Stripped!

Just got back from Atlanta seeing Eddie Izzard, baby! Yeah! I've been wanting to do this ever since I first watched Dress to Kill with Shar in that house she rented with all those boys. I think she was home sick with flu or maybe it was giardia. No, she had a tan, that was it. That was possibly ten years ago. I don't even want to think about those implications.
More importantly, Eddie was wonderful. Approximately half of the show was ad libbed (I think) and covered the following topics: the stone age, dinosaurs (particularly stegasaurus), iphones, wikipedia, giraffes, intelligent design, latin, eels in bags, noahs ark, and hunter gatherers. There were probably a few more things, but the whole bit ends up being a blur because you cannot repeat an actual joke...as you well know.
It was also difficult to hear everything at times because the audience erupts at damn near everything the man says. Honest to god, he could just walk out and say "jam" and it would bring the house down. He handles heckling quite well, though I would hardly call it heckling. People love to repeat his own material back at him. He was trying to remember something and someone yelled "Call Swindon!" to which he good naturedly replied "A town in England known for nothing in particular? How would that help?" In fact, he engaged with practically everybody who called out suggestions, all of which came from his previous material.
It must be pretty cool to have your fans adore your words so much that they can recite you by heart. Phillip and I listed to The Odyssey on the way down and I bet a lot more people can do the Pavlov's Cat bit than could spout anything Homer ever wrote. But Homer gets to smugly claim that everything written is a footnote and Eddie has to constantly respond to the "Cake or Death?" challenge. I guess everything is a trade off.