Eddie Izzard, a gender-fluid comedian who came out as transgender in 1985, shares his marathon feats—43 races in 51 days, including a 90K double marathon in South Africa—and critiques modern politics, proposing UBI to reduce automation-driven displacement. He performs surreal, multilingual stand-up (French, German, English) without scripts, blending dyslexia-fueled creativity with universal humor. On transgender athletes, he advocates transparency but highlights progress through role models, like his own childhood defiance of societal norms. His upcoming U.S. tour marks 40 cities in two months, cementing a career built on endurance and unfiltered wit. [Automatically generated summary]
not for herbs no herbs is I think that's more French influence I agree Yeah, I always wondered, because I grew up in Boston and I always wondered, like, those were the first people to leave England and Europe.
Like, what the fuck happened to their language?
Because they developed the most disgusting brand of it.
And you're such a large, your country is so large compared to us.
Yeah.
Because there was this thing that was only 10% of Americans have passports.
But if you look at the area, something like that.
But then if you look at where the 10% can go in America, it's just so huge.
So it's slightly more understandable why a lot of Americans say, I don't need a passport because I'm just going to go to that place, which is miles away.
But yeah, I mean, I find that from an American perspective, it would be very interesting people going there, even if they were there before and during the time of war or after just to see how people are because they fought for so long.
There's all the French stuff before that, the Indo China, but even before America got involved, and they call it a thousand-year war that they fought.
Anyway, it's interesting.
I hope new generations coming along don't bring the baggage of previous generations.
And we can all try and move forward into a world that's more positive, even though it doesn't necessarily look like that.
Well, what has always been really interesting to me about Vietnam that I learned from Bourdain was that they don't hold any grudges towards Americans, which I find incredible.
You know, there's some, I think there's quite a lot of people maybe who were the way they live their lives, they live their own personality, they're not particularly male or female.
I feel.
But I've always felt since I was four or five, I wanted to express this side of myself and it's built in.
I think it's genetic.
And if you analyze masculine and feminine, if you really get down to it, I found it impossible to come up with anything that was particularly masculine, particularly feminine, except for the ability to build muscle mass is easier for men in event comers.
That's it.
But, you know, great footballers, soccer players, men and women, athletics runners, men and women, strong character, men, weak character, men and women, mathematicians, whatever, whatever it is, there's nothing that you can really say, ah, that is only good shot with a gun.
No, anyone could do that.
We're all humans.
And we get fixated by the masculine and feminine.
Whereas if it's a tiger, if it's a tiger's attacking you and trying to kill you, you don't go, now, is this a girl tiger or a boy tiger?
the tigers so you've always felt like you gravitated towards feminine things towards no gravitate towards both i i had I gravitated towards playing soccer.
I was in the first team for two years when I was a kid.
I was planning to do officer training corps and then go Marines or Paras and then go into Special Forces RSAS, which would be the equivalent of your Delta Force.
And that was a distinct plan.
I knew a lot about that.
And I thought, which war are they going to send me to?
Actually, which war are they sending me to?
And it could be the idiots that I'm at school with will send me to the wrong war.
Because World War II is very clear.
And then after that, every other war is kind of hazy.
But there's all this feminine side, girl side.
I'm not sure how to do it.
Articulate, even after 34 years, it's difficult to articulate.
But I wanted to express that.
And if I look more like a woman, then I, you know, it would be much easier.
But yeah, so I decided to do that in 85 when it wasn't cool.
And I've had a lot of fights in the street, a lot of people screaming abuse at me.
Taken a couple of people to court or just reported in the police and then we went to court.
And yeah, and you fight your fights.
Instead of going to do a military fighting thing, I've done, I've said, this might be wrong for me to say this, but I say I've done special forces civilian division, you know, fighting people's teeth, screaming people's feet, and I perform in four languages.
I've run over 80 marathons.
I'm going into politics next year.
And yeah, and the transgender thing is, it's in a better place than it was back in 85.
And one of the weird things is if we are having less wars, if we're getting better health to people, then more kids are around.
And some people in, I suppose, lower income backgrounds around the world, they will say, well, we need to have six kids because that's what we have much money.
Yeah, that's what we do.
But as economics get better, people have less kids.
And hopefully that should calm down.
There should be a botting.
I mean, I think they feel there would be a leveling off of the population.
Yeah, I've read that theory that they believe that industrialized nations and westernized society, when people start having two careers, and then two career households, people are less likely to have a bunch of kids.
And I thought, well, if I'm going to do 43, that's going to be, I would be training forever.
And I can't be bothered with that.
So I, but you know, and it's happened in your Civil War, in maybe in any war.
I'm quite somewhat encyclopedic about your Civil War and Revolution war to a bit and World War II, but on-the-spot training, you know, training as you go along.
That's what I did.
The first 10 marathons trains you for the next 33.
Yeah, a fighter died from it recently in Boston, in the Massachusetts area.
Yeah, it's apparently something that happens when fighters overtrain as well.
Like sometimes they're not doing it scientifically, so they're not analyzing their heart rate or heart rate variability, and they don't know that they haven't really truly recovered, and they continue to push themselves because they want to prepare harder.
And they have this sort of mental mindset, just train harder and you'll be better off.
But that's not necessarily the case.
Your body can't physically keep up with the recovery, and sometimes they'll go into a fight over-trained, and then they wind up getting robbed from the fight.
And if you're a transgender guy and you come out, certain people go, ooh.
But I crossed into a line of, well, if you're going to do that, and you, I hate, I know you do some comedy, you do the drama stuff, we think you're a bit bonkers and out there.
But fair play.
I got this sort of, I've got to pass fair play to you.
If you're going to do that, and I was trying to do selection, you know, SAS, they have selection, your Delta Forces, Nava Seals, they all have this thing that can you just go on and on and on and it's the stamina thing.
And that was my civilian selection for my own whatever civilian forces.
I mean, coming out as transgender, when you're straight, I'm straight transgender, so I fancy women.
So I'm a wannabe lesbian.
So if you come out, you could stay in the closet.
And down the millennia, if we go back to the ancient Egyptians and further, there's probably a lot of guys saying, I'm not going to tell anyone about this.
I just, I fancy women.
I just go there.
