Eddie Izzard on the Daleks

Based on my personal experience, there seems to a correlation between skeptical thinking and science fiction. I attend functions of a group of skeptics, sometimes physically at local venues, and at other times online with people around the world and I find that a large number of them are aficionados of science fiction and are knowledgeable about the minutiae of those stories.

Recently I created some mild astonishment within this group by saying that I had never actually watched any complete episodes of favorites like Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, or Dr. Who. I knew about them of course and had read about them and seen the odd clip of something from them. It is not that I avoid them. I do read the occasional science fiction but had never had any great interest in seeing science fiction on TV or the big screen. This surprised others who seemed to expect that with my science background, I would find them appealing.

One thing that had always puzzled me were the Daleks, the evildoers in the Dr. Who stories. They seemed to me to be laughably comical and totally not frightening. Eddie Izzard shares my puzzlement as to what the creators were thinking when they created them as conical objects with flat bottoms, like pepper and salt shakers, who moved on wheels and had weird appendages where arms would be.

Eddie Izzard on Stephen Colbert’s show

Although I like comedy, I find it hard to watch an entire program by stand-up comedians. After a while, I find it tiresome and have to switch off. I prefer to watch short clips. The performer I can watch for longest is British comedian Eddie Izzard. If you search on this blog for her name, you will find a ton of her clips that I have posted over the years. She is always fun to watch.

Today her one-person show of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations opens in New York. This is not a comedy but it shows her skills as a performer who can switch quickly between multiple characters. She appeared on Stephen Colbert’s show to talk about that and her running for political office in the UK and running of marathons.

Here is the interview.

Izzard’s signature stand up comedy style is where she conducts a dialogue between two people by making a quarter turn back and forth to signal the shift in speakers. She says that she copied that from Richard Pryor. Here is an example of that quarter-turn technique being used by Izzard to parody James Bond films.

Eddie Izzard on running 27 marathons and coming out as transgender

I find Eddie Izzard to be always worth watching, whether he is doing a stand up act or not. He set himself a goal of running 27 marathons in 27 days, a total of 707 miles in all, to raise money for charity and completed in March of 2016. The target number was set to commemorate the 27 years Nelson Mandela spent in prison and he ran in South Africa. Because he could not run on one of the days, the 54-year old Izzard had to run two marathons on the last day to meet his goal
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Eddie Izzard on being transvestite and transgender

Eddie Izzard has long been my favorite stand up comedian. I think s/he is positively brilliant. I love the seemingly stream of consciousness patter, the mimicking of conversations, allusions to the Bible and history and popular culture, and the ability to find humor in the most mundane aspects of life. There are many clips from the live performances available on YouTube (many of which I have linked to in the past) but if you can get hold of the full performances that are available on DVD, they are well worth it.
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Eddie Izzard on Stonehenge

I can’t believe that while I was writing recently about how ancient civilizations managed to figure out how to move massive stones over large distances to create monuments such as the Pyramids of Egypt and the palaces and temples of the Forbidden City in China, I completely forgot to inform readers of Eddie Izzard’s reflections on how Stonehenge came to be built in England. (Language advisory) [Read more…]