text: This video was my first exposure to Eddie Izzard. We had several friends over one night and for some reason or another had channel-surfed to HBO during the course of the evening. Someone by the name of "Eddie Izzard" was on.I tried not to laugh too loudly at the first few jokes. I didn't want to be held "responsible" for the rest of the group's enjoyment of something that was obviously killing me. After holding in my laughs for more than was healthful, I let go--as did the others of us(we were not stoned, by the way, nor talking of insurance and pensions...). We were asphyxiated after that. The story lines, the plot, the bizarre yet ingenious connections throughout the sketches are nothing short of brilliance. I have since been addicted to every Eddie-Izzard-piece-of-comedy I can get my hands on. His work is sheer genius. His comedy appears effortless. He seems more like that hysterically funny friend hanging out at your house and rambling on about this or that...It's convulsively funny. He gives you the impression that the joke is between you .. and himself, the only true aficionados of humor, after all. If you are disappointed in this video, you have no sense of the penultimate in humor--or humour, as they say in the UK.