I just won't mention this kind of feelings in my head.
And I thought, I should mention it because if people shout and scream at me in the streets, I will fight that, at least verbally fight that.
Or, you know, if they start going for it, I have had one fight in the streets.
I mean, that is like a philosophy, quite apart from a fighting philosophy, but to be so trained up in so many things that they do not know what you're going to do.
Well, he had to overcome significant prejudice to adopt that perspective because when he was studying martial arts, you were supposed to be loyal to your style.
So if you learned kung fu, you were supposed to be a kung fu man for life.
You weren't supposed to also dabble in boxing and wrestling and all these different things that he was interested in.
He was interested in taking what's useful from all different martial arts and applying them.
So in a sense, he was really the founder of mixed martial arts, which you see today.
And in the UK, they have Cage Warriors, and the U.S. is the UFC.
And, you know, it's worldwide now, the art of mixed martial arts, of putting all the different styles together, and you can do whatever you want within the rules.
You'd have to line it up so, okay, we're going to check in with this guy and that place, this guy.
Yes.
And you'd have to take it in, like, you know, it's got to be something that you're serious at as opposed to dabbing.
I didn't want to dabble.
Like stand-up, when I'm filming, I still do stand-up when I'm even filming.
And if I'm doing stand-up, I will think about doing the drama.
You know, drama and comedy, they're kind of related but different.
So I keep pushing both.
You've got to keep everything match fit for life.
And that's why, like marathons, I can drop marathons now.
I just did three marathons.
I just dropped three marathons.
Got home from playing Australia, took the train up to Berwick upon Tweed on the Scottish border, ran up to Dunbar, which is one marathon, ran across to Edinburgh, second marathon.
Like to their grandma, or yeah, if they find you to be a threat at all, they're just so powerful.
They just launch you in the air.
There's a great video that I was watching this morning of a lion that was trying to take out a small buffalo, and the other one got behind the lion and launched it through the air.
It was literally flying, like 40 feet in the air, like flipping head over heels.
Because the strength of this thing to take a giant cat and just with its head just whoop and just flies.
Well, it's actually not nearly as high as I thought it was.
Maybe I'm thinking of another one.
Yeah, that one's pretty good, though.
I mean, just to see it do that.
Oh, you know what I'm thinking of?
I'm thinking of relentless enemies.
That's what I'm thinking of.
There's actually a documentary about this one particular strain of lion.
That there was a apparently the river split sides or the river changed its path and it turned this area into an island.
And the lions had to adapt because the only thing that they could eat was buffalo, which is very difficult to kill.
You know, usually they're eating antelope and other smaller things that aren't nearly as dangerous.
So these lions developed and became far larger.
So the female lions are as large as a normal male lion.
And they're hulking like massive muscles.
And they're just enormous.
It's just an enormous strain of lion that's exclusively eating buffalo.
And there's a whole documentary.
It's a National Geographic documentary, I think.
It's really good.
But it's just incredible to see these things walking around.
I mean, they look cartoonish.
They're like the Hulk.
So it's hard to tell.
You'd have to compare them to a regular lion, but there's some images of these things walking around.
They just look so much larger than a regular lion because they just had to adapt.
And I would think that if you're running around, like if you're running, you got to think like you're you look like something that's trying to get away.
Did you hear about that woman from she was an editor on the Game of Thrones and she was in one of those parks and she had a window rolled down and she they told her keep your windows rolled up at all times.
She was trying to take better photographs and the cat reached in and grabbed her and pulled her out of the vehicle and killed her.
Yeah, but even then, I mean, most people, if you just give them, if they're barefoot, like children, for example, like one of the things that I was reading this book about barefoot running and how important it is to develop this, and then most people that have problems from that, they're really having problems because their feet don't have strong muscles in them because of the atrophy.
And the way they were describing a regular running shoe is essentially like a cast, and that you're so used to being protected in this cast that everything sort of just gets mushy inside of it.
And then you're also striking down on the heel, which is a very unnatural thing.
And when I watch my kids run, like my kids will run with me sometimes, and they naturally know to run on the balls of their feet.
That's how they naturally run.
And when people start running heel first, that's where all the problems come.
And I was also initially in South Africa running on certain road services where they just dropped, instead of doing a Tarmacadam kind of covering, they had just put rocks.
Obviously, some lorry had come along and this truck had just dropped rocks out of the back to sort of hold together the mud in the rainy times.
And very uneven surface, very hard of the foot.
And I was doing these very thin-soled, running very thin-soled shoes.
But then I've got these boy genetics going on in me.
I really think it's genes.
I think they're going to find out how it works, but I can't prove that at the moment.
But if I transition over, then I'll just be on the other side of this kind of fence that we give ourselves.
And I've decided, okay, I'm gender fluid.
I'm just going to have, like a superhero, boy mode and girl mode.
like the human torch can go flame on flame off so i'm going when do you just do you decide some days today i'm boy mode i I can, but I tend to do sort of block periods now.
But when I campaign, I'm in girl mode, but I'm doing films, dramatic films, I'm in boy mode.
But, you know, the part of me wants to be Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, and part of me wants to be Elizabeth Taylor in looking like her in a cat and a hot tree.
No, cat and a hot tin roof, more like, which I just saw on the plane yesterday.
Oh, okay.
So these are the two looks I go between.
They're going, well, I kind of both of them.
And as a kid, I thought, you know, can't I look more like Clinton, Steve McQueen?
Because I'm kind of fascinated by Steve McQueen and what he went through to get to where he was.
And he was so driven.
I don't know if you know about this Steve McQueen story, but you know that he was in a film with Paul Newman and he was like 93rd on the list of credits.
Someone up there likes me.
If you watch it, you can see him.
There's a knife fight between Paul Newman and Steve McQueen, and he's like a heavy, you know, a young thug kind of heavy guy, but he's just a small player.
And then the second film he's in with him is Towering Inferno, where they are equal billing.
And I think Paul Newman is first and Steve McQueen is higher.
If you look at the names on the poster, Paul Newman comes in from the left, so his name is first, and Steve McQueen is on the right, but higher than Paul Newman.
That's how they got that equal billing.
How do you put equal billing if you're going to start reading from the left?
Right.
