Comedians From England

"If I like chocolate it won't surprise you that I have a few chocolates in my fridge, but if you find out I've got 16 warehouses full of chocolate, you'd think I was insane. All these rich guys are insane, obsessive compulsive twits obsessed with money — money is all they think about — they're all nuts."

"Four hundred years ago, we would have been burnt for this film. Now, I'm suggesting that we've made an advance."

"Basil Fawlty was an easy character for me. For some reason, portraying a mean, uptight, incompetent bully comes naturally to me."

"Cleese, who enjoyed a fairly traditional, upper-middle-class upbringing, has dedicated his career to subverting the very same traditional British society which both molded him and projected him into the limelight. He has been enormously popular, in part because the British middle and upper class tend to enjoy that small moral relief which they experience through laughing at themselves. Christianity, nationalism and class have all come under Cleese’s satirical gaze while he continued to enjoy the fruits of the middle-class existence that he so tenaciously and profitably chipped away at. Now, like so many Boomers, he finds himself in the crumbling ruins of that same soppy-stern society, wishing that it would return, if only partially, and has begun a late-life declaration of war against political correctness, multiculturalism and the ‘loony left’ for which he is partly responsible."

"...what happens as you get older, and I promise you I'm not exaggerating, is that you begin to realize, first of all, that almost nobody knows what they're doing or what they’re talking about."

"I had a very strange experience in our stage tour. I'm sure that they all remember it differently, but I remember we started off in Brighton and worked our way front to the Midlands, and we were doing a show in Bristol, and we were doing a matinee there, and for some extraordinary reason the audience just didn't laugh. So after about four sketches of this Bristol matinee audience not laughing at something that people had been falling around at for two weeks, I realized that they were right and that it wasn't funny. And I'm being perfectly serious: if people aren't laughing, it isn't funny. And then the next house came in in the evening, and they started to laugh again in all the right places, and the show became funny again. But I mean comedy is incredibly brittle, and if something goes wrong with the atmosphere, you're dead."

"You can do the creation and then criticize it, but you can't do them at the same time. So if you're worried about offending people and constantly thinking of that, you are not going to be very creative. So I think it has a disastrous effect."

"But I think it's particularly worrying at the moment because you can only create in an atmosphere of freedom, where you're not checking everything you say critically before you move on. What you have to be able to do is to build without knowing where you're going because you've never been there before. That's what creativity is—you have to be allowed to build. And a lot of comedians now are sitting there and when they think of something, they say something like, 'Can I get away with it? I don't think so. So and so got into trouble, and he said that, oh, she said that.' You see what I mean? And that's the death of creativity. So I would say at the moment, this is a difficult time, particularly for young comedians, but you see, my audience is much older, and they're simply not interested in most of the woke attitudes. I mean, they just think that you should try and be kind to people and that's no need to complicate it, you know?"

"There's always been limitations on what they're allowed to say. Why you go to Molière and Louis XIV. I mean Molière had to be a bit careful. And there will always be limitations. I mean in England, until some ridiculous late date like 1965, all plays had to be submitted to what used to be a part of the palace called the Lord Chamberlain, and he would read it and there were hilarious letters used to go back was saying 'you may only say f--- once,' this sort of- ‘and you cannot say bugger. But you can say-' this sort of ridiculous negotiating letters."

"Nuns with banners!"

"I've got a false lip."

"It's not a model if it's full-size. It's a ice-breaker!"

"Tomkinson: What are these? Mother: Shoe trees, dear..."

"Contrary to what the politicians and religious leaders would like us to believe, the world won't be made safer by creating barriers between people. Cries of “They’re evil, let’s get ‘em” or “The infidels must die” sound frightening, but they're desperately empty of argument and understanding. They're the rallying cries of prejudice, the call to arms of those who find it easier to hate than admit they might be not be right about everything. Armageddon is not around the corner. This is only what the people of violence want us to believe. The complexity and diversity of the world is the hope for the future."

"One of the difficult things of so much travelling is to say goodbye."

"The use of the word "just" by an Australian means that whatever it is you have to do, it will not be easy, as in "Just pull that sword out of the stone" or "Just split that atom.""

"I wish them a long and happy life. If it's as long as their wedding, I'm sure they'll be fine."

