Eddie Izzard: There is no ‘British’ humour

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/feb/05/eddie-izzard-force-majeure-tour-paris

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It’s ironic that when I meet Eddie Izzard to talk to him about his linguistic skills, he is struggling to string a sentence together.

He is “frazzled” after flying in the night before from the US. His sentences crescendo, fizzle out, and pick up again in a completely different place. Izzard struggles to respond directly to questions - arriving at answers via a stream of references and stories that dip into the surreal, reach back through history, touch on the personal and, very often, the political. But he always answers thoughtfully. He bounces between conversation and performance, and slips into sketches in French and German, undeterred by the fact I can’t understand anything he is saying.

On paper Izzard seems like some sort of ubermensch. The projects he throws himself into are impressive to the point of bordering on excessive. On top of a successful stand up career and numerous ventures into acting, in 2009 he ran 43 marathons in 52 days for Sports Relief. He has plans to move into politics and possibly run for mayor of London. His current endeavour is also a testimony to admirable stamina, albeit in a different setting.

If doing a stand-up gig feels synonymous with volunteering for public humiliation, then the prospect of doing it in another language is a step further into the incomprehensible. When I meet Izzard he is in Paris to perform the French date of his international Force Majeure tour, now in its second year. He has been catapulting himself across the globe for so long that his PA doesn’t appear to know where exactly he lives, and so far has performed sets in French, German and Spanish. Next on his list is Russian and Arabic.

Izzard is now well acquainted with the blank-faced awe his achievements are met with. What is the most common response when he tells people about his tour? “They say nothing,” he says. “It’s as if I’ve said I’ve swallowed a car.” Izzard himself is gobsmacked: “I feel like I’m doing something off the list.”

Languages first appeared on Izzard’s radar at school when he got the opportunity to go on a French field trip. They stayed at a French campsite his teachers didn’t realise was known locally for prostitution. He briefly set fire to both his tent and himself. The scope for adventure in another language “just seemed off the scale”.

After that came two years of studying German. For someone so markedly creative it’s interesting to hear him describe himself as “an empirical person” – although clearly the two are not antithetical. German was attractive because it felt mathematical. “I didn’t like English literature and was intimidated by a lot of stuff,” he says. This, he reflects, may have something to do with being dyslexic. By the end of school it was this intimidation with literature that made him drop languages: “I thought I do want to learn them, I just don’t want to do Madame Bovary.”

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Izzard has come along way from slogging through Flaubert to delivering comedy sets and even improvising in French. He measures his language abilities in percentages, and French comes up on top at 70% fluency. He was incorporating French into his sets as far back as 1997, although in 2011 he set out to create new material entirely in the language. He spent three months in Paris “hammering” through the set with the help of his brother – a linguist – and some teachers to correct him in rehearsals. It was hard work, but looking back this creative period had an almost romantic feel: “ It was fucking fantastic ... [At that time] Midnight in Paris came out, and that had this magic quality of Paris, and different epochs … I was living in my own film – in real time.”

There was, however, still pressure to fine-tune the set. This included the all important mark of linguistic distinction – the ability to swear like a native speaker. In English, he points out, when we say “fuck” – with feeling – we really slam the “ck”. He fondly remembers the moment he discovered how to polish his delivery of ‘merde’. As a teenager he found himself in France sleeping on a bench after plans to do a language course fell apart (a detail he doesn’t seem to feel the need to elaborate on). He overheard two men arguing over a game of pétanque. After about 20 minutes a large crowd had gathered. “Suddenly, one of their wives just shouted ‘mer…..DE!’. And she really whacked that ‘D’, and I thought ‘Oh, that’s how you do it. Thank you.’ I pick up lessons everywhere.”

He also rehearses everywhere. Practicing his pronunciation with his brother in a taxi on the way to a gig in Lyon he had to apologise to the driver, who was confused from overhearing the pair peppering their perfect French with the calmly delivered equivalent of “Bollocks! Piss off you fucking bastard”.

The process of assembling the German set was, in contrast to the French, very methodical. He saw himself more like an actor learning a play: he performed a show in English, recorded it, cut out the “waffle” and translated it into German. From there he learned it by rote, line by line, three pages a day, asking his brother for prompts when he forgot a line.

These gigs were intense. “It was a baptism of fire,” he says. “When I’m in the middle of doing what I’m doing I think, ‘this is fucking hard’.” He gave himself only 10 days to learn the German set, and with only 30 minutes in his head as opening night approached, they integrated a Q&A in English. For the Spanish gigs in Madrid, he had to very gradually increase the Spanish segment: first doing three minutes, the next night six minutes and so on.

It helped to recognise that language learning is, in part, instinctual and that mistakes were inevitable: “Kids make mistakes and gradually they start to feel when things sound wrong.” Eventually, those stumbles gave way to progress. “While giving a two-hour German radio show,” he says, “I realised I could speak German ... I thought shit, I speak German now!”

Breakthrough moments in improvisation were more elusive. In German, he says, he eventually reached the stage where he could stray from the script - sometimes it would be funny, sometimes not. In French, his greater fluency gave him a longer leash, but he would still occasionally get half way through a comment and run out of words. Even in English it seems for him improvisation doesn’t always feel like you are reaching for something concrete or tangible: more like grasping for something already difficult to articulate, a silhouette of a funny idea.