And if you remember the film, they come at it as two guys.
I mean, you've got to have egos to do these things.
I mean, so many things need an ego to do them.
And then hopefully you can switch, dial your ego down when you come off stage.
Some people can't do that.
When it comes to billing, if you know about Stephen McQueen and his mum was a sort of sometime prostitute and had men in and out of the house, and his dad was just never there.
And he found himself through a boys' retreat, you know, because he was breaking the law and they sent him off to this place.
And then they told him to taught these kids how to train wild horses.
And that was one of the first things he did.
And he was just so ambitious.
And with Yul Brynner in Magnificent 7.
Because, you know, if you know that film at the beginning, it's got Yil Brunner.
I really think that we're going to have technology within the next 50 years that allows people to definitively understand whether or not someone's being honest.
There was a limousine company that was writing bad checks, Faghesi Limousine Service, and it became like a thing on the East Coast where, oh, this guy's a Faghazi cop.
I've said that for nine years, quite consistently, I would like to say that I was going to run in 2020.
We had set terms in our politics, like you always had.
You've had a four-year.
We arranged it into a five-year, but then we've gone back to the old system, which is where the prime minister of the country can choose when they have an election, and it can be anywhere up to a day, you know, the next day after the election, or up to five years later.
But, you know, like we had a general election of 15, 2015.
And then in 2017, having been in for only two years, Theresa May was persuaded that if you go for election now, you're going to win big.
You're going to win tons of extra seats and then we'll be able to do whatever we want.
But in fact, they lost seats in that election.
So, you know, sometimes they grab it.
Sometimes you go in the fourth year.
There's a traditional thing of going in the fourth year because if you've got all the economics going and everything's pretty good, okay, let's go now.
We've got fourth year, we've got a year to spare, but let's go in the fourth year because we know we're in a good place.
And then you have to allow, I think, six weeks for election campaign.
But yeah, we do that.
I think other countries do that.
But I'm sure to America, you go, that sounds crazy.
But anyway, that's what we've been doing for some time.
Member of Parliament for some constituency, hopefully in England, would be my thing, as opposed to the United Kingdom, because there's Wales and Scotland.
Glenda Jackson, I don't know if you know Glenda Jackson, she did this.
Well, Arnold Schwarzenegger, you know about him because he went away and then came back to the creative work that he was doing to doing films, but he went away for seven years.
So I will go away for a period of time and put my career into hibernation.
My friend Doug Stanhope was running for president briefly, kind of as a lark, and realized that he really couldn't do stand-up.
Because if he did stand up, he would have to allow equal time for everyone else who wanted to perform, who also had some, like his stand-up performances were then thought of as political campaign performances, something along those lines.
It was like some weird bullshit that he was going to have to navigate that he decided to just back out of it.
My goal is to try and encourage my country and the world to go in a positive direction.
I think I've been saying this politically, that I think this is our last century on Earth, or it's our first century on Earth.
I think the next 80 years is for everything.
We're going to choose everything here.
We're either going to wipe ourselves off the planet or we're going to make it a fair world for 7.5 billion people where you have a right to have a fair world.
Enough democracy and transparency, enough money to live a life, to have a family, not everyone, not billions of people living on $1 a day or $2 a day.
I think we need to get to there because then immigration raises its head, your country, my country, every country in the world, and that's all people moving around because they haven't got enough money to live on or they haven't got enough security because there's a war, civil war.
And if we could get beyond that, then a lot of those problems drop away.
So, but going into politics and talking about a global vision of the future and whatever is slightly, it's a very difficult thing to do because people are going to say, oh, you've just asked for that.
How is that helping this global vision?
But I just thought we seem to be trying 1930s politics again in political areas.
So I thought, well, I'm going to look for a vision of a positive vision of the future.
And I know when I came out as transgender in 85, there was no way I could imagine anything.
I didn't know where it was going to go.
I just thought I need to go out there, need to argue, or discuss at least, try and set up a positive image version, you know, because I'm not sure what age you are, but I think you're 15.
Well, that's where you see the social currency of today's shame climate, like shaming people for this or that or attacking people for whatever various thing they're doing, trying to get public shame against people, especially people that haven't really done anything wrong.
What they're doing is they're trying to do that to elevate themselves.
And they see someone in the public eye, see someone who's famous or rich, and they're saying, that person's a fucking loser.
And sports figures are a perfect example.
Some super athlete and they drop a ball, you fucking loser.
And they're doing this to sort of maximize this sort of downfall.
If they see anything that's going wrong with that person's life, and if they can accentuate that and pump it up, but somehow or another, they think it elevates them.
It actually is the opposite.
It's terrible for them.
It's terrible for everybody.
But they have this natural instinct, this competitive instinct to push down the person they think is elevated too high.
Well, I think it leads into the trolling thing online, that if you can do it from behind a firewall of no one knows who I am.
And I remember there was something we have banknotes, like your banknotes, that had a woman on the back of one of our banknotes, the Queen's pictures on the front.
And then they changed it up every few years and they took the woman who was on the back of that.
I think it was a £10 note or something.
They took her off and they changed it.
And then there was this campaign.
We need to get a woman on the back of another different note.
It's not going to be that.
And two people trolled this, I think two women saying you should die, you'd be raped.
I mean, hellish stuff.
One of them turned out to be a woman who was actually attacking another woman.
Behind this firewall, you can go to any place of well, it's almost like they don't think that a person that they're attacking online is an actual person.
They're not getting the social cues from them, they're not looking them in their eye.
Yeah, I just think it's a piss-poor way to communicate with people.
I don't do any communicating with people online, I don't go back and forth with people on Twitter.
And it's one side or the other, and there's no one in the middle.
In a way, if you look at secession and American Civil War, that was bound to happen at some time.
If you go back to the Constitution in 17, was it 1787?
That was supposed to happen.
And I think once you've European Union, no one's ever tried from countries that have hundreds of years of history to choose to try and learn to live together, work together some shape or form.
This tricky thing we're trying to do.
It's the hardest thing politically that's ever been done in the history of the world.
And I think, because I'm saying the American model with Native American lands and rolling over Manifest Destiny is a different model.
And Native Americans didn't have this idea of, oh, we mark this off and we've registered this land.