"There are many ways of seeing the world. You can hang upside down from a meteor, volunteer to be the fourth stage of a three-stage rocket, or simply get in a balloon and keep going. But if it's sheer, unadulterated discomfort you're looking for, just stay on land."

"[From a review of Sexie] Mr. Izzard, whose theme is nothing less than civilization and its multifarious contents, traffics in delirious, dizzying circles of ideas and images. On the surface they have nothing to do with one another. And yet they flow effortlessly into a single, opalescent stream of consciousness."

"It's hyper-complex how humans work [...] Yet we're obsessed about boy-girl, whereas if a tiger is attacking you...[...] A tiger is attacking me? Is it a boy tiger, is it a girl tiger? I'm not sure — it's a f***ing tiger! You can surely check? No, I can't check. It's a tiger."

"I'm severely atypically dyslexic. My spelling's all over the place: cat with a 'k', ceiling with an 's'. I-Spy games went on for ever as a kid."

"There’s another name I’m going to add in as well, which is Suzy, which I wanted to be since I was 10. So I’m going to be Suzy Eddie Izzard, that’s how I’m going to roll, so people can choose what they want. They can’t make a mistake, they can’t go wrong."

"[On proposed gender self-id reforms and women-only spaces] I don't have all the answers [...] I happen to be trans. All I can do is say how it is for me. I can't come in and wave a magic wand and solve all the problems, because some people are very entrenched."

"[On the "fixation" about their transgender identity] I happen to be trans. It isn’t the central part of me. I also happen to play the piano. I also happen to have blue eyes."

"I've had such disgusting things said to me over 37 years and now, to stand to be an MP in the seat of democracy in the United Kingdom, I've had to have such a torrent of transphobic abuse at that point when we're talking about democracy, we're talking about making people's lives better. It’s rather sad that these people feel that they want to do this attacking and this abuse online"

"[Confirming their use of a women's toilet] You've got to question people's sensibility, if they're going around taking photographs of people going into toilets. I go to the loo to go to the loo. I don't know where other people's imaginations are going."

"Once he throws a conversational ball into the air, he keeps it in play for the rest of the night, even when you assume he's forgotten all about it. And every one of them is inspected with a magnifying eye that inflates everything to the point of absurdity."

"[On the Labour MP Rosie Duffield refusing to consider Izzard a woman] She has got to join the 21st century. She’s got to catch up with the rest of us. The vast majority of the world is now moving forwards … The millennium has happened and we’re 22 years into it. So come and join us in the 21st century."

"I prefer she/her, don’t mind he/him, and I’m going to be relaxed about it. It’s not the time for fighting each other on this."

"Yet Mr. Izzard never reads as hostile or even aggressive. Unlike most American stand-ups, he attacks neither his audience nor himself, instead creating the illusion that he is courteously letting you eavesdrop on an infinite internal dialogue."

"The sad thing is women, particularly feminists, once adored Izzard. Not only the greatest 1990s stand-up, he was truly brave. On stage and off, in lipstick, leather skirts and sparkly eye-shadow, he subverted rigid ideas about what men could be. "These aren't women's clothes," he'd say. "They’re my clothes." He called himself a "transvestite": a heterosexual guy who sometimes wore frocks. And while some men abused him in the street, women thought he was cool. Then "transvestite" became an unfashionable term and the concept of "gender identity" took hold. Whether you're a man or woman was defined not by your sexed body but your inner, soul-like essence."

"In 2019, the US podcaster Joe Rogan asked how he moved from girl to boy mode, and Izzard replied: "I take off my heels.""

"I find the idea that I can’t make fun of Eddie Izzard and Sam Smith, two of the most ridiculous people around at the moment, absurd. I wouldn’t say he's sold out. But he's in the grip of the same mania that a lot of other people are in. Eddie Izzard is trans? Really? He’s a fully intact crossdresser. How is he trans? I am as trans as Eddie Izzard."

"[Asked if he is misgendering Izzard] The Equalities Act also protects my belief that he's a man. What I find extraordinary about Eddie is he's an intelligent man. He's an enormously talented person. For him to not understand that his going into women's toilets means that men like Adam Graham [the transgender double rapist who identifies as Isla Bryson] can go into women's toilets. I just don't get how he doesn't see that. I can only imagine that he does see it and he’s ignoring it."

