Eddie Izzard in Hannibal
"The tricky thing is not so much fitting it all in, but the weirder thing is going from a comedy to a drama series to politics to running, but I think I really need that interesting mix" he explains down the line from Atlanta, Georgia, where he happens to be filming yet another new TV series (for PlayStation's new cloud-based TV channel Vue).
That need for an interesting mix seems to have started young for Izzard, who wanted to be a football star, run a shop, join the army, be an actor, and played classical clarinet and piano all through school.
It was the discovery that making people laugh and entertaining them made him feel loved in turn, which led him to comedy, and over the last three decades he's become one of the world's best. He reckons that a predilection for comedy might be genetic and credits his parents for his talent.
"My mother was a semi-professional singer and she sang in choirs in the Albert Hall, so the performing side of me comes from my mother, and the comedy comes from my dad."
In Force Majeure he combines those comedic and performance talents with another of his specialty areas - history.
"I start off talking about human sacrifice and I go into medieval kings, and talk about the clash of the Titans, the ancient Greek gods. It all came out of just being interested in history, and humanity, and realising there's all this rich material in history that can be mined for comedy."
There wasn't so much specific research or reading required to create the show, it's more of a constant, ongoing process for Izzard.
"I'm always inhaling all this info through documentaries, DVDs and Wikipedia. Military history, political history, general history, I have a lot of that bubbling round so I don't tend to do the research first and then build my show around that, I tend to find the comedic angle and then do the research from there, start cross-referencing and connecting the dots."
One of his favourite topics is the little discussed fact that England had a French King for 330 years.
"We had a French-speaking King, French-speaking aristocracy and French-speaking administration, and that's not taught to us in Britain and I don't think the rest of the world really knows that. We had a foreign occupancy, from the north of France, and they ended up becoming us, but it's interesting that initially they were alien with an alien language, and it's great fun to talk about what that means for Britain, and how that affected the English language."
It may sound like a fairly serious, academic set of material, but rest assured Izzard knows how to find the absurd aspects and silly observations.
"I ended up with a bit in which there's a bloke called Steve going, "Look see this, it's a spoon, let's just call it a f***ing spoon from now on, no more French," and making fun of that idea that someone could've made that decision about our whole language at half past one on a Tuesday afternoon.
"Because no one actually knows quite how it happened, how we got back to English."
He mostly finds the truth of history provides him with far more absurdity and insanity than anything he can dream up.
"Real life is always stranger than fiction. Why things happen, why humans make all sorts of decisions, and how they come to certain conclusions is often the root of comedy. How human sacrifice ever happened is a good one. I reckon it was the birth of fascism when someone managed to persuade other humans that because the crops had failed and the weather was bad that they should kill Steve, and that would make it all better. Who the hell could've persuaded everyone of that? It doesn't hold any logic, and it doesn't hold in any religious sense - if the gods created people then I don't think they'd be happy about everyone deciding to kill off Steve in order to appease them. That would be more like an insult. So how human sacrifice ever made its way into the system is a puzzling one."
Speaking to Izzard is full of these interesting asides and excursions - he's a mine of information with a keen mind to skewer just about anything into a great comedic bit, and the determination to share knowledge with a laugh.
"I find it a good use of comedy to talk about these things in a silly way, but also maybe learn something from it."
Lowdown:
Who:
Eddie Izzard
What:
Force Majeure world tour
Where ane when
: Performing at the Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington on February 14, at Horncastle Arena, Christchurch on Monday February 16, Claudelands Arena, Hamilton on February 18 and in Auckland at the ASB Theatre on February 19 and 20.
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