So the idea that people learning to work together is tricky.
At some point, someone was going to say, I think we'd like to change this or we'd like to move out.
So this fight was bound to happen.
And so it's very toxic.
I'm not getting too right at the center of it because you could just, you know, probably like you have on your news broadcast, you can listen to people talking hours and hours and hours.
What do you think about it?
What do you think about it?
And it doesn't seem to get anywhere.
So I've worked out what my worldview is, this view that everyone's got to have a fair chance in life.
I know that automation is happening right now.
So there's going to be a whole load of people who won't be able to get jobs because the unskilled labor force, their job's going to get automated.
That's going to get tricky.
So this universal wage is probably going to have to come in.
So for us in America, you're essentially dealing with a bunch of different countries that speak a bunch of different languages, whereas we're dealing with a bunch of different states that speak the same language.
But it's an easier way to be xenophobic slash racist on it.
And I've always said a xenophobia is just a racist with a xylophone.
Which is a joke, which I got to use somewhere in a political situation.
But it doesn't seem to make the big difference in the end.
We have enough ways of translating and stuff.
And most people in most countries now can reach for English if they need to.
You know, like some people, I think Putin will always speak in Russian.
Any leader of a country will probably use their own language first, talk to their own country people first, and then they might throw in something in English or in an interview.
But we can work out from vibe, you know, where most people are coming in.
You can do it on the Google app without even the earbuds.
If you go to Google Translate and you hit the microphone on there, you can just say, hello, good afternoon, and you can, if it's on the French button, it'll come out in French.
So I haven't done it in the field.
I would like to get out to somewhere out in the sticks.
actually I should test that I'll make that a the googled earbuds I think the idea is that like if you were talking to me in French it would translate it instantaneously to English It's probably a beta version of it now or like a clunky version of it.
But ultimately, we're going to have something that allows you to do that.
There's also a Google Lens.
I use that when I was traveling, or you could take the camera and you look at it and it translates foreign languages into the Google Translate verbal one at the moment does line by line.
Yeah, I mean, just think about what technologies existed 20 years ago and how much more advanced they are now, and then add that to translation and that exponential increase.
It's probably going to lose a lot of these barriers of misunderstanding.
Yes, that's an easy line to say, and it's very difficult to work it out.
But I do think as you gradually learn to live together, work together, as we gradually come together, I mean, it's like in the European Union, say in America, if certain parts of America or European Union are having a tough time, then money goes to those places having a tough time to try and get them back on their feet so that they can come back in and start making enough money to be able to help other parts.
And that's the idea.
And that's logically a model that should be able to work in the world as we head towards it.
Because we know that wars are terribly expensive and a lot of people die.
There doesn't seem to get anywhere.
Surely we should have learned this as we go back.
So wars of conquest, I don't think they're going to happen anymore.
Quite like the idea, we're going to invade this thing, like the old empire stuff.
Which I think the Nazis did the last version of that.
And, you know, and then it's economic wars as opposed to stopping terrorism in its tracks and trying to keep these radical terrorists from taking over certain countries and strongholds, but we really haven't done a good job of that.
And then people in their countries understandably don't like people dying abroad.
and then, you know, wars of defense, do they, I wonder whether that's going to happen.
You know, this thing called right to defend.
The idea that countries that are better set up should be able to go in or should be willing to go in and defend people having a really tough time and try to get the politics to work on that.
You know, if someone is menacing, when Hitler was menacing within his own country, no one did anything like that.
When Stalin was menacing in his own country, no one, you know, because about 30 million died under Stalin.
And I know there was something like in Germany, something like 10,000 people were wanting to vote for the Nazi party, or maybe it's more, but that's a country of 80 million.
So let's get the perspectives right.
If certain things happen and they're on television, you go, whoa, and that's obviously why they do them.
To create an outrage, get on television, and you go, wow, it's all over.
It's happening everywhere.
Oh, well, no, it's in this small place.
I mean sometimes well the beautiful things that human beings can do is stunning we you know we can So many stories are just amazing things that humans do.
And then you put the horrible things that we can do.
That goes on forever.
If there was a God, I don't believe in a God, but if he did come down, he said, what are you guys doing?
need to say this and I know I'm not taking the from the the Japanese I thought the Nazis were fanatics but the Japanese at that time took it even more fanatical you You know, when the last Japanese soldier surrendered?
The Thais figured out the best way to gamble on fights.
They figured out the best, most brutal style of fight, and that is they incorporated a lot of things that other people didn't, including like leg kicks and knees and elbows.
And they fought really often.
Like they would have these, like to this day, they have Lumpini Stadium and all these different stadiums in Bangkok.
They have these stadium champions and they'll have matches on a consistent basis.
And so these people are fighting from the time they're really, really young.
Like they're taking like six and seven year old boys and girls as well.
And they're sending them off to these Thai camps and teaching them how to fight and then having them fight.
You know, they'll have a hundred fights by the time they're 16.
I think that, I think people, I mean, I follow Steven Pinker's logic of that people will sort of look at the horrible things that we have today and say, God, this world is terrible.
There are definitely terrible aspects, but this is without doubt the greatest time ever to be alive that we've ever seen, at least in recorded human history.
Hey, you can teach someone how to save their life on the internet.
You can also teach people how to make a bomb on the internet.
So I think this is always the way.
Every next step we get, we will have some positives.
Then we'll hit the whole negatives and then we'll go back to some more positives.
So yeah, I've got to be optimistic.
Yeah, well, I am an optimistic person.
Otherwise, it just wouldn't be here.
But this military aspect that I've mentioned, I'm flipping back to that.
But yeah, I do try and think I need to do this.
I think that's a good thing to do.
Now I need to do that.
For nine years, I've been saying I'm going to politics, so I'm going next year, but it might not be a general election.
I try and plan ahead because I can't, if I randomize it, if I just float, because a lot of people do, wow, this happened, and then that happened, and then I was like, and that could be a wonderful life.
But I have my river analogy.
If you're canoeing down a river, if you go at the same speed as the river, it could throw you onto rocks.
It could give you a wonderful ride.
It could be anything.
But it's up to the river.
Whereas I pedal like crazy.
Sometimes I backpedal like crazy.
I have actively backpedaled against things.
