Quotes & Jokes by Eddie Izzard / page 5

The Spanish Inquisition wouldn’t have worked with Church of England. “Talk! Will you talk!” “But it hurts!” “Well, loosen it up a bit, will you? Fine…”

At school, the first page I ever learnt in French was full of things that are quite difficult to get into conversation, thinks like "The mouse is underneath the table" – "La souris est en dessous la table". Just slip that when you’re buying a ticket to Paris: "Le train à Paris, oui? C’est ici? C’est maintenant? Cinq minutes… la souris est en dessous la table…"

We have two hundred languages in Europe. Two hundred languages! Count them! I know you won't!

You say 'erbs', and we say 'herbs', because there's a fucking 'H' in it!

You piss me off you Salmon... You're too expensive in restaurants.

I did bronze survival swimming. I could save people in a bronzey kind of way.

Cable cars are fun - everyone gets on board and becomes a rhesus monkey.

There was Pope John if you remember, now there is Pope John Paul. The next Pope's gonna be John Paul George and we can see where they're going.

I can't get the fuckin' trees, damn I will kill everyone in the world!

Poetry is very similar to music, only less notes and more words.

It proves that we're all from Africa, you see. Proved through the Y chromosome and through the mitochondrial DNA that we're all African, which is brilliant 'cause it means that racist people can retire.

It’s a secret, religious, weird, ceremonial rite of passage for girls that women know. Hopscotch, it was bizarre for boys, ‘cause they never played it, and as a boy, I was behind walls, going, “What- what happened? What did they do? What do they do here?” And they had a track laid out with numbers, mystic numbers- 1, 5… 7, 8, you know… A bit of a broken doll there, some girl keeping lookout with a skipping rope…

Performance enhancing drugs are banned in the Olympics. Ok, we can swing with that. But performance debilitating drugs should not be banned. Smoke a joint and win the hundred meters, fair play for you. That's pretty damn good. Unless someone's dangling a Mars bar off in the distance.

So in Europe, we had empires. Everyone had them - France and Spain and Britain and Turkey! The Ottoman Empire, full of furniture for some reason. And the Austro-Hungarian Empire, famous for fuck all! Yes, all they did was slowly collapse like a flan in a cupboard.

So the American government lied to the Native Americans for many, many years, and then President Clinton lied about a relationship, and everyone was surprised! A little naive, I feel!