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He sounds faintly bemused at the perception this was a landmark moment of asserting his trans identity, or settling on a gender. Izzard’s personal pronouns were swiftly feminised on Wikipedia. While posing for the finalists of Sky Arts’ Portrait Artist of the Year, he was referred to (with his happy consent) as “she/her”. Yet when we speak over the phone, it is amid a social media explosion of interest in him that has nothing to do with his act, and everything to do with his pronouns. It will all be live-streamed, like a sweaty version of Big Brother. This month, mid-pandemic, he not only repeats and exceeds the feat – running a marathon every day of the month on a treadmill (a project called Make Humanity Great Again) but is going the extra mile, metaphorically, by doing a show straight after. In February last year, building on a gasp-inducing sideline as a marathon runner (for charity), he pounded the pavements of 28 European cities (throwing in London at the end). This pronounced Europhile did a long stint in Paris, performing in French, and has gigged in Germany, in German. In the US, he sold out Madison Square Garden, and was the first solo comedy act to play the Hollywood Bowl.
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Other comics fell by the wayside Izzard, now 58, not only stayed the course but kept going off piste – building a stage and screen acting career, making waves in arenas, and heading overseas to be a “world comedian”. With supreme confidence and poise – glamour and grit – he was able to deliver the goods as mesmerically in make-up and a frock as more blokey garb. That imaginative freedom was of a piece with his sexual identity: he was gender-fluid avant la lettre – and way before Grayson Perry took the limelight. Whether conjuring Darth Vader in the Death Star canteen (“Give me penne all’arrabiata or you shall die!”), the thoughts of a busily munching squirrel (“Did I leave the gas on?”) or God as James Mason, Izzard didn’t just riff off recognisable reference points but spun big existential questions into hallucinogenic gold. It was the antithesis of the Ben Elton-ish, Thatcher-bashing template that then dominated alternative comedy. Inspired as a child by the Goons and Monty Python – hailed, in fact, by John Cleese as “the lost Python” – and having cut his teeth as a street entertainer, he made burbling, conversational surrealism his stock in trade. When he emerged in the late 1980s, before shooting to fame in the 1990s, it was as if he single-handedly established a parallel universe for British stand-up comedy to occupy. Few comedians appear to think bigger when it comes to artistic possibility, ambitious career moves and sheer human potential. Eddie Izzard doesn’t do things by halves.