And sometimes usually I'm pedaling faster than the speed of the river to try and guide myself through the river.
When I look at human interactions objectively, part of me has to consider that there's a possibility that we need all this negative in order to reinforce the positive.
That there's some component of human life that desires or relies upon negative things to reinforce positive things.
That this yin and yang that we exist under, that this this that we see the horrors of war and horrific poverty and all these terrible things and horrible violence, we see this and it actually serves to reinforce our desire for positive things and reinforce and push our society in a more positive direction.
I mean, I almost think that this is when we see national tragedies and shootings and all these different terrible, terrible things.
There's all this fear and anger and frustration, but there's also action.
And the action might think there's a lack of action by politicians or a lack of action by the police or a lack of action by whoever we think should be responsible for mitigating these horrible situations that happen.
But publicly, the social fabric of the world, the way people communicate and interact, I think it reinforces our desire to not have that happen.
It reinforces our understanding of peace and our love of peace.
And I think that these bad things that we see in our world, they almost propel us towards a better world because human beings are constantly striving for improvement and innovation.
This is one of the things that we do.
We want things to be better and bigger and faster and stronger.
And we want our society to be better at all times.
We never say, this is good.
Let's keep it just the way it is.
We never say that.
So my thought is that even this, even what we're experiencing in this country, it seems at times that we're almost like on the brink of civil war between the right and the left and people are lying on both sides and conflating people's opinions and changing people's perspectives in order to suit their own narrative.
That I think that this ultimately, all this angst, and you see it from the outside and you look at it, you go, what the fuck are we doing?
I think it's a natural part of the way human beings figure out life.
And all that, all the forces and the money and the armors and the tanks and the Shermans coming in, you know, we needed that coming in.
And without the Russian people, we wouldn't have won World War II.
And that was, and they were in this agreement.
So I can't quite work out humanity.
I do think positive, I do think the negatives, you can appreciate the positives more.
I do think one thing on the Brexit hate thing that's been going on is a lot of young people are coming on saying, well, so we're going to lose all this stuff, the ability, we could travel to Europe without visas, we can work there, we could retire there, we can get a health care there all across Europe, and that's something we cut off and our roaming charges are going to go up.
All that people are valuing what they could lose a lot more.
So yeah, the yin and yang.
I think it's going to go on this way.
And also some people, once we get to a good place, I've noticed that a lot of people will say, okay, I'm not going to be politically active anymore.
I'm just going to carry on doing my life and other people can sort things out.
I've noticed that people will get activated to get to a result, maybe an election result or something or a referendum or whatever it is, and then they will just back off.
And just say, but now I'm not even going to pay attention to what's going on.
But things will start rolling backwards.
So I think we're going to keep having it like that.
Maybe the percentage of positive things to negative things has never changed over all the years, over the last 10,000 years.
It's just there's more people in the world doing more positive things than doing more negative things.
Maybe humanity hasn't changed because our brain sizes haven't changed.
Even back to the caveman days, you know, even back the last 100,000 years, the size of our brains has not moved.
So if you went back to 70,000 years ago, we would still be able to have conversations like this, even though we wouldn't have the radios and the things.
It would be more on our tribe.
I think our tribe is better than your tribe.
Actually, Steve, I don't know if our tribe is better than that tribe.
I just think maybe similar.
There's some good people in that tribe and there's some shitheads in that tribe.
We need to maybe trade with them more.
We can go to war with them, but then we could die.
And Shirley could die and Kenny and Roger at number 22.
Because those conversations were happening in a slightly different way, I think, all the way back.
And they weren't all just going, me, food, you, nice, good, three, five.
It wasn't that.
It was maybe, you know, millions of years ago, but not 100,000 years ago.
And we only started speaking 100,000 years ago.
So what we've developed since then, I'm fascinated by us as human beings because we were just another animal.
And now we are kind of an amazing animal.
We've invented beautifully.
landed on the bloody moon you guys landed on the moon which I as a child thought that we landed on the moon but in fact you guys landed But Apollo 11, they kept it quite open.
I think Michael Collins in the command module said this is for the world.
And there was this kind of feeling in Neil Armstrong.
It's a nice, yeah.
I grabbed hold of that.
As a kid, I was growing up, you know, a bit younger than me.
No, well, I don't think it's a bloke upstairs floating in the clouds because they used to live in the clouds and then we flew through the clouds and no one ever mentioned, hey, he's not in the clouds.
So it's a randomizer thing.
You know, I think these random, like dinosaurs, 165 million years of those bastards.
But I go to Normandy, 75th anniversary of D-Day, and I do, and they fought the Battle of Normandy in German, obviously on one side, and then French and English on the other side.
And so I do three shows in German.
First show, 50 minutes in German, and then I do 50 minutes in English and then 50 minutes in French.
And then we have a buffet and everyone hangs out and I meet everyone.
And all the German speakers, the French and the English speakers.
Well, I did French at school for eight years and I did German at school for two years.
So it was partly a sort of low-level political thing.
I just thought if I'm an English guy going to France and doing it in French, then maybe a French kid go, well, I'm going to do it in English.
And now the Germans are doing English, the Russians are doing English, the Spanish, everyone's going to English because you can have a Hollywood career potentially or be on television in English.
You can also tour the world in English now.
You can use it as a bridging language.
We were talking about Google Translate.
I know French kids, French kid, my friend Yassine Belus has performed in Helsinki in Finland and Finnish kids have been watching in the second language.
They've been watching in English and listening in English.
And he's been performing, a French guy performing in English.
So they've met and laughed in a second language, which I think is an amazing thing.
But now you can tour the world that way.
So this is the thing.
Anyway, so I'm going to go to Normandy and it's a commemoration of that the battle happened and 75 years ago and it's a celebration that now we don't go to war in those three languages anymore.
So if they took you and suddenly, for some reason, you had to be in any other Thailand, say.
Say somebody dropped a big block of heroin into your thing, just as a test, as a social experiment.
And they filmed this all and you say, hey, he's smuggling.
So you have to go to Thai prison.
This is kind of an extreme example.
Anyone.
And then you'd be learning within one month.
You'd have basic sentences going.
Anyone who goes to prison is going to have.
Sure.
