Seeing the Big Yin tonight!
Posted: Thu Feb 19, 2015 6:13 am
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.
