Izzard exposes funny side of history in 'Stripped'

Eddie Izzard has appeared in several movies and stars in the FX television series "The Riches." (David livingston/getty images/file)

Eddie Izzard loves to play fast and loose with history. Very loose. Look, he's a dinosaur playing an organ in church with tiny dinosaur hands (Hymn #428: "God, What the [Expletive] Is Going On?"); now he's a hunter-gatherer who kills a bison with a stone and thinks: "This could be the beginning of an age."

He's book smart and blissfully silly, and this combination has earned the cross-dressing British comedian an almost rock-star-like appeal. When he appeared onstage in front of the sold-out crowd at the Orpheum Monday night (the first of three shows there, including tonight's final performance), looking very butch in jeans and black eyeliner and a ringmaster jacket, the place erupted.

"I thought tonight I'd talk about everything," he said, and he certainly tried. His mouth and his brain were working so fast at times that it was hard to keep up. If you looked away or let your mind wander even for a second, you'd miss something - a look, a gesture, a mumbled quip - that had everybody else in stitches.

This is the first leg of his "Stripped" tour, and as of yet it's nowhere near as shaped and polished as his brilliant "Dress to Kill" show. But that will change. Izzard made amusing imaginary notes on his hand throughout the night - "Where am I going with that?" he scribbled on his palm after a baffling aside about wolves and sheep. He sang and bounced in place when words failed him, and you could see a million thoughts percolating in his head as he tried to pick up the ambitious thread: "OK - civilization!"

He's not afraid to get deep. "Did God invent us or did we invent God?" he asked. But before long he has launched into one of his surreal skits, pretending to be God wielding a crème brûlée torch from above.

Izzard is a skilled actor - he's been in a number of movies and stars in TV's "The Riches" on FX - and he boils down his dramatic talents into simple, purposely clumsy pantomimes: Moses trying to keep the sea back, stoned assassins bargaining for Kit Kat bars. Often, he didn't even need words to get his point across. He was able to act out the Ten Commandments by grunting and pointing. His two-way Latin conversation about an impending invasion was all gibberish, with German and Spanish and mime mixed in. And in his pre-language game of Scrabble, everyone's a winner.

Still, his words are priceless - his title for Charles Darwin's book about evolution, for instance: "Monkey, monkey, monkey, monkey, monkey, monkey, monkey, monkey, monkey, you!" (give or take a monkey).

He went off on countless tangents, but always returned to his convoluted timeline. It was truly momentous when hunter-gatherers became farmers, he said, but it came at a price: "You move up in civilization, but you move down in sexiness."

As uneven as the show was in spots, Izzard's crazy history lessons are definitely moving up stand-up comedy in civilization, even when he's just grunting and pointing.