If you work in a restaurant, if you work anywhere you work where no one's giving you any English coming in, you just have to pick up the words and our survival instincts would pick them up.
And then you might have a strong accent, but you, me, everyone.
We can pick it up.
So I just, again, use the art.
I can set up this artificial scenario of I have to do this.
So I had to learn French.
So I started before.
This show, this Wundaba show, which is a German title, meaning wonderful.
And I started it in French.
So I jumped, because I improvised to workshop.
I don't write anything.
I just go on and go, hey, chickens, what's going on with chickens?
Unfortunately, the local, I less of the locals, they'd had these couple of earthquakes, which, you know, you tend to think, oh, everyone has earthquakes.
But I played, you know, I went all through and played in Tokyo and I played in Hong Kong and in Shanghai and had all the guys from, because you have the people from the Communist Party come along to check you out.
So I'm not going specifically in on certain things.
But anyway, you know, my stuff is all the people from the comedy what?
I developed this confidence on my own to go and stand on.
If you've ever heard the film My Fair Lady or seen the film of Eliza Doolittle, that is set on Covent Garden.
It's a massive piazza, massive square.
Washington Square Park in New York was another street performing place.
So it's a big open place.
And I could stand up there on my own and talk to no one and build up an audience.
I would set out these tea cozies, which are little animal tea cozies, ducks and hamsters, weird things, things that just look like animals, and put them on the floor.
And people thought, this guy's crazy.
And then I'd start talking and there'd be literally no one there sometimes.
And I'd say, good afternoon.
I'm going to do a show.
Welcome to the invisible audience.
Very nice to have you here.
And I had this confidence if I just kept talking.
Like, you know, in your podcast here, you know, you can keep talking.
I can cue.
And I go on, yeah, we're going to have, oh, there's some visible people here as well.
This is Jack and Kenny.
And I would just go on and on until I built up about 20 people.
Then I could start the show and then we get into it.
And if you're doing an escapology show, in the end, you're going to get out.
You've worked out how to get out.
And so there will be a definite end.
And then you can say, now, don't go.
And please, can you give me some money?
So that's how I earned my living.
But that's the ninja training of performing because I learned to perform when people didn't even want to see me.
Because normally they've come into a room and at least they go, okay, who is this guy?
I don't know.
But we're in the room, so let's drink a beer and watch.
But if they're on the street, they don't have to watch.
They can just walk off.
They often did.
So it was a tough, I lost all my confidence on the street.
In fact, there's a thing, Army does this, you know, break you down, build you back at the Marines, break you down, build you back up.
They also, in drama school, they break you down, build you back up.
This kind of idea, I accidentally broke myself down and built myself back up on the streets of London.
I did it once where I just said, okay, let's go through my life.
So when I was, so you may not know this, but I was living in Northern Ireland and we were born in Yemen.
I would go through some, I've done this where I went, trawled through my life.
I need some sort of structure, otherwise I'm stuck.
I also found that once I'd recorded the show, like I last tour for Smajour, I toured for five years because I just found there were no rules on touring.
I could just keep going back.
I did 45 countries, so I could just keep on going.
And I found there were certain things I developed after we'd recorded it that were interesting and worth keeping.
So I said, okay, well, that's not in the old show.
I'm going to pull that and start off the new show with that little bit, which is that little piece of material, which is fun.
And I was training on a marathon and dogs were woofing at me.
You know, I ran past the house where a dog was woofing at me.
And this is in the show now.
And I suddenly thought for the first time ever, because dogs have woofed at people all for, you know, it's beginning of time.
I thought, what is the dog actually trying to say?
If the dog had Fox P2 injected into him so he could suddenly talk, what would he say to me?
What is that woof woof?
What does that mean?
And so it goes into, he's basically saying, assassins.
Well, I was watching a film, Battle of Britain, and at the end it says, filmed on location in Spain and England and at Pinewood Studios, Ivor Heath Bucks.
And in the 70s, and if you remember, we didn't have videos.
We couldn't freeze things.
You just have to scribble things down.
So I was scribbling down stuff off the end of films.
And I said, Pinewood Studios, Ivor Heath Bucks.
Okay, Ivor Heath.
What is that?
So Bucks.
Okay, Bucks is short for Buckinghamshire.
That's a place.
Ivor Heath must be a town.
It's a weird name town.
City?
A village?
That must be a village or a town.
So I got a map of the United Kingdom, which had alphabetically every town and village and city there going, listed alphabetically.
And I went all the way down and I found Ivor Heath, but okay, that's where it is.
So I took a train from the south coast of England up to London, a tube train, an underground train, to a place called Uxbridge and a bus to this roundabout.
And I got off.
I said, Pinewood Studios there.
They said it's about half a mile down that road.
So I marched down the road and I got to the big gabled entrance where all the big stars would come in.
And I went up and I hadn't got this bit worked out.
So I went up and I said, I'm going to be in films.
And I just finished my first film, Six Minutes to Midnight, that I've co-written and produced in.
What is it?
It's set in just before the beginning of World War II.
I grew up in this little seaside town.
America has seaside towns as well from the old days when people used to go to seaside towns before they all went to the hot countries.
And it's called Bexilon C. It's near Hastings, Brighton.
Anyway, South Coast, I think.
And there were 26 schools there.
For some reason, 26 schools.
It was linked up.
There was an Earl Delaware that had set the place up.
Anyway, one of these things, new.
And one of them had young girls, German girls, who were linked to the Nazi high command.
And they were over to learn English and make friends and be ambassadors.
And because there was, you know, obviously fascism in Germany and there were fascists in Britain and they were making friends.
And that was the idea.
There was going to be Hitler had this idea of linking up with British and taking everyone on, and which some people in Britain were for, and obviously a lot of us were against.
And so it's set around this girls' school.
And I was shown the badge, the blazer badge.
All the girls had a blazer, blue blazer, and it had a badge, and it had the name of the school, Augusta Victoria College, Bexilon C, and at the top it has a British flag and then the Nazi swastika next to it.
And I thought, holy cow.
I've just never seen those two flags right next to each other on the same badge.
If he does, I'm not sure if he's doing the comedy so much anymore, but exactly where Steve Carell's gone.
