I could record it, starting with Dallas. Try to follow it.

• Dallas
• Football ("When we play football the foot and the ball actually make contact")
• The Scottish v. English
• Checking "okay" to update your Mac, only to realize you have to reboot when it's finished
• Everyone lies when checking that itunes "agree" box
• God - "I don't think he's up there. Or, he's up there and doesn't give a shit." Do God and Jesus twirl their hair like a girl?
• The last 10,000 years (when civilization started)
• JFK
• Sick Cows
• "That proves my theory" (something Izzard often says when he's forgotten what he was talking about)
• JFK got a man to the moon, but Izzard wants to send crazy people to the moon (mainly europeans).
• "What am I talking about? I've got clothes and everything."
• Hamlet
• Hitler was in here somewhere.
• Back to JFK
• Committing the whole world to level playing fields.
• The beginning of civilization.
• Between 4.5 billion and 10,000 years ago, there were monsters on the earth. (This is where he breaks into a stunning triceratops impression)
• He starts singing a back and forth of The Flinstones song with the audience
• The Stone Age
• Hunters vs. Gatherers
• Cows, oil and "monkey drives"
• monkeys
• Hunters vs. gatherers
• The Bible
• How to sell your daughter
• The arc
• bad ducks
• Giant catapaults
• Stonehenge and the druids
• Winston Churchill, and how he didn't know the difference between the "victory" sign (like a peace sign) and the UK symbol for "F-off" (a backwards peace sign)
• St. Patrick was apparently French (he had to pull out the iphone again)
• Stonehenge
• Egyptians and their pictographs
• The back of a $1 bill
• Spartan sheep
• God
• The Golden Rule
• The Romans
• Squirrels in toasters
• The Romans attempting to speak latin
• Hooters
• "Darwin wrote the book 'Monkey, Monkey, Monkey, Monkey, YOU!"
• God
• Creationism and Intelligent Design ("The appendix, how is that intelligent?")
• Alien monsters
• Moses
• The plague of frogs
• Smelted Metal
• The 10 Commandments ("Thou shalt not cover thy neighbor's ox)

At this point Eddie Izzard said he was finished and played conductor to the audiences "wooh's" before he started up with his only encore. The encore was only about 5 minutes long, but he still managed to discuss the following subjects:

• protests
• chickens
• fox hunting
• Barbara Streisand
• Back to fox hunting
• How they won't let the posh people work out of fear that they'd break things.

I have to say, his breadth of subjects within a two hour period was not only hilarious but quite remarkable. For everyone lucky enough to have gotten tickets to the June show, you should have paid for more expensive seats.

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