I’m a big Eddie Izzard fan. He came to Oracle Arena in January, and I went. I was one seventeen thousandth of his audience. Like, 5.88235294 × 10^-5 of his audience.

Okay? I’d never been in an audience that big.

I was able to see him thanks to the big screens flanking the stage, which meant that it was like popping in an Eddie Izzard DVD and viewing it with seventeen thousand of my closest strangers. All things considered, I was impressed with the way he was able to keep things feeling so almost-casual.

My audiences have maxed out at 100 historically, though there have been plenty of nights when I’ve played to significantly fewer. The night I met Jacques, for example, he was 20% of my audience.

I wondered what I’d do in front of an audience of seventeen thousand people, and I suspected that I’d spend most of the time just freaking the fuck out.

Hello. Hello, everyone. Hello. Boy, there sure are a lot of you, aren’t there? Heh. Wow. Couldn’t possibly learn all your names, even if I tried for a whole month, could I? Just imagine that endeavor! I don’t think I’m neurologically-optimized to relate to a group this big! You know, substitute teaching prepared me for a lot of things, but learning seventeen thousand names at a go was not one of them.

Of course, many of you probably have the same name! If you could just arrange yourselves alphabetically, by first name, I might be able to learn the names of entire sections of the audience! Could we do that? Would you play along? It would take HOURS, wouldn’t it? Even taking into account your clearly-above-average-intelligence! It’s just too bad, because I could track first-name-influence-on-sense-of-humor by noting which sections laughed the loudest at which bits! For science!

We should try that next time. I hope there’s a next time. Maybe I don’t. Wait. Yes I do. Wait. I take it back. The first part. Not the second part. Wait. I forgot what I said first.

Um. [awkward silence]

Listen, I’m sure I had something planned to say to you tonight, but fuck if I can remember. There are seventeen thousand of you. Did I ever tell you about the time I saw the Grand Canyon but couldn’t understand it because it was too big? That’s like you. I mean, you collectively.

You are much like a geological wonder. You go around in your lives, your individual lives, thinking about how the guy in front of you is walking too slow, or how your shoulder kind of hurts or whatever, but you never think, “I am part of a collection of humanity so big that if even a fraction of us were put in an arena, facing Jessica, she would not be able to comprehend us and would freak the fuck out.”

Wait. Try something for a sec. Just turn around and look behind you. Let’s just pretend I’m in the back row of an event meant to focus on someone else, but for some reason this one heckler in the back (who is me!) just happens to have a mic. Just – could you try it? Look, People In The Nosebleed Seats, you’re now in the FIRST ROW! Joke’s on all of you who paid the big bucks! Ha! HA! HA HA HA!

Wait. Nope. Still freaking the fuck out. Dang.

Listen, I imagine you came here to laugh and instead you’re looking slightly puzzled – at least, those of you I can see! I appreciate that you’re consistent. I mean, in my fantasies of standing in front of seventeen thousand people, the seventeen thousand people have always seemed slightly puzzled. And I want to thank you for being just like I dreamed you would be.

Thank you and good night.

Anyway, Eddie Izzard did not appear to freak the fuck out. He walked out onstage, greeted the crowd briefly, warmly, and with good humor, and then launched straight into a pro-atheism rant. And an aircraft-hangar’s worth of people shouted and hooted their approval! Thank you for giving voice to my most intimate feelings Eddie Izzard! I will now laugh in solidarity! I will laugh and grip the armrests of my chair, so that I don’t plumet to my death should I lean too far forward in this fit of hilarity I’m experiencing at 30,000 feet.

Really, I was amazed at how easily he was able to push all the right buttons, create a feeling of solidarity in a group that big.

Honestly, I’ll tell you, I have very little idea of what I could authentically say to a group that big and be well-received. The fact that he knew it made him seem almost Better Than Mere Mortal, almost Uber Artist.

But then you know what? Just recently, Roger Ebert (who tweets like no other), reported that Eddie Izzard “bombed” as the emcee for the Independent Spirit Awards:

This year’s emcee was Eddie Izzard, the British comedian, who opened by informing America that there is no God, and turned that into a running joke that failed time and again, along with an inexplicable joke about Werner von Braun.

Granted, I wasn’t in the room, I don’t know if everyone would have called it “bombing,” but I have to admit that I actually found this sort of cool, and not in the schadenfruede kind of way. It was like, “Wow. Maybe there is no super secret knowledge, maybe all artists are still just making guesses about how their work will be received, maybe it’s true that success just means you have the opportunity to fail bigger, and man, Eddie Izzard seems so much cooler to me now!” Why is that? I don’t know. Maybe something to do with risk-taking.

Can you imagine what it must feel like to be him? To make a tour of aircraft hangars across the world and have your material just slay, and then to emcee an awards show and just be you – the same old you – and have your material be recieved so unenthusiastically? I mean, the scale of that? Lesson learned about the importance of self-selecting audiences, Eddie Izzard. Thank you, and I still think you’re awesome.