Izzard seeks out life’s joys
Eddie Izzard tells how to tackle comedy in a time of hate.
EHarriet
'If half the world is marching backwards then the other half of us has got to march forwards and we've got to do it strongly.' Eddie Izzard
ddie Izzard calls me from Madrid, where he’s working up to performing his whole show in Spanish. ‘‘I’m slightly blown away that I’m doing it [in Spanish] but it’s good, I do about 40 minutes in English and 20 minutes in Spanish and gradually I build up the amount,’’ he says.
‘‘It’s not actually as hard as you’d think. People say there’s a French sense of humour, there’s a German sense of humour, and so on, and that actually I think is not true.’’
Instead, Izzard says, it’s about making sure your references make sense.
Wherever you are, ‘‘mainstream comedians will make jokes about the sports stars, the politicians, the soap operas on television’’, he says.
‘‘The more alternative comedians will make jokes about chickens with guns and fish that could take over the world or whatever,’’ and if that’s your sense of humour, it’ll work regardless of the language.
From St Petersburg to Cape Town to Wellington, Izzard has found people tend to find human sacrifice ridiculous.
‘‘Isn’t that a stupid idea? Someone said ‘the weather is bad, the crops have failed, the gods obviously hate us so we’ll go and kill Steve’,’’’ Izzard says.
‘‘Everyone thinks ‘this is nuts, why did we ever do that?’ So it’s a universal thing you can grab hold of.’’
That’s good on a practical level – if he had to write a whole new show for each destination, you can imagine Izzard might tour less – but it also brings a sense of unity and togetherness to Izzard’s work.
‘‘It’s a fight back against the Brexhate thing that’s happening, and the Trump hate,’’ Izzard says, noting that his affinity for languages is connected to his politics.
‘‘If half the world is marching backwards then the other half of us has got to march forwards and we’ve got to do it strongly.’’
Izzard felt some of that hate personally in April, when he was harassed on the street near his London home and called a ‘‘f...ing poofter’’.
The abuse was threatening and homophobic, and Izzard reported 24-year-old Jamie Penny to police. It ended in a November trial, and Penny was found guilty on two counts of using threatening and abusive words or behaviour with intent to cause harassment, alarm or distress, the Guardian reported.
‘‘If you’re LGBT, if you’re an ethnic minority, if you’re anyone who’s been aggressively hassled, harangued, shouted at in the streets – it’s quite a harrowing thing to take it on and say, ’I will stand up in court, I’ll look them in the face’,’’ Izzard says.
It wasn’t easy, but Izzard felt he was the right person to do that, and to send a message that hate speech won’t be tolerated.
‘‘We’ve got to stand back on it. This is diving back to the 1930s, and saying ‘Yeah let’s get fascism going’. It needs to be fought back, right now,’’ he says.
Izzard is almost as much an activist as he is a comedian, but he’s also an actor. We spoke while he was promoting Whisky Galore, the Gillies Mackinnon-directed adaptation of a 1947 novel by Sir Compton Mackenzie (which was originally made into muchloved Ealing comedy in 1949).
Mackinnon and Izzard have worked together before on Castles in the Sky, a BBC film about the invention of radar.
Set in Scotland during World War II, Whisky Galore is based on the true story of a shipwreck that liberated thousands of cases of export whisky while locals were experiencing a drought.
Izzard plays Captain Waggett, the Home Guard leader whose mission is to recover the whisky and spoil the fun.
‘‘I’m a stuck-in-the-mud type character, I’m an idiot who’s a stickler for the way it should be done,’’ he says.
The film was shot on location in Aberdeenshire and Morayshire on Scotland’s north-east coast, and it’ll make you want to book a holiday. Izzard says the crew had a ball.
‘‘We used to go down to the beaches and we’d have barbecues in the middle of the night after shooting,’’ he says, adding that he first decided to act when he was only 10.
‘‘I love doing films ... To be able to do them and go on location, it is a joyous thing.’’
Whisky Galore
(M) is now screening