Along with food and fashion, humour is a favourite subject for national stereotyping. As the clichés go the Americans think that irony is a metal while the British think it's the stuff of life. One culture's belly-laugh is another's blank look. The message is simple: comedy does not travel.

Comedian Eddie Izzard, however, begs to differ. Mr Izzard is an Englishman who has just finished playing Lenny Bruce in the American play "Lenny" on the English stage. In early December his one man show, "Dressed to Kill" opens in Paris. There he is going to perform, in French, the very same act which, in English, had them laughing in the New York aisles. Mr Izzard, needless to say, thinks there is such a thing as the global joke.

"This idea that there is no collective sense of humour is garbage," he says. "When [Monty] Python went to America they didn't need a translator. It's specific references that create problems, you know. If I go to New York and I talk about our political system, well most people might know who Tony Blair is, but they wouldn't necessarily know Gordon Brown. But if I describe him a little, that's fine. In 'Lenny' we switched some monologues. Lawrence Welk would have taken too much explaining in London ("there was this guy, he had a band show"). But Jackie Kennedy wasn't a problem. You have to be careful of brand names. Marathons aren't Marathons in the US, they're Snickers. But it's not the same with humour.

Izzard on humour is similar to Izzard on anything: a quasi-performance full of long, evocative phrases that run into one another with not a lot of pauses for breath. But under the verbiage is a fully developed ontology of humour based on psychographics, not demographics. "Alternative humour is understood by alternative groups, whether they are in Germany or Sweden and whether they have an alternative humour or not," says Mr Izzard.

He has built a career assuming the existence of a universal funny bone, performing not just in Britain but also in France, Iceland, the Netherlands, the United States, Canada, and Sweden. He is now learning Spanish and German so he can travel further, and he'd like to work in Russia.

The one-joke-for-all-people theory is the reason why Mr Izzard, who came to the fore as a motor-mouthed transvestite, thought he could play Bruce, the fast-talking, short-lived, stand-up comedian who became famous in the 1960s for saying the unsayable. "He was the Jesus Christ of alternative comedy: he died for our sins," says Mr Izzard, who adds, "I think it's important that people are scandalised as much as possible"--a sentiment that Bruce himself would have loudly applauded.

When "Lenny" opened in London, however, the thing that scandalised most critics was not the nudity (and there is a lot of it), or the song medly performed by Izzard/Bruce where "fuck" is the only lyric, but rather the gall of putting Lenny Bruce's monologues into an Englishman's mouth.

The complaints were all about the physical: Mr Izzard's accent faltered; his frame was too stocky; his persona too nice (this may be a function of chronology: blasphemy as a concept was a great deal more shocking 30 years ago). No one ever said, "the jokes don't work", although whether they will agree in Bruce's home territory, New York, remains to be seen.

Next spring there are plans to take "Lenny"--ideally with the same cast--to Lenny Bruce's old stomping ground, and the theory of the global joke will be tested once again. "an English transvestite playing Lenny Bruce?", says Mr Izzard. "It might be so wrong, it's right." Funny you should say that.

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In the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, you might have mistaken Eddie Izzard for a small forward from a visiting rugby team.

`Circle' Tonight through March 26 Royal George Theatre, 1641 N. Halsted Sold out (limited box-office tickets may be available before showtime)

Square-headed with a rugged, blond goatee and a boxy build, clad in a black T-shirt and leather and chain-smoking American Spirit cigarettes, the British comedian appears, in his own words, "blokey." "I'm a bloke," he allows over early-morning coffee. "I like to do blokey things: drink beer, smoke, be loud."

Normally, you wouldn't expect such an explanation from a stand-up artist who has been gaining a reputation playing toughs and criminals in such films as "The Avengers" and "Mystery Men" and who will be bringing an acclaimed Lenny Bruce characterization to Broadway later this year. But then you notice the high-heeled boots. Not a punker's Doc Marten stompers, but svelte leather boots with tapered heels.

Izzard--the handsome, self-confident and daring bloke--is also a transvestite. And not necessarily on stage. For real. "I'm not like Barry Humphries," Izzard says of the Australian comic who has been playing Dame Edna Everage for months to sold-out Broadway houses.

"He puts on a frock and makes a character--a fine, funny character. I'm a male tomboy, a male lesbian. I do blokey things, and I fancy women. But I wear women's clothing and makeup--for me."

For our post-post-modern, millennial, globalized and gender-bent world, Izzard is the thinking person's entertainer of the moment. Appropriately labeled "a human search engine" by the New York Times, Izzard brings his newest one-man show, "Circle," to the Royal George Theatre mainstage tonight for his Chicago debut. He's a boundary-defying, border-breaking, word-spinning, self-deprecating political junkie, a mental and physical Rubik's Cube who one way or another gets you on his unique wavelength and broadcasts to you nonstop and at top volume.

