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The late George Harrison once said that when the Beatles began to disintegrate in 1969, their cheeky spirit traveled down the cosmic motorway and translocated itself to Monty Python's Flying Circus, which had formed that same year.

Perhaps this same daft karma went in search of a new vessel after the Python lads went their separate ways and stopped writing sketches about dead parrots, toad-elevating moments and Vikings who sing choral tributes to Spam. Quite likely, it passed into the person of British stand-up comic Eddie Izzard.

It doesn't take too many pints to imagine this bloke as the reincarnation of Monty Python's tree-cutting transvestite from "The Lumberjack Song," slapping his thigh and warbling "I wear high heels, suspenders and a bra." Because Izzard, who plays two sold-out shows at the Byham Theater on Tuesday and Wednesday, wears all that, with a bit of eye shadow. Both onstage and off.

But you're likely to forget Izzard's glam get-ups once he opens his mouth. Like Spike Milligan, the barmy and brilliant "Goon Show" comic who influenced John Lennon, Izzard seems perpetually afflicted with attention deficit disorder.

"Before there was Stonehenge, there was Woodhenge," he'll say, and faster than you can say "Who likes a sailor, then?" he's switched to the topic of Hitler or the invention of fire.

Much of his charm comes from his voice, a flutey, melodious instrument that speaks in a veddy British accent, rushing along with a breathless, blink-of-an-eye cadence, as though he might explode if he drops below 50 miles an hour.

"It was developed more to get myself popular," Izzard says. "When I was 17 or 18, doing chemistry A-levels the (teacher) would leave gaps or pauses where you could chuck words in. He would say, 'Put chemical A into' ... 'A large cat!' It's like it's perfectly designed to train yourself. I developed it to get popular with girls. To pull."

Izzard's childhood was anything but funny. He was born in Yemen. His family then moved to Northern Ireland and then to Wales, where his mother died when he was 6. He survived the infamous British public school system, "came out" as a heterosexual transvestite at age 23, and eventually "busked" as a street performer for the crowd at London's Covent Garden theater district, getting the crowd's attention by telling them that a "disgusting" performance was about to begin and "I'd go away if I were you."

"Initially, it was so awful that it was just humiliating," he says of those early attempts at performing. "I'd already come out as being a transvestite. Once you've done that, everything else seems kind of easy. You've got to stick your head in the lion's mouth."

He did so, flopping four consecutive times at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland. "You can die in a most stunning way," he says. "And some idiot's jabbering away, and no one's watching you."

And Izzard always wanted to be watched in the worst way. But he couldn't even get cast in his school plays. But he had the last laugh on the British public school system. He did so by making himself cry.

"They do remove all emotion in retrospect," he says of boarding school. "The only way to survive was to close off emotionally. I was 19, and a cat was run over in front of me. I forced myself to cry. I was looking at the cat but the cat just stopped and looked at me in the middle of the road. Then it staggered across the road and died a few minutes later. I thought, 'I don't feel anything.' I thought, 'I've got to force myself to cry, to have a proper reaction to this situation.' I began this journey to reopen myself in terms of being in touch with myself."

His first one-man show, "Live at the Ambassadors," debuted in 1993 in London's West End. He also starred in the West End production of David Mamet's "Cryptogram" in 1994 and scored a Tony nomination this year for his role in the Broadway production of Peter Nichols' "A Day in the Death of Joe Egg." He broke in America with his 1999 HBO special "Dress to Kill," which won two Emmys and recently came out on DVD. Izzard also played a glam rock manager in "Velvet Goldmine" in 1998 and a silent film star in "Shadow of the Vampire" in 2000.

"I don't think that comedy does come from pain," he says. "I just like laughing. I don't feel enormously f-- up. I think it's my genetic set of cards, and I've really worked on it. To try and bring it out."

General gabbery with Eddie Izzard

His family name derives from a goat. He's re-imagined the Spanish Inquisition as a proper English persecution, cruel but polite, with the inquisitors asking the heretics, "Tea and cake or death?" Eddie Izzard doesn't talk in a stream of consciousness; it's more like riding a water slide at some demented theme park. But the celebrated "action transvestite" is really just a regular bloke at heart. Just ask him.

What are you wearing?

Just clothes, mainly.

Do you still get hassled in public for wearing women's clothes?

It's a sort of baggage that you have to deal with. I decided that I should come out a while ago. It sort of follows you around. ... You do get aggro on the street, and you have to deal with it and shout back at people and get in fights. It's not terribly easy. The classic example is I get people trying to beat me up, and the next guy asks me for my autograph.

Why are the British so obsessed with dressing up as women?

Logically, most thinking people would agree that it's probably been around for a very long time. It goes back to the Greeks. I think it's genetic. Dressing up, it's been going on forever. No one's really accepted it and said, "OK, this is cool."

The press release says your tour climaxes in Philadelphia on Nov. 8. So what's Pittsburgh - foreplay?

No, I think we started on the first of July. So Pittsburgh is another gig. We don't climax in Philadelphia. There's other shows after that. Perhaps if Pittsburgh could be on the coast. If you could move it. I can't explain the order.

What sort of a last name is Izzard?

It's initially English. The Izzard name is French Huguenot. It dates back to the 1700s, on my mother's side as you keep going back. The name Izzard, it's the name of a mountain goat. In the Alps and the Pyrenees, there is this goat and it has big curved horns. In the Alps, it's called a Chamois, which is where the chamois leather comes from. It's French in a herding-type way."

Was English boarding school as appalling as Pink Floyd and Morrissey make it out to be?

The first boarding school in Wales was bit a like "Tom Brown's Schooldays." It wasn't quite as Victorian as that. It did have caning and just regimentation and stuff. Along the way, my mother died. They've got all these rules and stuff, but they were kind of OK in retrospect. They do remove all emotion in retrospect. The only way to survive was to close emotionally. A lot of people who got to these private schools, they're very sort of closed off emotionally.

Is it true that you don't write anything down, that you carry 'Sexie' in your head?

I don't write stuff down. There's a number of people who do it like this. I go on and ad lib. If you have a conversation, an idea will come into your head. It's very much conversational standup.

British humor seems to contain a lot of historical references. Monty Python did sketches that featured Sir Philip Sydney, and Billy Connolly does this great 16th-century narrative about Bonnie Prince William.

"The Simpsons" do as well. They've also taken people from history and shoved them in all the other places. It's really just realizing 'God, there's a whole ton of crap we can use.' ... I just noticed in Britain that no one was going to history, and I liked history. It also seems very erudite, this air of "Ooh you, you studied!" So I'm just (using) that. "Napoleon! Yeah! Small guy. 1802."

Is it true you have a pilot's license?

I wanted to do a tour in a Spitfire, a British World War II plane. That's what I was building toward. My flying is kind of sporadic. It's kind of therapy. Because I used to throw up on airplanes.

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