The Lounge Izzard

WHAT AMERICAN MALE COMEDIAN wears nail polish, eyeliner, a black neck ribbon, a shiny red Jean-Paul Gaultier jacket, has dyslexia, was born in Yemen and has wowed audiences from Amsterdam to Reykjavik? Answer: no American comedian. The only comic, or human being, who fits this description is Eddie Izzard, a Brit who's the most unlikely comedy hit ever to cross the Atlantic. Izzard wound up his sold-out three-week gig last week at New York's P.S. 122, the legendary crucible for performance art. For the second year, Izzard, 35, scored such a huge popular and critical success that there's talk of bringing him to Broadway. The Daily News has said he had ""a level of intelligence that's rare on this side of the pond.''

Take that, Letterman, Leno, Robert Klein, Paula Poundstone and all you other unintelligent colonial comics. Izzard himself is a modest bloke who has described his comedy as ""highly crafted rubbish.'' So let's take a calm look at this guy.

Out he comes, in his tight, glitzy get-up, to a rousing welcome. Izzard starts off riffing on the Old Testament, giving God the suave, insouciant voice of James Mason (thereby cleverly issuing the Lord a British passport). Izzard evokes Noah, who, leading his animals to the ark, comes to a brace of ducks. Ducks: ""We're not coming!'' Noah: ""There's going to be a flood!'' Ducks: ""So?'' A master of free (or at least cut-rate) association, Izzard ricochets from the Bible to lawn mowers, toasters, airplanes, hopscotch. That leads to one of his key themes, the mystery of women. Izzard becomes a sidewalkful of boys watching in puzzlement as girls hop about in their ""strange ritual.'' Izzard then becomes the Grim Reaper, scything his crop of humans. But women refuse to be scythed. Like the ducks, they just won't go. This is Izzard's way of explaining why women live longer than men.

Izzard jumps to the New Testament, featuring Saint Peter going to Rome, where he delightedly notes that everyone is riding Vespas. Izzard is a surrealist whose surrealism is benign, almost cozy. He is indeed a funny chap, and his gentle wackiness may explain in good part his popularity with the nonbohemian young people who seem to be his core American audience. They relish a comic whose rare four-letter words have an odd innocence. Izzard is also almost totally nonpolitical. About the closest he comes to topicality is his salvo at Prince Philip, whom he depicts as an envoy to China insulting the Chinese: ""You're all bastards! You're all foreigners, that's your trouble! F--k off!''

As a post-Monty Python comic, Izzard breaks no startling new ground. Even his mild androgyny seems pastelish in the era of RuPaul. He seems the perfect comedian for the Tony Blair age; Izzard's outrageousness is domesticated just like Blair's leftishness. He hopscotches the world, making audiences laugh not by skewering reality but by taking the edge off the serrated sallies of the Angry Young Comics. No God who sounds like James Mason is going to send the world to hell.

© 1997