For Izzard, his cross-dressing matters as much--or as little--as his being a British comic "doing American."  

"It might seem intimidating to make comedy from one place translate to another," he says. "But actually, it's a fascinating challenge. I mean, on the one hand we in Britain owe a lot to American stand-up because it was so different and so fresh when it came to us.

"But I'm also crazy about research and about history and finding out what people are thinking about and arguing about and fighting about wherever I play. I mean, forget America. I want to do my show in France!"

Anyone who has seen Izzard on late-night television or on his HBO special, "Dress To Kill," will know that for him, France is--as for many Brits--the ultimate foreign land. In the first place, as Izzard likes to remind us, "it's so French!" But it also is a symbol of one of Izzard's favorite topics: Europe and the bringing together of nations and peoples.

"We've still got Tories in England who think that we should never have given up an inch of our empire, but that once we fully join up with Europe, we'll be forced to wear berets and eat smelly cheeses."

For the North American tour of "Circle," he has been reading up a lot on American politics and history and immersing himself in pop culture. "When I'm here, I'll sit up at night in a hotel with the TV remote and go through 100 or 200 channels. Admittedly, there really isn't anything on any of them. But when you keep flicking them and blend them all together, it's wild!" Izzard has been through something of a cultural blender himself.

Born in Yemen to British parents in 1962 (his father was an accountant for British Petroleum), he later grew up in Northern Ireland and then, after the death of his mother, in a series of "absolutely awful" boarding schools.

He began acting at school and found himself as a classroom cutup. He went to a university in Sheffield but dropped out after a year to become a busker, or street performer. When he wasn't yet 20, he made his first appearances at Edinburgh's anything-goes Fringe Festival. Then he took his street act--sometimes with a partner, sometimes solo--to London, doing everything from escape routines to unicycle riding.

As American-style comedy clubs started opening, Izzard took his act indoors. "I was still under the spell of the Pythons," he says, speaking of the Monty Python television and film troupe, "and I still am, really. But I was also trying to find a way to take their smart and bizarre humor and mix it up with the free form of stand-up and improv, which took me back to my busking routines in a way."

He cites Steve Martin as a major influence early on, and it's not hard to see how that blend of braininess, surreal, seeming normalcy and living on the edge would appeal to him. He has had five huge hits on U.K. stages. His work with legendary stage director Peter Hall on the West End production of "Lenny" was a sort of homecoming after so much success with his own act.

"Lenny Bruce has to be a sort of god for any of us in this business who really care about what we do," he says, becoming both reflective and animated. "He loved language. He could come up with the most amazing comparisons and contrasts that were wholly original but made complete sense. He would be completely there in his act. And he had this amazing political consciousness."

Throw out Bruce's drug problem and add some wicked high heels, and you just might have a working description of Eddie Izzard.

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Brit Eddie Izzard's brand of comedy comes full 'Circle'  Chicago Daily Herald  By Jack Helbig

Watching English comedian Eddie Izzard stalk the stage in his current show, "Circle" in Chicago, delivering one killingly funny line after another, it is obvious he loves to shock people.

In his HBO special, "Dress to Kill," which aired last fall, Izzard flouted convention by performing in heels, a fabulous Chinese tunic over shiny black (perhaps vinyl) pants, and lots and lots of eye makeup and foundation.

"Yes, I'm a transvestite," he announced to his audience. "But I'm not one of those weirdo transvestites, I'm a professional executive-model transvestite."

This time around, Izzard, appearing in Chicago for the first time, shocked his audience again by wearing no makeup - and a pair of tight pants and chemise that could have been taken as either men's or women's clothing. He joked about the fact that for years he was criticized for wearing women's clothes and now he'd getting criticism for NOT wearing women's clothes.

Izzard's point: you aren't really thinking out of the box if you are stuck in a different box. Case in point, his shoes. Pointing to them he said that he'd bought them in the women's department of a shoe store. "Are they women's shoes? No, they're my shoes!"

Having begun by addressing his rebellion against prevailing attitudes about what men may and may not wear in public, Izzard then set about, over the course of this incredible 21/2-hour solo comedy show, to gore one sacred cow after another: declining English culture, American treatment of Native Americans, the European Union, the Guinness Book of Records, the appalling ignorance of everyone.

Izzard even spends a fair amount of time making fun of himself and of the show he is performing as he performs it.

The show is start to finish a dazzling display of intellectual and comedic brilliance. At a time when too many American standups have gotten slack, joking about the same naughty body parts and favorite TV shows, the British born Izzard shows us just how sharp, funny, and creative comedy can be.

No wonder tickets are already hard to come by for his 12-day engagement at the Royal George Theatre. Many shows are already sold out, but according to Izzard's people, "a limited number of first-come, first-served tickets may be available ... an hour prior to each performance."