General News / Media

Eddie Izzard update

Who doesn’t love some Eddie Izzard news? Just saw his name headlining an ad for his new show The Riches and wondered what it was all about.

It seems like the show has been an occasion for lots of interviews. The Daily Telegraph has an interesting discussion with him about balancing cross-dressing with work, and although he works as an actor, I think what he says is true to some degree for any non-transitioning transgender person regardless of their line of work.

The Discovery Channel has an article that combines some of my favorite things: it’s a summary of a forthcoming article in Language and Communication by SUNY-Binghamton professor and University of Chicago graduate Douglas Glick where he analyzes the techniques used by standup performers, focusing on two Izzard routines. At the end of the Discovery News article, added almost as an afterthought, is a quote from Glick’s colleague Stephen Straight explaining why Don Imus really did use (as opposed to mention) both a racist insult and a sexist one against the Rutgers basketball team, and the fact that he was joking is not an adequate defense.

I’m a proud Binghamton alum, the last linguistics major declared before the Cuomo budget cuts put the major on hiatus for several years, and Steve Straight was my advisor. I remember, at Steve’s suggestion, doing a paper on frame semantics and reading Victor Raskin’s frame-semantic analysis of humor. I don’t know if Glick used Raskin’s work; I’ll have to wait until the article comes out. After Binghamton I got my M. A. at Chicago, but I don’t remember Glick; he must have been in the Anthropology department. Binghamton and Steve Straight, the U of C, linguistics, humor analysis and Eddie Izzard, all in Discovery News.