Review: Billy Connolly

I don’t know when the epiphany happened but once upon a time I didn’t find Billy Connolly funny in the least. In fact whenever I saw him on the television he instilled in me an acute feeling of deep, personal embarrassment. One enduring, but very early, memory of Billy Connolly is of him standing on-stage, playing an acoustic guitar whilst wearing, amongst other things, a custom-made pair of wellington-boots, as he shouted at the crowd in, what seemed to me at the time, to be a bullying manner, to encourage them to join in with the chorus of The Wellie Song.

Not funny at all. In fact, deeply embarrassing.

And then something started to happen in the linky bit of the ether that sits between Mr Connolly and my sense of humour and I found myself beginning to like him. I’m not sure what the ‘something’ was. Maybe he started to mature as an entertainer (for Heaven knows, he hasn’t matured that much as a person!), or maybe he started to take a far wider range of ‘life’ in to his telescopic sights. But after even more of a while I began to become a bit of a fan. I even grew to love the smiling-but-curmudgeonly, the grinning-like-a-demented-lunatic, the cheerfully-grumpy ways that can only be Billy Connolly’s natural demeanour. And he began to say things that I could wholeheartedly agree with, without fear of embarrassment. Maybe I was getting older. Or he was getting younger.

Billy Connolly is at last back in the UK performing a string of one-man-shows, showing people just how much he has grown as an entertainer and how much older, as a character, he really hasn’t got at all! Unfortunately the London-based end of his dates sold out before he’d even set foot onstage to rehearse, such is the power of word-of-mouth amongst the committed Billy Connolly fans. The age thing bothers me just a little because Mr C is now just three years short of his 70th – SEVENTIETH – birthday yet he does a one-man-show with as much energy and enthusiasm as people more than one third of his age.

So what do you get for your money from this old age pensioner? Laughs. Lots of laughs. The beard and very long hair are now white but there’s nothing wrong with Billy Connolly’s brain, his observational style or his delivery. The once welder on the Glasgow shipyards can spin a yarn and hold an audience the way pretenders to the throne of comedy wish they could. Two hours, that’s what you get, two solid hours of stand-up, one-man comedy machine that is still guaranteed to offend at least half of the population of the country and all of the Daily Mail readers. The air onstage is as blue as the Saltire but it never fails or falters when he makes a point. And oh yes, Billy Connolly has very many points to make. We should make every MP go to this show because the section that delivers ‘MPs? They’re all useless fuckers, every last fucking one of them’ is laid out with such heartfelt honesty that half the audience rose to their feet to give a standing ovation.

This isn’t being funny for the sake of being funny, this is observational humour at its very best, delivered by a masterful observer. Onstage he is relaxed even when talking about a facet of life that clearly upsets him. And what is it that upsets him? Lack of humour, self-obsessed style gurus, pomposity, the American religious Right and self-importance. For a man who is himself famous onstage, on-screen and in front of the film camera, Billy Connolly is remarkably lacking all facets of self-obsession. He has been through the fame academies, starred on stage, screen and television and yet he remains a deep-rooted man of the people.

‘Nice of you to turn out on such a shitty night’, is how he began the evening. And what a lovely way to be greeted; here is a man who knows the value of his fellow humans. Here is a man who is humble without wearing it on his sleeve.  Here is a man politicians must hate being the target of. Here is a man who made me laugh so much I cried like a bereaved dog owner.

Billy Connolly is currently performing at the Hammersmith Apollo until 30th January 2010

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