Eddie Izzard: Keeping it surreal

Now that a comedian has called a venerable actor and left him a series of detailed messages about sleeping with his granddaughter, there are few heresies left in comedy. There is one that remains, though. If you say you don't like Eddie Izzard, you are going way beyond the pale.

Because everyone loves Izzard. Saying you didn't like him would be like expressing an aversion to chocolate, or puppies. He inspires the same manic affection among his admirers as he himself felt for the Monty Python team in his childhood, when he learned their scripts by heart to pass the time in chemistry lessons. Mention his name at the pub and your friends are likely to chime in with half-hearted versions of his rambling anecdotal style; casually let it drop that you are going to see him live and they will likely assault you in the hope of getting a ticket.

For that's the only fly in the Izzard ointment: these days, his live shows are few and far between. As far as most of his hardcore fans are concerned, there just isn't enough of him being funny to go round. Those DVDs of his 1990s performances are getting worn by now, and his insistence on straight dramatic roles – frequently far from hilarious, as in his role as the Nazi General Erich Fellgiebel in the forthcoming Tom Cruise film Valkyrie – doesn't leave much time for anything else.

"I actively try to be less well known in comedy," he explains. "If you get too well known in comedy, I think it blocks people from taking you in drama." In recent years, Izzard has worked mostly in America, in film and television, and he hasn't been seen in the West End since 1996. That is, until this week.

The early reaction to his new show, Stripped, is as adoring as ever. "Thank heavens for the return of Eddie Izzard," wrote one critic. "He seems to me to be one of the comedy greats, a modern stand-up who can bear comparison with such giants as Frankie Howerd, Tommy Cooper and Ken Dodd."

That's exalted company indeed, but few would dispute it. Unfortunately, it is hard to say exactly why Izzard is funny without reference to the man himself: to rehash his jokes in the explanatory effort is a bit like trying to explain what a Picasso looks like by saying it's a picture of a jug. His self-consciously virtuosic style leaves no room for mistakes, and no chance at paraphrase. "Really I'm just a bloke talking crap," Izzard says. "I'm a child of Python: I'm just talking nonsense."

In Stripped, he speaks about his passion for Wikipedia, gleefully detailing his pursuit of obscure subjects through the endless rabbit warrens of embedded underlined links, and it isn't hard to see his brain as a kind of synaptic Wikipedia, making hypertextual connections that the rest of us would miss in the blink of an eye.

His own entry in the online encyclopaedia is full of exactly the sorts of fascinating, clickable phrases that indicate a remarkable life: "accountancy", "street performer", "transgender lesbian". It begins in Yemen, where Izzard was born in 1962, and where his father worked for BP. Before long, the family had moved to Bangor, Northern Ireland, and it was there that the defining event of his early life took place. When he was six, his mother, Dorothy, died from cancer. The impact was profound. "She was great and I didn't want her to go away," he once said. "I just thought she was ill and she would get better. And then you come home one day and she isn't there, and you don't see her ever again."

Some psychologists draw a connection between transvestism and the need to replace the need for a missing mother, but Izzard says he first felt the urge to dress in women's clothes a year earlier. Whatever the truth, what is undisputed is that his love of performing can be dated to that familial catastrophe. Ever since, he has given everything to audiences in a frank bargain that demands their affection in return.

He explained it thus to Bono in a conversation for The Independent two year ago: "A mother gives unconditional love, but an audience's love is totally conditional. You have to deliver. Consequently, I believe my desperation to deliver is to get this love out of an audience. That is what keeps pushing me."

At 16, after a quietly unhappy childhood at a series of British boarding schools, Izzard decided he wanted to be a performer. But he then went to study accountancy at Sheffield University (the director Stephen Daldry, who went there with him, is as effusive about his manner as everyone else: "He has always been a good bloke," he said. "There has never been any edge to him."). Once Izzard was there, it rapidly dawned on him that this might be an odd career move for a wannabe actor and, after a few undergraduate shows (Sherlock Holmes Sings Country; World War II: The Sequel), he dropped out in favour of making his own way as a street artist.

It was this experience, and the need to keep an audience engaged, that Izzard credits with the birth of his meandering style. But it took a few years for his efforts to pay off. His first performance at the Comedy Store wasn't until 1987, when he was 25; only in the early 1990s did his comedy begin to draw acclaim.

To his new-found fans, it was soon apparent that he was a true original. Nothing was familiar about these performances, from Izzard's defence of the European Union, to lengthy imaginings of evil giraffes, and how Jesus might tend to the dinosaurs. Most unusual was his dress. A male comedian in woman's clothes outside panto was rare; one who was straight and didn't even dress terribly stylishly was even more of a shock.

Izzard didn't come out as a transvestite until he was 21. When he made it big, he lost his concern about anyone else's response to his clothing. "I'm not saying anyone else needs to do it," he said. "I'm just saying this is me." Who Izzard is away from performance is something of a mystery, his relationships a closely-guarded secret. "He just doesn't talk about any of that," his publicist on Stripped says.

In his 1999 show, Dress To Kill, he ruminated (in full drag) on the difficulty of making it in America as a transvestite comedian – and on Hollywood's propensity for ruining its imports. "If Room With A View did any kind of business in America," he mused, "Hollywood would remake it and it wouldn't be anything like the original. It would be Room With A View Of HELL!"

Izzard's own efforts at crossing the Atlantic were to meet with success. Today, he is not just a transvestite but a leading man, playing the loquacious grifter Wayne Malloy alongside Minnie Driver in HBO's The Riches; he is not just a comedian but a character actor, as his forthcoming appearance in Valkyrie attests.

The Riches was recently cancelled, and so fans would be forgiven for thinking that this trip home might be a sign of blissful stand-up tours to come. But Izzard insists that is not the case. His determination to work as a straight actor as well as a stand-up remains undimmed, and seems most likely to be fulfilled in America. There is no way round it: he has moved beyond us now. Those who love Eddie Izzard have another three weeks to catch him. After that, they are going to have to let him go. n

A life in brief

Born: 7 February 1962, Yemen.

Family: His father, Harold, was an accountant. His mother, Dorothy, was a nurse and died when he was six years old. He has one brother, Mark.

Education: Attended St Bede's Preparatory School in Eastbourne and Eastbourne College. Was kicked off his accountancy degree course at Sheffield University after one year.

Career: Regarded as one of the finest stand-up comedians of his generation, he started out performing street comedy before moving on to the UK stand-up circuit. His 'Dress To Kill' show won him two Emmy awards. His film credits include The Avengers, Ocean's Twelve and the forthcoming Valkyrie.

He says: "I definitely have breast envy. When teenage girls were saying 'I wish I had breasts', I was thinking the same thing."

They say: "Gentle cutting edge, kind of like a velvet razor." Robin Williams on Izzard's comedy.