Movies |
Billy Connolly
By
Published: Jan 01, 2006
Category:
Comedy
My distress with the theater has reached the point where I skip almost all plays and only venture out to see one-person shows. Chris Rock, Eddie Izzard, Dave Gorman, Billy Connolly — give me a guy (or, better, woman) who can stand up there alone for 90 minutes and make me laugh, and I’m calling for a babysitter.
Mrs. B and I saw Billy Connolly last night. If you’re not familiar with him, he’s a tall, wild-haired Scotsman. He dropped out of school to
be a welder, and he has a workman’s lack of pretense. Which is to say, he finds humor in the moments of our shared vulnerability that others shy away from. Or, to put it another way, he has a potty mouth and he does a lot of bathroom humor, and if that bothers you, you should remember his name as someone to avoid and never let his act near your ears.
On his current tour, "Too Old to Die Young," I’m sure he varies the act a bit from night to night — even when it’s scripted stuff, he likes to present his material in musical terms. Jazz terms, if you will. He starts out on a topic, digresses, maybe adds another digression and then swings back to his original topic. When it works, it’s dazzling.
Last night, for example, he came out, took off his glasses and set them carefully on a stool. This led to an easy truth: "If you pay a lot of money for your glasses, they fuck off. Buy ’em for a buck at the drug store, they’re yours forever."
Glasses led to the subject of age. He’s now in his ’60s, but he starts this part of the show with his ’50s — "the prostate time of life." And he really gets into it. "My doctor has his finger up my ass at every opportunity," he says. "But it’s not all that terrible. As a matter of fact, on the way out, it’s not the worst thing ever." He prefers it when the doctor stands behind him. One time the doctor stood beside him. He couldn’t figure out why. Then, he says, "he milked me."
But you had to see that moment to believe it.
By now, the audience is convulsed. Because not only is Connolly dirty, he’s totally matter-of-fact about it — the more uncomfortable the topic, the more he…uh….milks it.
Where can he go from here, you ask. And soon you find out: the colonoscopy. Well, not yet. First he wants to tell you about the laxatives. He mimes taking the pill and gulping eight glasses of water. He goes about his business for a few moments, and then — then, fortunately for you, it’s one sight gag after another.
From there, it’s on to diet pills. And the TV commercials that flog them: "See this picture? That was me — last week. I never used to leave footprints when I walked on the beach; my ass was so big it used to wipe them off." He mimics the mumbo-jumbo of side effects they tell you about at the end of those commercials. Three words catch Billy’s fancy: "uncontrollable oily discharge." I’ll let you imagine what follows.
You can’t go much further in this direction, so Billy cuts back to safe subjects (marriage and women) before taking off again on once-sacred topics (the "Nazi Pope" and the Catholic Church). This stuff is funny, but harder to care about. You’ve laughed too much, you’ve filled your quota of Billy.
Well, everyone goes on too long these days; I can forgive Billy Connolly. And I think I can commend the Greatest Hits, which trace the development of his work from boyhood to….well, adolescence. Because one thing you need not worry about — Billy Connolly is in no danger of growing up.
To buy "The Greatest Hits Of Billy Connolly" from Amazon.com, click here.
