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Brick Wall Comedy
Brick Wall Comedy

Sexie

Eddie Izzard

2003 · 1 h 37 min

Eddie Izzard brings rock-star scale to rambling, surreal stand-up.

Watch it free on YouTube (opens in a new tab)

Eddie Izzard walked onto the stage of her 2003 arena tour with high heels, leather pants, and a newly acquired, mail-ordered pair of prosthetic breasts. This aesthetic pivot (which Izzard jokingly recommended as a great way for middle-aged men to distract from a thickening midsection) anchored a show that treated stand-up like a rock concert. Complete with arena-level lighting and a booming Tom Jones intro, the performance leans heavily into Izzard’s trademark digressive style, where a routine about Greek mythology quickly derails into a discussion of Medusa’s hairdresser.

Recorded at the Congress Theatre in Eastbourne, England, Sexie caught Izzard at a career high point, fresh off a Broadway Tony nomination for A Day in the Death of Joe Egg. The 97-minute show captures the comic’s transition into playing massive venues, translating intimate, improvisational whimsy to thousands of people at a time. The material meanders through shark behavior, the slow speed at which superheroes get dressed, and her role as a German cowboy in a French-produced Western. Izzard closes the evening with a characteristically bad impression of Christopher Walken.

The set list

6 bits

  1. Odysseus and the island

    Izzard imagines Odysseus sailing past an island in a speedboat or riding a bicycle, framing multiple takes as alternate endings for the DVD.

  2. Prosthetic breasts as earmuffs

    Explores the mechanics of non-implanted synthetic breasts, joking about their potential to explode at high altitudes on planes and their usefulness as earmuffs.

  3. Cavemen Jeff and Steve inventing fire and the wheel

    Deconstructs early human development through banal dialogue between cavemen and a Neanderthal book-of-the-month club.

  4. Pavlov and Doppler sharing a car

    Enacts an absurd dialogue between Pavlov and Doppler sharing a two-steering-wheel automobile while Doppler throws cats out the window.

  5. Acting in the Baguetti Western Blueberry

    Recounts her experience playing a German cowboy riding horses in a French western film with Juliette Lewis and Michael Madsen.

  6. Christopher Walken impression

    Delivered as an encore routine framed as her latest bad impression.

How it plays

Tone
Absurdist, whimsical, literate, goofy, and unaggressive.
On stage
Surreal, stream-of-consciousness monologuist and self-described 'male lesbian' / straight transvestite comic appearing in high heels, fishnets, and a corset top.
Pace
Rapid-fire, meandering stream of consciousness featuring playful tangents, faux-loss of memory, and pauses to scribble notes on an invisible pad.
About
transvestitism, synthetic breasts, Greek mythology, human evolution and Neanderthals, superheroes, dentistry

What the critics said

Critics lauded Izzard's trademark intellectual agility, bizarre juxtapositions, and effortless charm, though several reviewers and fans considered it looser, more rambling, and less consistently brilliant than Dress to Kill or Circle.

In the room: The Eastbourne taping was characterized by reviewers as having a somewhat subdued or poorly miked audience response compared to the rapturous reception on other stops of the world tour.

Summed up from reviews, articles and listings. Sources: en.wikipedia.org, imdb.com, primevideo.com, letterboxd.com, latimes.com, variety.com, observer.com, nonfamous.com, auntiemomo.com, nzherald.co.nz.

Backstory

Filmed at the start of the 2003 Sexie world tour in Eastbourne, England, where Izzard went to school and where her father and grandfather were born.

Details

Released
Taped
Congress Theatre, Eastbourne
Runtime
1 h 37 min
Director
Declan Lowney
Topics
Before
Circle (2002)
After
Wunderbar (2022)

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