It is totally the cutting edge of everything ... I don’t think anything is going to go back in the box.

The process of developing material for another tongue forced him to dismantle and analyse the mechanics of his act: “It became much tighter, it became like a play.” It’s also encouraged him to sort out his “lazy” diction in English. “I really punch the words now, like a TV announcer.”

But does the introduction of another language into his act not interfere with the precarious alignment of rhythm, timing, and cultural references? He agrees sentence structures can alter the rhythm and impact of the delivery. Just like the lady splitting “merde” into two syllables for full effect, sets need to be honed if they are going to make crowds laugh just as much, at the same times and for the same reasons, in Paris as they do in Edinburgh. But Izzard’s whole perspective is underpinned and guided far more by a theory of how comedy works than a concern with the quirks of different languages. For Izzard, humour is universal. On this point he is pretty stubborn: a joke may be “built in British” but that doesn’t mean the comedy hinges on anything inherently “British”.

Izzard has passed on this philosophy to French stand-up Yacine Belhousse who he has taken under his wing and encouraged to tour the UK in English. “The trick is simply to block out all cultural references,” he says. So what constitutes a universal reference or idea?

“So for example, [in Force Majeure] I talk about human sacrifice.”

Something everyone can relate to?

“Exactly.”

In this routine a group of people reason that if the crops are going badly, they should probably kill someone – in this case someone called Steve. It’s a leap of logic that Eddie likens to the start of fascism.

It’s part of Izzard’s talent that he can take a complex, potentially uncomfortable subject and strip it down to expose the gruesome absurdity of it all. And it is these flashes of societal observation that everyone from Paris to Moscow to Kathmandu can grab a hold of and laugh at, he says.

Is it overly sentimental then, or perhaps just arrogant, to insist there is something unique about British humour? Izzard doesn’t budge. “There is no ‘British’ humour. It is only the references [that are specific] … you don’t need to nationalise it.” Every country has different schools of comedy and the fault lines don’t fall along national borders: “There is a whole truck load of stuff in every country.”

And this truck load is increasingly being exported. Eddie is at his most animated when talking about what he sees as the beginning of a new era of comedic osmosis; he is jumpy with enthusiasm and keeps reaching for his phone to show me videos of the European comics moving into the UK scene.

Will this help to disrupt stereotypes of national humour? German comedian Henning Wehn, most well known for his regular appearance on 8 out of 10 Cats, is a case in point. The idea that Germans have no sense of humour has been drummed into the British since the Second World War, according to Izzard. “Henning Wehn has blown this apart,” he says. “Not only do the Germans have a sense of humour but the Brits will pay to see it.”

Izzard talks about the shattering of these linguistic barriers in almost revolutionary terms.“It is totally the cutting edge of everything. It is breaking the mould, and I don’t think anything is going to go back in the box,” he says. “I’m pushing into the future here, I can see it,” he adds, starting to sound a bit like a comedic clairvoyant.

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Does his prophecy also have a political dimension? Izzard has made no secret of his political aspirations and his plans to run for London mayor. He is staunchly pro-Europe (over the table he waggles his painted nails at me, one finger with the European flag, another with the union jack). Does his attitude to languages embody some of his political intuitions? “Languages enable you to take part,” he says. “If we run away and hide, which Ukip want us to do, it’s not going to get us anywhere. If you want to change Europe, get inside it.”

On the topic of politics he talks in abstract, idealistic terms and I’m struck by the fact he uses the same language of struggle in this context as he does when describing the process of mastering another tongue. “You have to fight for a more positive Europe, for a more positive world, otherwise the world will not make it ... hope is the fuel of civilisation.” Throughout the interview he comes back to this vague, and ominous, warning that we “might not make it”.

Yet the ability to speak another language clearly helps to reaffirm his philosophy “that we are all the same”. But what about when you add humour into the equation – is it too idealistic to think it can be transformative? Is comedy the currency of social empathy? Potentially. For Izzard, shared humour is a fast track way of connecting with other people: this is its distinct advantage. Music, for example, doesn’t have the same effect: “You don’t have to listen to the lyrics so much – you can listen to the music,” he says. “Music is a feel gig, and comedy is a mind gig.”

Although there are some who may be beyond reach. After being given 40 minutes with Izzard to talk about languages we wrap up here, two and a half hours later, speculating on the genetics of Britain’s right wing: “Some people just have hatred built into them,” he says. “I don’t know if there is anything we can do for them ... The right wingers of our country might just have bad genetics. And I’m saying that as a transvestite.”

That evening at La Nouvelle Eve, an old cabaret venue in Pigalle, Paris Belhousse warms up the mostly French crowd in English to honour the spirit of evening. When Izzard comes on stage and bursts into French, I’m reminded of something he said earlier that day. As a teenager he remembers being frustrated that nobody listened to him speak at the family dinner table: at school he was recognised as funny, but this persona didn’t easily translate to his home life. As flares of laughter go off around me, I can’t help but join those in awe of the man who is now heard not just across the table, but across borders.