John Lithgow could also say he was someone who was very much a dramatic career, but then he did third rock for the Sun, which he was beautiful in, and he was nominated every year and won two Emmys and nominated six times.
Because I'm watching that and I'm thinking, okay, now I've gone through the clubs myself, but I did mine in the 80s and into the 90s, and that's in this 50s.
It's very difficult for British kids, or maybe even American kids of today, to know, because he's doing a lot of hipster references, a lot of, you know, the Sophie Tucker references, and there's a Lawrence Welk, is it?
Welch?
Welch, yeah.
We don't know those guys.
So when he was doing it, it's good as a Sophie Tucker.
And they're going, I got to look up Sophie Tucker.
I had to look up some of the punchlines or a number of the references because without the references, you can't get it.
This is a trick I do in universal humor that I take either huge references or explain my references.
So that, you know, Caesar, everyone probably knows about Caesar.
And it's also the culture so significantly different between the late 50s and 60s where Lenny Bruce was sort of starting out and making his mark versus today.
It's like the things that were naughty back then, the things that he could say that were controversial.
Well, there was one that still was when he said, how many people using the N-word, the S-word, you know, you just went through all the racial epithets.
There's some fantastic recordings that I don't know where they are now, but they used to be able to buy them.
I bought them at a truck stop, and they were from Red Fox's Comedy Club.
And they were cassette tapes.
And I was doing a road gig, and I think I found them, and I bought a bunch of them.
And these recordings were, they just had set up a tape recorder, and he was doing these random sets at Red Fox's Comedy Club.
And it was a lot of experimenting, a lot of ad-libbing, a lot of, I mean, he was clearly high on stage.
I mean, he would go on stage high a lot.
And he would just ramble about stuff.
And you would see these bits forming and coming out of that.
And then some of those bits eventually would be on some of his more famous albums later.
It was great, great stuff.
Just to see this guy who was just so, I mean, you go, if you go from your traditional stand-up comedian from 1960, like you were seeing George Carlin on stage, to what Pryor was doing in the 70s.
It's just so different, so radically, radically different.
Obviously, it's huge in America compared to what we have.
We have quite a good TV industry, but we tour like crazy.
So there's lots of tours in 100 seaters, 500 seaters, 1000 seats, 1,2,000 seaters.
That goes on like endlessly all the time, way more than it used to before.
And there's lots of clubs, and a lot of them were just room above a pub type clubs.
So I believe the clubs in America, which are much more set up.
There was a bar thing, the system.
People come out and do the drinks, and it was quite a cash outlay to get this club going.
And it would be, you know, most nights of the week.
We'd have it one night a week.
It'd just be a function room in a pub that existed for maybe hundreds and hundreds of years because all these pubs used to be taverns, drinking, and it wasn't used.
And Some guy would say, Hey, I'll run a club up here.
I think there's less now, but it's there's lots of open mic nights now, and so many people wanted to get into it.
You can create, there's no top to the career now.
We're playing, you know, people are playing in arena.
I started doing arena tours.
I'm now doing more theater tours on this one.
My audience has got a bit older, but anyway, jumping between the two, like playing Hollywood Bowl here, you know, in LA, that's such a beautiful thing to play.
I was reading the definitive thing on Robin Williams and how he would jump into clubs and do stuff and go on.
And that doesn't really work for my stuff.
I tend to get a small, I can do a club like for the work in progress shows I was doing, I was taking, I was, they have the Al Murray Club in Islington, no, Angel in London, sort of Northeast London.
And they had a show going on at 6, one at 7, and I would take an hour of that and just do that again and again and again.
So I'll take an hour and I'll go out for an hour and workshop the show as opposed to coming on and doing 15 minutes off the top of my head.
Because I find that if I'm completely going scattergun, just trying to find funny, that doesn't really help me.
I need to keep crafting the stuff because then I can use it in the show.
Yeah, and also I don't need – if it's a comedy club, they want it faster, they want it quicker, they want it smoother.
And I'm not looking to hit the gags.
I'm just looking to find things and have the space to stop and go, what is it about cheese?
After the marathons, it all because they said, oh, so, because I used to say action transvestite and executive transvestite.
I was in New York.
I was playing New York and they said article.
A guy was found living in one of the caves in the park in New York and he found to have a lot of women's shoes in there.
So he's probably a transvestite.
And I went, okay, well, that's weirdo transvestite.
I'm not living in a cave.
I'm traveling business class on the planes.
This is executive transvestite.
So I came up with that one.
And then the action transvestite was just kind of a fun because I was more kind of boisey about things that I'll give people grief in the streets if they give me grief.
And then after the marathons, it became a different thing.
And everyone just went, oh, I've had some, you know, I remember a guy, this was a very interesting altercation because there's hardly any words in it.
So I live near Victoria Coach Station in London most of the time when I'm around.
And I was walking down there.
And anyway, it's a coach station.
So people are traveling all over Europe from there.
And I walked up and I was in girl mode.
This guy looked at me and he said, hey, it is, you run all those marathons and you wear all that clobber.
The biggest controversy in America in terms of transgender people, probably the biggest, or one of the biggest, is competing in sports with biological women.
Yeah, but an airplane is one, you know, it's only one person to go in there.
I think their concern is there's, you know, some men are fucking creeps.
And some women just want to have a place where they could just be themselves and just check their makeup and go to the bathroom and wash and talk amongst other women.
Right, but the only reason to do this is to accommodate people who are transgender in a way that it seems like it doesn't put them in a position where they can be judged because everyone's doing it.
Now, I and they just punish the creeps, which is really what you, I mean, if someone's being a creep in a bathroom, the problem is the creep, it's not the bathroom.
So this is, you know, I haven't scientifically proved this with chemicals and a slide rule or whatever, but it's an idea that gets to us to a better place.
And surely we're all somewhere on the spectrum of something.
So the idea that anyone who is expressing themselves in a different way, that that is a problem.
If you take back just straight, if we all went back to how we used to think that there was just men and women and everyone had straight sex, even that sex, no one would talk about that.
People, you know, Victorian age and your equivalent of Victorian age, no one would talk about that.
That was all horrible.
Sex was procreation was dirty.
The whole idea of everything.
So if you I'm trying to get to a practical place where people just go to the loo and behave like adults.
