Eddie Izzard has a very unique comic style and delivery as opposed to several of the other comedians I have seen both in and out of class. Personally, it seems as if he is making up his monologue as he goes along. Many of his jokes turn into rambling tagents upon tagents until he eventually comes back to the original train of thought. It is as if he has a short setlist and peppers his own improvised jokes throughout until what could be a 30 minutes set becomes an hour and a half show. Furthermore, alot of his timing and delivery is mumbled such that his jokes come off as stream-of-consciousness ideas mixed into planned bits. This, of course, is not to his discredit since his work is extremly humorous and such whimsical comic style adds to the humor. However, is this planned or does Izzard really work on-the-fly?
It is very hard for me to believe that Izzard can go up in front of sold-out audiences every night with a loose structure planned in hopes that his spur of the moment jokes will fill the void. However, maybe he just is that quick on his feet. It would take an answer from Eddie Izzard to fulfill that question. Nevertheless, I will take the stance that he purposely delivers his act in a "made up on the spot" delivery. Such an approach would probably prove to be equally as funny. I find much more pleasure in watching improv than strictly planned setup-punchline jokes because it is far more impressive to see what someone can do without warning as opposed to someone who has ample time to write and rehearse their jokes endlessly. The thrill of improvisation, for the audience as well as the performer, is probably the unpredictability of the joke and neither one knows where it is going to end up. Sometimes amateur comedians will perform sets that seem so rehearsed and hokey that their jokes seem stale and dead. On the other hand, with comedians like Izzard, such off-the-cuff jokes inject life and fluctuation into the routine. If Izzard can convince the audience that he really is adding alot of this in as he goes along, we begin to pay closer attention as we anticipate which curvy path his stories will take next. I would personally think a joke is much funnier if it was made up as opposed to planned out and perhaps that is what gives Izzard such a humorous appeal. It is as if he pretends (or maybe not) to write his set as he goes along and therefore gives the audience a view of the driver's seat. By equalling the levels of audience-comedian by that much, we feel closer to him and more apt to laugh.
Obviously to go on stage and completely pull material out of thin-air is no recipe for success. In fact, watching a comedian struggle to reach for jokes can be utterly painful to watch. Therefore, whether or not Izzard is adding this humor on-the-spot or just making it appear that way, the end result is whether it makes the audience laugh. Izzard does in fact make the audience laugh and if that is the result of improvised and varying jokes, more power to him as a comedian since such a talent is rare.
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I think you were actually pretty accurate in your first thought, that he has sort of a set list around which he works and moulds his stuff. He has said as much himself. He will say that in any given show, maybe 5-10% of stuff is new. I have actually seen him live quite a bit in the past year and the fact is, no two shows are the same. There are set pieces (though not always delivered quite the same way) but there usually is at least around 10-15 minutes or so of each show that is more or less unique. I did see him at one point do two shows a month apart and I reckon they were probably 50% different. I also saw one show that was really long (maybe 2 and a half hours, no interval) where I'd guess 45 minutes or so was unique and where he came up with a whole new piece that then stayed part of his set for the rest of the tour. So not quite improv and not quite scripted either but entirely unique. His delivery style has been much imitated, but no one else does it quite like Eddie. In summary, neither quite unplanned, nor as contrived to seem unplanned as some would suggest.
ReplyDeleteActually, the whole thing is probably scripted ahead of time--part of the act is that it appear spontaneous. This is the oldest technique of humorous on-stage persona (goes back to the 19th century "lectures").
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