Stripped
Wednesday night I saw Eddie Izzard live. Overall it was great fun, but having seen some of his earlier shows on DVD, I was a little disappointed at the slower pace and repetitiveness of this one.
Best joke: Noah is ushering animals onto the ark, with his son on board helping keep count.
“Okay, here come two tigers, two cats, two gazelles, two rabbits, two geese . . . what have we got so far?”
“Uh, so far two tigers, Dad.”
Early on in the show he did an impression of two tigers trying to use an iPhone to find giraffes on the savanna. Later, he whipped an actual iPhone out of his back pocket to look up “haberdashery” on Wikipedia. (Turns out the audience was wrong to say a haberdasher sells hats; he actually sells notions—ribbons and buttons and things.) Within a few seconds I saw little blue lights speckling the crowd below me, as people unholstered their Blackberries* to, I don’t know, check his facts? Find a haberdasher near them? It was a clever gag, at any rate.
For an encore he popped back on and urged us all to vote Democrat, which I thought was pretty tacky. I mused aloud that there probably weren’t many hardcore Republicans in the audience anyway, but John thought it might be half and half. Surely Eddie’s fans swing liberal (he’s a transvestite, for crying out loud), but Houston is more conservative than most large cities—maybe it would balance out? We didn’t conduct a poll, so I still wonder. I think I’m right.
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* A couple years ago when my dad got a Blackberry, I was like, “You know they call those Crackberries, right?” And he said, “Why, because people sell them to buy crack?”
Tags: Eddie Izzard
