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Circle Eddie Izzard Certificate 15, 81 minutes This review first appeared in Third Way, November 2002.
Izzard is one of the most innovative, inspired and successful British stand-ups on record. This is his sixth video in ten years, an impressive total, and among fleeting interests from lard with bits in to Englebert Humperdinck’s renaming commitee, he has been perpetually fascinated above all by religion from the start. His shows have covered Genesis and Revelation, hymnsinging and original sin, women priests and church schools, the reformation and inquisition, and above all Jesus, visiting and revisiting every major event in his life. All done with utter irreverence, but also comic brilliance, and such an absence of malice that though many Christians would hate it, others are enchanted. This lack of malice is something of a trademark. He is one of the few stand-ups - Harry Hill is another - whose comedy is rarely at the expense of anyone at all. This places him historically. The alternative comedy of the 80s proved that you don’t need those hilarious Irishmen, darkies and mothers-in-law to make people laugh, but generally replaced these unemployed stereotypes with yuppies, cabinet ministers and Paul Daniels. In the 90s, when politics finished and threatened to take stand-up with it, the surrealism of Izzard and Hill arose to fill the vacuum, laughing at Daleks plumbing and cats drilling behind sofas. They took up where Ben Elton etc. left off, rejecting traditional comic victimisation but doing without the politically correct victims as well. Their surrealism disproves the well-supported idea that comedy is essentially at someone’s expense. Absurdity is the truly alternative comedy in this sense. It is often called ‘anarchic’, but it is the law of the jungle it breaks as much as any other. Izzard’s crazy innocence has faded a little since those earliest recordings. Targets on Circle include various Popes, the National Rifle Association, the parties in Northern Ireland and his US audience. (On Northern Ireland: ‘Do you get this? Do you know there’s other countries?’) Not that there is someting wrong with comedy engaging with reality, but in this case something is lost in the trade-off. He is probably more preoccupied than ever with Christianity here, and certainly less sensitive to its adherents. Whereas before he was content to say, ‘If you’re religious that’s OK…, but you’ve got to keep updating, keep analysing and keep a sense of humour’, now at points he more or less preaches against Christianity. However his arguments (no dinosaurs in the Bible, basically) are thin and dumb enough to be page three girls, so it is not time to panic yet. It is the sacrilege that is harder to take than the half-hearted (and equally well baked) polemic. Closest to the bone is the domestic that he enacts between Jesus and his father, when Jesus returns to heaven complaining about being set up and God tears a strip off him for what he said at the last supper. Like the crucifixion scene in The Life of Brian, it is such comic mastery it is very hard to decide whether one is unhappy about it or not. Whether the material is offensive is as subjective as whether it is funny. Either way, there is something more important at stake I think: it is an extraordinary and wonderful thing that even while the church struggles to keep its head above water, one of our most celebrated entertainers finds Jesus the most compelling figure on the post-Christian landscape, and multitudes flock to hear him tell the one about the camel going through the eye of the needle. Deference is dead, but Jesus is alive. |
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