Billy Connolly review – Older, frailer but Big Yin is still a maestro
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Version 0 of 1. There’s a beautifully funny routine midway through Billy Connolly’s new show, in which the young Connolly – then a folk musician – is playing a charity gig in a hospice. He’s on the autoharp, thrumming Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow Tree, when one member of his audience slowly expires before his eyes. Aghast, Connolly – still twanging his zither – beckons a bandmate to corroborate. We’re laughing and laughing by this point, at Connolly’s consternation, everyone else’s obliviousness, at the daft instrument he’s continuing to play – and at the comic skill that can take a man’s death and, without a shred of meanness of spirit, fashion a hilarious story from it. In a wider sense, retrieving laughter from the jaws of adversity is what Connolly’s sell-out Scottish tour (tickets have been changing hands for over £500) is about. Having undergone surgery for prostate cancer, and now suffering from the onset of Parkinson’s disease, Connolly could be forgiven for not feeling jolly. But this show is not the work of a man with a diminished sense of humour. In fact, it’s classic Connolly, a 90-minute compendium of droll things other people have said and anecdotes culled from across his 50-year career in music, the movies and comedy. It’s old-school: this shaggy-dog story humour isn’t fashionable. And one consequence (I assume) of Connolly’s condition is that the stories are getting shaggier, in that he’s slowing up, taking longer to get to the punchlines. But what he loses in pace, he arguably gains in authority. He’s physically a little frailer, we see him refer to his notes – so his every word seems harder-won, more crucial to hang on to. As the man himself says, in response to a heckler: “You’re lucky I’m here at all! Have you no’ read the papers? I’m nearly dead!” Until he is, he’ll probably remain a maestro of timing, economy and tone of voice. Several routines here – the one about his mistaken arrest for drug-dealing in Aberdeen city centre; the one about having a cigarette accident while driving – are unexceptional in principle but made to soar by the musicality of his accent, those sonorous preacher rhythms, and his schoolboy sense of fun. And he doesn’t take the cheap route to laughs. The easy way to be funny about the rackety flight he makes in a tiny plane across Mozambique would be to overegg his own cowardice. But he doesn’t – he makes the situation, not himself, ludicrous, and the story’s the funnier for it. There are lulls, and the occasional second-hand routine – the jilted girlfriend stitching prawns into her ex’s curtains, say – that’s beyond even Connolly’s powers of resuscitation. More often, he’s distilling what’s funny about a predicament into expressive nuggets of dismay or discomfort, like the infirm whine of that African Cessna, or the suppressed howl of those prey to the “uncontrollable oily discharge” that accompanies certain US slimming treatments. And at his best, Connolly’s comedy, which gives friends and strangers so many of the best lines (“Sure as I’m fae fuckin’ Banff,” one routine climaxes, “you’ve just hit my cat in the face wi’ a fuckin’ hammer”) is joyfully democratic. I’m pretty sure he was spared the indignity at this show of any audience members dying on him. But if they had done, they’d have died laughing. Wednesday, Perth Concert Hall (01738 621 031); Saturday 4 October to Wednesday 8 October, Usher Hall, Edinburgh (0131 228 1155); then touring. |