British comedian Eddie Izzard has been thinking a lot about language (no suprise to anyone who's heard him riff on monkeys on branches, mice under tables, and cats on chairs).
And he's had a crazy idea: Training himself in new languages — German, Spanish, Russian, Arabic — so when he's on the road, he can perform in his audience's native tongue. Though that won't be a challenge when he hits the road in America this week.
Izzard tells NPR's David Greene that he was seven years old when he first knew he wanted to go onstage. "I was watching this other kid, and he was getting a lot of reaction and applause, and whatever he was doing he was doing right, and I thought, I have got to do that. I have analyzed this in my self-analysis way as, my mother had died a year before and I believe I swapped the affection or the reaction of the audience for what I'd lost from my mother."