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Billy Connolly



         


Dr William Connolly CBE, (born November 24, 1942 in Glasgow, Scotland) is a comedian, musician and actor.


Billy Connolly
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Background

Billy Connolly was born to Mary and William Connolly, the son of an Irish immigrant.

Connolly was brought up in the Anderston and later, Partick districts of Glasgow and attended Saint Gerards Secondary School.

He started his working life as a welder in a Glasgow shipyard but left that trade to become a folk singer. Together with Tam Harvey he started a group called the Humblebums, which later included Gerry Rafferty. Connolly sang, played banjo and guitar and entertained the audience with his humorous introductions to the songs. Eventually the duo broke up and Billy went solo. His first solo album in 1972, Billy Connolly Live! on Transatlantic Records, features Billy as a singer, songwriter and musician. His early albums were a mixture of comedy performances with musical interludes, but by the late 1980s Connolly had all but dropped the music from his act, though he still records the occasional musical performance.

It is as a comedian that Connolly is best known. His observational humour is idiosyncratic. He talks about himself, who he is, where he's been, what he thinks and how he reacts to the world around him. He has outraged audiences, crtics and, of course the media, with his free use of the word fuck. He has used masturbation, blasphemy, defecation, flatulence, sex, his father's illness and his aunts' cruelty to entertain. By exploring these subjects with humour, Connolly has done much to strip away the taboos surrounding them. Yet he does not tell jokes in the conventional way. At the end of a concert the audience can be convulsed with laughter but few can remember a specific "funny" line.

Connolly's most famous comedy skit is "The Crucifixion", a riotous early 1970s recording in which he likens Christ's Last Supper to a drunken night out in Glasgow. The recording was banned by many radio stations at the time. Musically, Connolly's best known song was "The Welly Boot Song" which he used to close many of his concerts in the late 1970s.

In recent years he has appeared in various Billy Connolly's World Tour of... series, in which he combines touring with travelogues, giving his views about the history and culture of the places he visits between excerpts from stage shows performed in those regions. He also visited the frozen north in A Scot in the Arctic.

A notable feature of these shows is that he strips naked in one scene in each of them, usually in some remote wilderness area where no one is likely to complain, although for Comic Relief he once danced naked around Piccadilly Circus.

Billy's second wife Pamela Stephenson, has written a biography Billy which outlines his career and life including the sexual abuse by his father that lasted from his tenth to his fourteenth year. Much of the book is about Billy Connolly the celebrity but the account of his early years provides a context for his humour and point of view. A follow-up, Bravemouth, was published in 2003.

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Awards

Billy Connolly was awarded an honorary doctorate of letters by the University of Glasgow on July 11 2002. This particularly bemused his wife, who noted that she had studied for six years to obtain her PhD, whereas Billy merely had to turn up and collect his. He has also received a BAFTA award for lifetime achievement in 2003.

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Further reading

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Movies

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Television

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