Even the kids seem to behave more like adults, which is interesting.
I don't think they might have had male and female toys in the Roman times, but just the fact that they were more open about the idea that it's bodily functions.
Has the attitude, besides the marathon thing, has the attitude culturally shifted in the UK the same way it's shifted in America where people are more?
I think the more and more people are out and positive.
I mean, you've basically got to from every group.
This is ethnic groups, this is from women, this is from anyone that feels slightly out of the loop.
If you can have any positive role models that go out there that do other things, you know, just something that's nothing to do with sexuality, you're very good at cooking, you're on television for this.
It tends to be television helps.
You're a great sports star, you're this, you're that, you're what those things, people say, well, there's a positive role model, and they are of a different color or of a different sexuality.
And that just helps everyone adjust their mindset.
And the younger people come through and that's all they know.
I know about this person.
I mean, like, you know, in baseball, do you see the famous documentary baseball, the Ken Burns?
Yeah, the Ken Burns one.
And that black people, after the Civil War, black people were playing baseball, and then there was some guy who was very powerful.
He said there would be no black people in major leagues at all.
And it was blocked from about 1890, something like this, all the way through to 1950s.
So it was actually happening, and then it went backwards.
I mean, I think people care because they're unhappy with themselves.
I think that's the only time people care.
My issue with this that I've come across is with athletes.
It's with transgender athletes competing against women, particularly in my field, in fighting.
There's been some, there have been at least, there was one very vocal case, one very public case of a transgender athlete who was male for 30 plus years, transitioned over for a couple years, for two years, and then started fighting women.
Didn't tell them that she used to be a man.
And it became a giant issue, and people were outraged and anger.
The women who got beat up were angry because they got destroyed.
Two of them did.
And then she started, and then she was public about it and then started fighting women that were willing and knew.
I think one of the interesting things about it is that there are no real answers.
That it's one of those things where you just got to go, huh?
What do we do here?
And this is what I think one of the more unique things about being a person is that we have this opportunity to look at this unusual circumstance and communicate about it and try to figure it out.
I just knew on my personal thing, if I came out, if we started talking about it, we'd get in a better place than not talking about it and just saying it's a negative.
And also, I think I say quite often, you know, it's a genetic thing because I didn't feel I got up, you know, when I was 23 and a half and I said, I think I've all become all transgender now.
No, I was four or five when I first knew, and it has not moved those thoughts.
That's interesting.
I think it is for most gay lesbian people I've talked to, I just think it's locked and it's built in.
It's something you get given these cards, as I say, and we're trying to be upfront and be positive and express ourselves.
Well, it only makes sense when you look at the other variabilities, the other variables when it comes to people's personality, their body shape, their mentality, their drive, their ambition, all these different variables.
It only makes sense that there's feminine and masculine variables and that these shift back and forth with certain people.
And that certain people are just like they're somewhere in like where you are.
Well, you have boy mode and girl mode.
And I would imagine that you're talking about it so openly and that you're that you're just so free with it that there's probably people out there that are listening to this that are like, God damn it, that's me.
Well, Johosa, and the young, the youngest, young people around the world, I have met people who are talking about it in school.
Actually, when I came back from South Africa, my co-writer, Kellen Jones, he said, can you go in?
My daughter's in class, and they've been talking about your runs in South Africa.
So I went in and they could talk about racism because I was running the salute to the Mandela, 27 Marathons to his 27 years he had to spend in prison.
So they could talk about racism, but they could also talk about being trans, transgender or self-identifying and LGBT stuff because there was some kid in the class who was already identifying, wanted to identify as a girl.
And so they were being positive.
And these kids were eight, I think, you know, so it's way different to our childhood.
Our childhood, it was just do not talk about it, do not mention it.
And if you mention it, you're going to get your head kicked in by your peer group.
So, and I was always, that's why I never mentioned it at school.
Especially, you know, I fancy a girl, so I could just go in that route.
unidentified
And did you run into girls that had an issue with it?
People that I know less of, but if you talk about relationships, it gets really tricky because it reflects upon people's relationships with yourself.
But it's cool, and I've never been great at relationships.
That's always tricky.
So, well, you know, if I got this career thing, and I worked out how I could work that, and I can just keep staying four steps ahead of the game, and I'm playing all these countries, and I'm doing the four languages.
So I've got all that going, but then how do you, you're never really in one place to be able to continue a relationship.
And then there's the being transsexual, and that goes on.
And then I said, when he's five, he turns to his mother because he realizes he's called J-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R Tolkien.
And he says, in his South African Birmingham Twang, and he goes, I do this strangulated accent that is trying to fight between South Africa and Birmingham.
And it's such a stupid line to go on.
You know, there's no logic to where I'm going.
And his mother's going, what are you saying, J-R-R-R-R?
I can't understand it.
And because she's still in South Africa, and he says, you're so I'm spending time going into this sidebar, which is making me laugh.
And I think a lot of the audience are going, what is he mamma?
What is he whitering about?
And you can't really even hear what I'm saying.
But I just do this strangulated accent.
And in the end, he has to talk in a Yorkshire accent to get his mother to understand if you could cut down the number of R's in his name, he becomes J.R.R. Tolkien.
So that's typical of my stand-up where I just go off on a tangent.
Yeah, and if I'm, you know, if the person on stage is having a good time, then the audience should probably have a better time.
And this thing of it's not being locked down, that it's living and breathing in front of them.
They do love that.
And you put more energy into the next bit when you go, yeah, and then this, and then that, and the other thing.
Yeah, so I do love Stella because it's, you know, you can just do it and do it.
And, you know, there's no one.
Well, I was a double act.
I was a four-person act.
And whenever you, if you're even just a double act, if you go off on a tangent, then you have to look across to your partner and your partner's going, where are you going?
He might want to go with it.
He might not want to go with it.
Keep to the script.
But on your own, you could just go off.
And Lenny Bruce, you know, the gigs he did in front of the band.
You know that thing in the film, that part of the film?
And then as you start, and you're talking to either God or, I think I'm talking to a judge who is a bit like a god at the beginning of it and explaining things as I'm putting my clothes on.
So you start off naked, then you have simulated sex with my wife about a quarter of the way through the film.