I was lucky enough to watch an early performance of Eddie Izzard’s “Death Star Canteen” at Chicago’s Royal George Theatre on March 26, 2000. My mom got the tickets for my 26th birthday, and by then, I’d been performing stand-up for two years. Izzard’s bit, “Death Star Canteen,” shattered all of my preconceptions of what was possible. I’d never seen a comic kill at three in the afternoon in front of almost 500 people. I’d never seen a comic do more than 45 minutes, let alone two hours and an encore. I’d never seen a comic work without a hand mic. I watched Izzard get laughs in ways I didn’t know you could, and it was the funniest bit I’d ever seen. Watch “Death Star Canteen” now, as recorded that June at New York’s Town Hall and released on DVD as Circle.
Comedy is an engine for turning fear into joy, and few characters in the popular imagination are as synonymous with fear as Darth Vader. Played by the six-foot-six David Prowse and voiced with eloquence and controlled rage by James Earl Jones, Vader is a force of inescapable menace throughout George Lucas’s Star Wars trilogy. I remember crying so loud at 3 years old when the giant bionic killer choked his first victim that my dad had to walk me out of the theater. “Death Star Canteen” is a six-minute deconstruction of the power of that character to frighten us, ending with the universal symbol of faceless terror reduced to an impotent laughingstock.
Izzard leads into the topic with a riff on Lucas’s out-of-sequence film numbering: “the fifth of the four Star Wars films.” After impersonating a child incorrectly counting through the films — “four, five, six, one, two, three, ten” — Izzard earns her first big applause break at 33 seconds after switching to the teacher’s confused reaction. She holds this face for the laugh, her makeup ensuring the expression reads well enough to hit without words. Then she begins turning Lucas’s menace into a mouse with one fact everyone knows: Vader is only part machine. His most iconic trait is his mechanically aided breathing, and if he breathes, he needs to eat. The movies never show him doing this, Izzard points out; acknowledging that Vader needs lunch would be a blow to his stature. What better location to bring him down to human level than an employee cafeteria?
For this performance, Izzard wears high heels, tight leather pants, a shiny shirt, heavy rouge, eyeliner, and lipstick, just as she had in Chicago. Aside from expressing her identity, it’s just about the most “performance enhancing” outfit an entertainer could choose. The heels make Izzard taller, thus a more visible and dominant presence in the room. Her outfit’s lustrous materials accentuate her movements, and the makeup amplifies her facial expressions like a visual loudspeaker. The benefits clothes and makeup like this provide, especially once you move past a club capacity, are why even a performer with as little interest in gender fluidity as Gene Simmons found a justification for putting them on. They just work.
Izzard’s decision to forgo the traditional handheld microphone for an ear-mounted one also pays dividends. She muffles the ear mic with her hand to get Vader’s signature vocal distortion; to get the same sound with a hand mic, she’d need to hold it in front of her face with both hands every time she talks. Darth Vader and the canteen employee look like Vader and a canteen employee — not Vader, inexplicably holding a microphone, talking to a cafeteria worker who holds one too. When I saw this live, it was the first time I saw a comic free to use their whole body for act-outs before. I never forgot it, and when given the option to ditch the hand mic on my Conan appearances 12 years later, I jumped at the chance.
With the premise now established, Izzard begins stripping away everything that makes the character scary. “I will have the penne all’arrabbiata,” she says as Vader, prompting a big laugh at 2:28. Beyond hearing Vader attempt Italian, witnessing a character we’ve only seen giving orders and threats having to wait in a line and ask for food is already a demotion. “Do you know who I am?” he demands when the canteen employee tells him he’ll need a tray. The employee fires the identical line straight back to Vader along with a perfect combination of vacant and perturbed on Izzard’s face. The underling doesn’t even recognize his leader — another notch down for old Anakin Skywalker’s aura.
“This is not a game of ‘Who the fuck are you?’” Vader snaps back. The audience starts to applaud, but Izzard pushes through. Flummoxed by the man’s indifference, Vader goes on a lengthy explanation of how he could kill him “with a single thought” if he wanted to, like a 12-year-old on the playground explaining why pushing him would be a big mistake. “You still need a tray,” the worker tells him. Vader takes this to mean he’d need a tray to kill him. He tells the employee he’d hack away at his neck with the “thin bit” of his tray. Here, Vader is thrown off his game and grasping for words, for the first time stripped of the verbal mastery that’s as key to the character as his power and cruelty.
Then Izzard pops the scary balloon. The canteen worker, who is not scared in the least, interrupts Vader to correct him: “No. The food is hot. You need a tray to put the food on.” Instead of attacking him with the tray as threatened, Vader crumbles, and in one sentence, he does three things we’ve never seen him do: sees the error of his ways, apologizes, and awkwardly chuckles to ease the tension. The massive status shift earns Izzard a seven-second full-room applause break at 3:14. Another run of Vader trying to jog the worker’s memory gets several laughs, leading to the worker mistaking Vader for Mr. Stevens, “head of catering.” A four-second applause break follows, and then Vader does get angry, but it’s more pique than his traditional wrath. This guy has the food, so he can’t kill him. “I’ll get a tray. Fuck it,” he says, off to follow orders not from the emperor of the galaxy but from an employee of Mr. Stevens.
The audience begins another ovation at 4:15, but instead of holding Vader’s expression and letting it ride like a less-assured comic might, Izzard launches into an act-out of Vader trying to find a dry tray. Here the ear mic pays off again so Izzard can both do the Vader voice and sift through the trays convincingly. Her refusal to milk the applause breaks lets her characters respond to each other with the rhythm of a real conversation, rather than seeming to hold their responses until an audience they shouldn’t know is there decides they’re clear to talk again. For the sacrifice of a couple of ego-feeding seconds of applause, Izzard makes the piece feel more like a sketch than a series of jokes.
Vader returns to the canteen line to discover he’s been cut by someone who thinks he’s “Geoff” Vader. Pushing into Abbott and Costello territory, they argue over his identity until he breaks down and threatens to kill everyone there. “Death by tray it shall be,” says Vader to the completely unafraid “Ooh!” from the guy who cut him off, and then the annoyed worker asks, “Do you want peas with that?” All that made Vader terrifying is gone, and we are left with a sputtering, frustrated cog accepting an unappetizing lunch from an inferior because he has no other choice. The half-man, half-machine is now a man stuck in the machine like all the rest of us. As Vader threatened to do to the canteen worker, Izzard has killed him — as an object of fear, anyway — with a thought.
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