Night at the Wunderbar

Last night, I saw Eddie Izzard perform here in Denver on his stand-up tour, Wunderbar. It's been a long globe-hopping tour he's performed in German, French, and English, and he's now beginning to wrap up in anticipation of a run for public office for the U.K. If he wins, this could be his last comedy tour for some time.

This is the third time I've seen him, and I confess to being a touch disappointed in the previous two sets -- not because he didn't have some good material. He did. But his recorded performances of Dress to Kill and Glorious were so amazingly funny that they set too high a bar for expectations. This time, I tried to keep that bar at a more reasonable level.

With politics on his mind, you might expect this to be a highly political set. Fortunately, such moments were sparse (and mostly front-loaded in the first five minutes). I do agree with his political views (so far as I know them), but I found it less enjoyable when one of his previous tours leaned heavily into material about them. Basically: the world can be depressing enough right now... can you just make me laugh instead? This batch was more along those lines.

It was also a lot of material. He played two full acts by himself, without an opener, for a grand total of nearly two hours (including the encore). He touched on literally everything, from the Big Bang to "last Thursday." Especially fun segments focused on the behavior of eons-old monkeys, what dogs would say if we could understand them, and the origin stories of superheroes. He also closed with an extended riff on the Lord of the Rings that had some good moments.

Overall, it seemed like stronger material than the previous times I've seen Eddie Izzard in person. Unfortunately, though, it was also the worst sound quality of any time I've seen him. I don't generally find his accent too difficult to follow, but last night, I truly could not understand somewhere between 10-20% of what he said. Same goes for the people I went went, and even for strangers sitting around me (who remarked on the issue during the intermission).

This was a particularly bad situation, given the nature of Izzard and his material. Some of what he said was deliberately mumbled for comedic effect, or actually in a foreign language. But then, some of it was neither of those things... it was just too quiet to hear, or spoken too quickly, or swallowed up in bad reverb of sounds smacking around the space. As much as I was laughing otherwise, I felt like I was missing some really good moments for failure to understand them. I found myself in the regrettable position of wishing maybe I'd stayed home so I could turn on the closed captioning. (Not that he's releasing this tour in such a format, but you get the sentiment.)

I feel as though the performance might have been something like a B+, and the best material I've seen Izzard deliver in person. But the issue of understanding really dragged down the night for me in a significant way -- I'd say the experience overall was a B-. Though perhaps, if he is indeed about to embark on a long career in politics, the night will grow in my memory. I'll be able to say I was there for his final (?) tour.