BY WILL HARRIS
VIRGINIA BEACH — If your favorite band can go on the road and perform a set of their greatest hits, then why can’t a comedian?
That’s the premise behind Eddie Izzard’s latest tour, “Remix,” wherein Izzard takes jokes and stories from a 35-year career and tweaks them a bit here and there, keeping premises familiar while providing opportunities for new laughs.
“I can’t go out with my standup and go, ‘Here’s the old jokes in the old places, as it was before,’” Izzard said recently. “What I can do is refine it. Some of the old jokes are there, but it’s as if I’m doing that subject for the first time. You’ll be going along and say, ‘Oh, I know this one. Oh, no, that’s not there. That shouldn’t be… That’s new. That’s different. Oh, yeah, but that’s one of the old ones … ’ And I just jump around all over the place.”
The Remix Tour Live comes to the Sandler Center for the Performing Arts in Virginia Beach on Friday, Oct. 18. Ticket information is online at this link.
Izzard said she uses a technique other comics employ to keep things fresh — entertaining herself along with the audience.
“I think you can lose it if you say, ‘Well, here’s my set, and I’m going to knock it out,’ and it all begins to die because it’s like a prayer,” she said. “It’s just locked in concrete. Whereas, my stuff is molten.”
Izzard came out as a transgender woman in 2020, and her full name is now Suzy Eddie Izzard, though she’s billed professionally as Eddie Izzard. She said she’s tried to make things easy for those who might find change difficult.
“In case people haven’t heard,” she said. “I did make a statement on Twitter that I prefer she/her, don’t mind he/him, prefer Suzy, don’t mind Eddie, some people call me Suzy Eddie and … I thought, ‘No … Well, all right — if you want to, you can go ahead.’”
Laughing, Izzard added, “I thought, ‘Whatever’s working.’ As long as they don’t call me Arthur or Sabrina, I’m cooking with gas. So people can stay with one or go with the other or whatever they like. I’ve made it easy, politically.”
Izzard said some people may have a problem with her transition, but, for her part, she has experienced positivity that outweighs possible negative reactions.
“It’s just so much better for me to be honest and to say, ‘Yes, this is true, this is how I feel,’” she said. “On the right wing, they’re talking about cultural wars, but there are no wars. There are culture debates and culture disagreements, but it’s not a war. There’s no one invading people’s land masses with tanks. That’s just trying to stir up trouble. And the positive thing about all this debate is that the debate is happening. When I came out (as a transvestite) in 1985, no debates were happening at all. No talk, no chat, no words, no nothing. Just silence. And I was considered a ‘wrong person.’ So it’s nice to be out.”
Izzard’s career has encompassed her celebrated stand-up work, as well as acting on the stage and screen. And she seems to be working more than ever now.
In addition to continuing with her decades-long stand-up career, she’s also been doing one-woman performances of Great Expectations and Hamlet, not to mention appearing as part of the ensemble cast of Netflix’s Kaos and playing the titular character in 2023’s Doctor Jekyll. And if you were really paying attention, you might’ve caught her popping up in a guest spot in the most recent season of The Kids in the Hall on Amazon Prime Video.
“Sketch comedy was what I was supposed to do,” Izzard said. “My mum died when I was six, and then at seven I see a play going on. There was a lot of applause, and I thought the love of the audience … I think this is psychological, what I did, but I said, ‘Yes, I need that!’ And then I discovered comedy, and I thought, ‘Oh, you can specialize in comedy. Oh, I’ll do that instead of dramatic acting.’”
Izzard didn’t ultimately end up with a career in sketch comedy, but she’s still managed to channel that love into her stand-up.
“It’s kind of weird,” she said. “That’s what I was going to do – playing characters with strange voices – and now that’s what my stand up is. It’s me narrating different stories, and then I cut to, ‘Well, why are you doing that?’ ‘I don’t know why.’ ‘Well, you must know.’ It’s sketch comedy. It’s me introducing me doing sketches.”
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