"And I think that if God did exist, he had many children. I think Jesus proves this. Jesus must be the seventh son of God. A-sus, B-sus, C-sus, D-sus, E-sus, F-sus, G-sus. That's just logic. That's just mathematical. And T-sus would always be fucking about. And P-sus does deliveries. C-sus started the Roman Empire. Cae-sus. F-sus, City in Turkey. B-sus was covered in something. Some people applauding there; other people going, "What?" … B-sus was covered in bees."

"Relationships with me are tricky. You've got to be a woman who's very self-confident about your own sexuality to go out with me."

"The main point is, did God tell him to make a boat, or did Noah just use his captain common sense? Cause there are a number of us, if we were somewhere where it was raining and raining and raining and raining and raining and raining and raining and raining, and we had a big pile of wood, some of us might put two and two together and go, "I'm gonna make a bloody boat!" Others might go, "I'm gonna make a hairdresser's", "I'm gonna build a monkey emporium.", "I'm gonna build a big pair of wooden shoes, that would fit a giant." … But he made a boat. Oh, he was quite sensible! And what did he put on the boat? His family. What else? Animals. Which animals? Any he could find. Did he put two of every animal in the world on the boat? No! How can I be so sure? Try it!"

"Charles Darwin wrote a famous book in 18[gibberish]. And that book was an interesting book, cuz it was called "Monkey-Monkey-Monkey-Monkey-Monkey-Monkey-You"."

"[On a preference for she/her pronouns] If it's not affecting someone, then why do you need to lean in and stop other people just trying to create a little space for themselves to be positive. This is not an attacking thing, this is just existing."

"[Talking about the royal family] 'Cause they got in at '52, and then immediately the Queen introduced the new … then in the '60s, the Queen decided to change the way that … and she encouraged people to … and in the '70s she completely redistributed … and realised she had too much wealth, so she decided to … then in the '80s, they set up a charity to do … and then they encouraged other people to … and in the '90s, they just totally relaxed, and they said, "Everyone, why don't you …" And then in the 2000s, they've set a great example by … stop me at any point. I think she's got 20 years left. She's in there, but she essentially does what she does on the stamps."

"I've got this weird thing which is, for one thing, making the stuff universal. Anyone would get the references in my show, no matter what the country."

"[Having described himself as a lazy person with a huge drive] It's the oil tanker thing. Once I get going I don't want to stop. Once I stop I don't want to get going."

"[On making (male) bathrooms, restrooms or toilets gender-neutral] If you just take out urinals, then everyone can use them. You can solve it right now. Just rip them all out. Lets share so everyone is equal. It gets rid of so many things in one fell swoop."

"I have played one transgender character. I will play hopefully more transgender roles in the future, but there are a lot of boy genetics in me so I am happy to play boy roles. It would be great if more transgender actors can play more transgender characters."

"I have girl genetics and boy genetics, I feel they are fun and sexy [...] I came out 32 years ago [as trans]. And women have total clothing rights and I have total clothing rights. I'm not wearing women's clothes - I'm wearing clothes."

"I'm a wannabe lesbian. I've fancied women always, I fancied girls, but I also sort of wanted to be one. I also got boy genetics. I have both. I wanted to be special forces as a kid. I've performed in four languages, run marathons and come out."

"I felt it was better to come out even though people suggested that I didn't. I knew I would get to a better place. I think that is part of my strength. I have done these shows in different languages and done charity by running over 70 marathons. My strength comes from me coming out in 1985. I knew I had to come out and gradually get back into society. I knew I had to get trans-whatever, the language has changed over the years, into society as part of the world because we are citizens. I am running to be a member of Parliament now and that is not even an issue. It's not even talked about or brought up in the campaign, mostly in girl mode. I have boy mode and girl mode. I am kind of gender fluid. I want to express both sides of myself, which has always been there. I am a tomboy and tomgirl kind of person."

"WCT: What do you prefer your pronouns to be? EI: I am going with either "he" or "she." Either way is fine. If I am in boy mode then "he" or girl mode "she." People get confused, but thank you for asking."

"I try to do things that I think are interesting, and this is the first programme I’ve asked if I can be she and her. The transition period."

"Well it feels great, because people just assume that they know me from before but I'm gender fluid. I just want to be based in girl mode from now on."