I don’t often do things on a whim but I like to make them count when I do. Three weeks ago, someone mentioned on Twitter that Eddie Izzard was extending his run of the show “Stripped” in Paris and, being a huge fan of his, I thought ‘why the hell not?’. The difference of course being that the gig was in French.

As of next month, I’ll have been living in Lausanne for 3 years. I originally came for one and a half but as my friend Rob said when I got here “you’ll never leave”, and I guess so far he’s been spot on with that one. As a result, I consider my French to be at a reasonable level even though it’s still way behind where it should be given the amount of time I’ve spent here. I blame that on the prevalence of English at the university I work at and my own laziness. So you can see now that it wasn’t just a whim to go to Paris to see Eddie, but to see it in French too.

I would never go and see a native French speaker do comedy in French. I’ve seen comedy on TV here and if they’re not making funny noises and pulling stupid faces then I’m totally lost. At the same time, Eddie often performs sections of his English performances in French (I say ‘often’, it’s certainly more often than most comedians). The reason I think he can get away with this is that a lot of his comedy stems from a place of overt physicality. Yes, a fair amount of his comedy is in the words he uses, but when he does, it’s more about taking words out of context rather than pure wordplay. In fact, I feel that when Eddie does wordplay, it usually falls flat on its face but you can tell he’s not surprised by that and usually turns it around immediately. He does exactly the same thing in French.

So you may expect going to Paris to see comedy in French for someone like me would be a super-whim rather than just a regular whim but really, seeing your favourite performer perform in a language that is not his first is a very rare opportunity and as pointed out in describing his style of comedy, maybe it wasn’t as big a whim as it first appeared (it was still pretty big).

The performance itself was very similar to the performances I’d seen him do on DVD (this is the first time I’d ever seen him live). It’s clear that the show was a direct translation of the English version, and for the most part that wasn’t an issue, but when he starting talking about the Wikipedia entry for “confiture”, it was impossible not to think that it would have been much funnier if it were the entry for “jam”. I also learnt the French for “badger” after the gig (“blaireau”). There was a very prominent badger Eddie talked about (and that’s not a euphemism) that I had to guess was some other kind of animal. When it was explained to me, I’m amazed I didn’t work it out sooner.

The show itself was very, very funny and Eddie excelled. As a fan, I could work out themes that are the hallmarks of Eddie’s act alongside some new stuff including undercover raptors and new material about where we were in Paris and how Clichy (the boulevard on which theatre is located) is an anagram of Sex. No really, that all got explained. There was also a visit from a French chef who was hilarious. So much so that Eddie had to try doubly hard to convince us that he wasn’t part of the act. I still don’t believe him.

All in all the show was much shorter than usual, less than an hour, but driving to Paris to see it was one hell of an adventure. Three cheers to Rob for agreeing to come with me and drive us there and to French Tom for putting us up for the weekend. We had a great time in Paris and now I really want to go and see Eddie perform in English. It may have been fun to try and follow the whole thing in French but I only really got about 70% of the whole thing. I really should try and practise my French more and so going to live gigs will probably have to wait. The thing that surprised me most, however, was how often I expected the French bit to be just a short section in a much larger English show. I guess that’s just what your brain expects after seeing his English shows often enough.

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