IT’S BRILLIANT TO HAVE A DAY OFF. I SLIP INTO MACY’S AND BUY SOME MAKEUP. THE ASSISTANT LOOKS AT ME IN HORROR AS I SLAP ON A LIQUID BASE AND ASK KNOWLEDGEABLY ABOUT BLUSH. EARLY SHOPPERS WATCH askance as a very mature British man leans into a mirror dabbing on concealer. It’s kind of fun. Appropriately, Eddie Izzard calls. He’s in town. We neither of us are working tonight so we decide to meet for a movie. I love Eddie. I went to see him at the Aspen Comedy Festival in Aspen in 1998 when we were being honored, and I laughed so much I had to go back the next night and see him again. He walked away with the best-comedy award that year and waltzed onstage at the start of our reunion interview at the old Wheeler Opera House.
“Monty Python, how did it all start?” asked Robert Klein.
“Well,” says Eddie, “I was in a railway carriage with John Cleese and Graham Chapman…”
“Fuck off, Izzard,” we said, booting him off the stage.
I meet Eddie at the movies and we watch Mystic River. Afterward we cab for coffee and a Kaliber at the Parish Café, on Boylston Street. I remind him that the last time I saw him (about three weeks ago on the L.A. leg of his Sexie tour) he was sitting backstage with Sharon Stone talking about La Perla underwear. He laughs and raises an eloquent and ambivalent eyebrow.
“Well, you have to,” he says.
Eddie seriously helps me. He is genuinely supportive of my shift into stand-up and filled with tips and ideas and helpful hints. He is very keen for me to improvise and gives me a couple of pointers. I explain my concerns, which are between balancing the needs of the genuine Python audience (who want and expect old favorites) and finding my own voice. I also outline my Archie Rice anxieties. He will hear of none of the latter. He sees a future for Idle striding onto the boards like Izzard and Connolly. (What it is to have friends!) We natter on till two in the morning and I am tremendously buoyed up. I am so rock-and-roll, living dangerously, out on the streets late at night, man, that I accidentally break a glass, and it means nothing to me. I am wandering into dangerous territory here. Will I become the Keith Richards of comedy? What’s next, breaking a saucer?
Eddie riffs some very nice stuff about the warm-up man at Nuremberg who opens for Adolf, and the little S.S. storm-trooper who has to go off for a piss in the middle of Hitler’s hysteria and can’t find his way back to the troop: “Excuse me, Hamburg? Has anyone seen Hamburg?”
This has almost Chaplinesque qualities, and of course Eddie has already played Chaplin. He is obsessed with an idea to put the Pythons back together and have them do improv.
“No old stuff, you see, just fresh new improvised stuff. They’d come from miles.”
“Yards, I think.”
“You could start in little, obscure out-of-the-way places. You could work out in each other’s homes.”
“Yeah right, one day in Santa Barbara, California, the next in Brixton, London.”
He seems so much in love with this idea that it is a shame to disabuse him, so I agree to it. Immediately he drops it. Only to return to the subject five minutes later.
“That’s the beauty of the improv thing. It might be painful and unrewarding at the beginning.”
I who am slightly more acquainted with the strange workings of the semilegendary snake have a different take on the chances of this coming to fruition. Just tonight my wife has had desperate calls from Vanity Fair: the Pythons won’t return their calls for a photo session. Of course they won’t. Mike’s in the Himalayas, Terry Jones is filming in Lincolnshire, and Terry G. is under the Weinsteins in Austria. (Now there’s a musical: The Weinsteins in Austria: The Mound of Music!) This photo session is never going to happen. Dream on, Graydon, baby.
The very nice people at the Parish Café won’t let us pay. The odds against two British comedians wandering in off the streets have clearly impressed them. Eddie’s Sexie tour is doing very well. I tell him my next tour will be called Fuck me, I’m British. He said he liked the T-shirt.