Spoilers exist (Cousin Dan, this means you!). Short version. GO SEE HIM!
My one regret is that I should have gone to see him in Cleveland and taken Taffy. She would have pissed herself laughing.
Oh and don’t leave until the house lights come up. There’s always more.
Okay so first off, he is NOT in drag. Which is a bit sad, since he looked so sexy in it before, but he’s also a few years old, and frankly I think it was the right call. He’s got a bit of a spare tire now, like most blokes in their mid forties get when they live off Kraft Services (seriously! Actors get fat from bad food!).
It was worth the price of the tickets, and while we had poor seats, we also had an unobstructed view of the show, so I don’t mind the nosebleed. The stage was laid out such that Eddie didn’t seem too small, and I didn’t feel like I was too far away.
The jokes were a very odd mix of the Old Eddie (circa Dress to Kill, which I hold as the peak of his stand up career) and the New Eddie I’ve been seeing on TV and reading in interviews. He’s no longer ‘Bloke in a Dress’, but ‘Grownup Gent who likes dresses, but also pants. What?’ We’re witnessing the transition of Tranny Bloke to Fellow. I get that he’s trying to be taken as more than JUST that dress guy, and he’s managing to do it without sacrificing who he is. I laud him for that!
The audience, alas, was embarrassing. Someone shouted out ‘Geezy Creasy’ (see Dress to Kill) and another said he had a flag (ditto). Seriously, I adore that bit. I have the DVD, I watch it in French sometimes! But the man is more than just that bit. He’s funnier than just that. You lot need to grow up!
The bit was meant to be history, the whole world, and how God may or may not exist, and if he does, he’s fucked off, because seriously, look at the world. Eddie took on ‘Intelligent Design’ (which he points out needs to prove both those things before he’ll agree to it. Look at our President). He joked about how vegetarian monsters don’t make sense. Triceratops. Three horns, nasty looking fucker, eats veggies. What the fuck? This was followed by a miming of a very angry dinasour growling at the veggies and ripping them up. He riffed on the idea of God having a toy with pull levers and buttons, so he could press a button and make a volcano or a giant dragonfly (aside, Jesus would point out there are OTHER buttons, dad).
It was classic Eddie, all grown up in a good way.
My favorite bit really was a tie between the Spartan Sheep (so butch they shave themselves with a rusty razor and scare the wolves off) and the fact that you can’t make movies about humanity after we became an agrarian society because farming boring (also there’s a good riff on the hunter/gatherer point of life, and how the gatherers had the shit job). “How many berries have you got?” “Seven.” “I’ve got thirteen.” “I’ve lost the will to live.”
Wikipedia was also a hot topic. Eddie freely admits that he ‘learns’ from TV and Wikipedia, and if he didn’t have Wikipedia the show would be “Well, er, I met a guy … and we had a sandwich.” He also claims Wikipedia is 90% accurate, however if you watch his shows, you know he makes up those percentages all the time, and this time he openly stated that this number is “according to a study which I just conducted in my head.”
In talking about hunter/gatherers, he explains that our propensity to violence is due to the fact that being a hunter is cool, and in our DNA. As such, we engage in sports. Football, or as we call it, something really dorky, because we used ‘football’ to describe a game where only one moron kicks the ball, and he’s on a ‘special team.’ Eddie didn’t mention special teams, I just wanted to point out that American Football is a stupid name. Soccer, for those of you who are in the back of the class. From there, he got around to assassins, and explained that the etymology of the word came from hashish, which they fed to the blokes before sending them off to kill. Eddie then acted out a potted fellow, headed off to kill a guy, but all he really wanted was a Kit Kat. And since the fridge wasn’t invented, and therefor he couldn’t chill the Kit Kat, he shot the man in the leg.
Wikipedia is run, per Eddie, by Mr. Wikipedia and his two sons, Jeff and Stevie, who live in a toilet. Please note, Eddie is British. This means the term ‘toilet’ is what most of us Americans would call a bathroom. But as Eddie points out, that’s stupid. There’s not bloody bath in a restaurant bathroom, now, is there? Which is why I call it a restroom or a lav. I also call it the head, when I want to make light of why I’m leaving a meeting.
Now, in order to prove he didn’t just make up the hashish/assassin connection, that the word was derived from Hashshashin, he did indeed, turn to Wikipedia, on his iPhone. Eddie loves Macs. He was on about how we’re all addicted to our computers, and how he loves getting software updates, but that after you’ve been updated, nothing’s different. He mentions that Windows is very similar to mac, just less friendly. So he did whip out the iPhone and went to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassin#Etymology
He also mentioned how it’s not that everyone hates America, its that they hate our aggressive foreign policy. It was likened to having a neighbor who pisses over the fence, but every four years, he goes away. The new bloke says sorry for the pissing, not my fault, but in four years he goes away, and another pisser comes back.
And finally, to all you morons who left after the first bow. I laugh on you, like Nelson. Hah hah! Eddie came back for another 15 minutes of riffing. You missed it so you could get to your car or catch a cab. Because of that, I’m not going to tell you what he said after you left, go buy the DVD when it comes out.
Hah, hah, hah, hah, hah. *blows raspberry* (that’s per Lily Tomlin in 9 to 5)