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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
The Scottish comedian Billy Connolly likes to date his enduring optimism to his days in the shipyards of Glasgow, where he worked as a welder from the ages of sixteen to twenty-four. One day, he says, he went to buy a pack of cigarettes from Tam, the chain-smoking old worker who ran the company store:
He started to cough. It was like a storm building up--a thundering storm from miles away. He ended up with these noises that sounded like a platoon of cavalry galloping through a swamp in Wellingtons full of vomit. Then it came to an end; all calmed down. I says, "Jesus, Tam, that's some cough." He says, "Fuck off!" He says, "Did you pass the graveyard on the way in here?" I says, "Aye." He says, "Well, the graveyard's full of people that would fucking love my cough." And that's basically my philosophy: if you think you're having a bad time, the graveyard's full of people who would love to be doing what you're doing.
In a thirty-three-year career, which has included some two thousand stage appearances, eighteen videos, and fifteen CDs, Connolly has almost never written down a line of material. Instead, onstage, for two and a half hours, he holds a sort of seance with himself. (One of his daughters once referred to his profession as "comedium.") A comedian performing without a script is like a high-wire artist working without a net: it creates a particular kind of immediacy. Connolly's free-associating hodgepodge of personal revelation, fantasy, and bawdry often takes him, as well as the audience, by surprise. "All this shit comes out," he told me in his distinctive burr. "All this fear and angst and learning." He added, "If I'm talking about something during the day, it'll pop up in the night. I remember talking about sex to Pamela"--his wife, the former comedian Pamela Stephenson--"when we first met. My point was that it was an animal act, and the worst thing you could do to it was put on it the manners of the dining room." In his routine, that idea became "You mustn't take the animalism of the bedroom into the dining room--except for foreplay. . . . It's handy to remember, when it comes to the cutlery, that it's the same as foreplay: start at the outside and work your way in."
The cross-dressing British comedian Eddie Izzard, whose own humor was inspired by Connolly's early, pathfinding performances, explains, "He'd just sort of say whatever he wanted to say; it didn't seem to bear any relationship to any structure that had come before." Last January, at a tribute to Connolly organized by the BBC and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, Izzard said, "He shall lead you from the world of 'my wife' jokes to the promised land of the comic philosopher." Eric Idle, part of the "Monty Python" menagerie and Connolly's neighbor, agrees. Connolly offers the thrill of "ruthless honesty," he says. "He's not censoring anything. You see the whole Billy." (As did more than twelve million British television viewers two years ago, when Connolly, in order to raise money for charity, streaked naked around the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus.)
Connolly is an instinctive disturber of the peace, an enemy of blandness--of "the beigists," as he calls the humorless bourgeoisie. But although he makes a few million dollars annually from his comedy--he spends up to half of every year on tour--the American public is still, for the most part, unaware of him and his role as the progenitor of alternative British comedy. A beloved Scots Everyman, Connolly has never quite managed to sell himself as an American Everyman. Pamela Stephenson's insightful book about Connolly's life, "Billy," was a No. 1 best-seller on both hardback and paperback lists in Britain for twenty-four weeks, selling two million copies and earning Stephenson the 2002 British Book Awards' Book of the Year prize. (Her second Connolly volume, "Bravemouth," was published in England last month and is already No. 2 on the Sunday Times best-seller list.) In the United States, however, "Billy" was acquired by Overlook Press for a four-figure advance and only sixteen thousand copies were printed. Although Connolly has lent his charm to two American sitcoms--"Head of the Class" and "Billy"--and was featured in a 1990 HBO special, "Whoopi Goldberg Presents Billy Connolly," he is still perhaps best recognized in America as the swaggering manservant John Brown, whose plain speaking won the heart of Judi Dench's Queen Victoria in the 1997 film "Mrs. Brown" (a performance whose subtlety surprised fans of Connolly's brazen comedy).
Connolly's lack of renown in this country is, in fact, one of the reasons that he has chosen to live here--in California--since 1991. "To let go of some of that fame I have in Europe is a wonderful thing," he says. "At first, you think it's like a big spear, but actually it's a big shield." One of Connolly's maxims is "Don't work out, work in." He knows that the hardest battle a star wages is an internal one: the world wants the extraordinary, but the performer--who is, by definition, a salesman of himself--risks losing himself in the management of the ordinary. Still, Connolly, who occasionally catches himself trying to call room service from his home phone, has more or less come to terms with normality. He lives among the good and the great of Hollywood (his house in Laurel Canyon, which overlooks Universal Studios, is just a few doors down from David Hockney's), but in his daily life he experiences a more mundane version of Los Angeles. He picks his children up from school; he eats with his family; he lets other people speak at dinner parties. It's his detachment from the Hollywood scene that allows him to do the work of comedy, he says: "Life without that adoration is so nice. The volume goes down. You don't move so fast. You can go for walks. You can look in shopwindows. You can feed your brain." He adds, "You have to look at the world. Absorb it, read, look, stay awake. It isn't what you're hearing that's important; it's what comes out again."
One of Connolly's havens is a cigar store in the Valley called the Big Easy. Here, in a crepuscular boys'-club atmosphere of beer signs, red leather chairs, old baseball mitts, boxing gloves, and pinball machines, Connolly can carouse and enjoy the invigorating company of "honest guys," who remind him of the men he knew in Glasgow (which he calls "Liverpool without deodorant"). "They know about football and baseball and politics," he says. "They're very, very aware. They're men. They're not new men." Connolly refers to himself as an "end-of-the-pier comedian," who aspires to be "beer-down-your-nose funny," and his noisy bravado is essentially a Friday-night pub style--"ludicrous storytelling, lying, and bragging that gets up to such a pitch." For the half hour that it took him to smoke his Bahia Gold one afternoon at the Big Easy, Connolly, who will be sixty-one this month but has the lanky body and the attitude of a much younger man, paced beside the counter in his usual mufti of cowboy boots and jeans and bantered with his mates: Mikey, who makes solder; Stevie G., an actor; and Billy, a union man. They argued about George...
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