Whoopi Goldberg Presents Billy Connolly

This performance of Billy Connolly live at the Brooklyn Academy of Music was recorded for broadcast on the American channel HBO, presumably as part of a series in which Whoopi Goldberg would use her celebrity status to introduce a different famous comedian each week and then walk on stage to kiss them at the end and share in their applause. Broadcast in 1989, this relatively short set of around forty minutes is Billy at his best, holding nothing back for the television cameras and allowing his mind to flit freely between topics with his customary lack of direction and without any pretence that this material has been prepared or selected especially for the occasion.

That’s one of the things that marks Billy out from the other famous stand-ups, as apart from his unique stage presence and ability to grip the audience with the most humdrum or scatological of stories, he has a genuine, natural talent to spin material off the cuff, or at least decide on a rough set of topics he wants to talk about and fill in the precise wording later. Taking the audience on a journey that begins in their local New York, travels out to Mozambique and ends in the unpleasant intimacy of Billy’s home toilet bowl, every movement of this meandering, sweary symphony really is the comic at the height of his ability, and would doubtless be quoted endlessly as his other shows tend to be if only it had been officially released over here.

There is a clear foundation for all of this material in the broad topic of air travel, which I found quite fascinating, but I’ll avoid the temptation to amateurishly dissect it and thus drain it of all its comedic energy, much as I want to in a way. The air travel theme seems to act as a means for Billy to keep track of where he’s going, however far he veers from the source, and it’s clearly helped him to generate his usual mix of clever observations, angry philosophising and toilet humour. Oh no, there I go. The show begins with the clean-shaven comedian applauding New Yorkers on their violent city and even giving it the honour of a comparison to his native Scotland, though the guffawing audience would clearly be on his side throughout even if he had ridiculed them and cursed their city into the dirt.

Some ingenious ideas of how New York can compete with the glitz of L.A.’s Hollywood Boulevarde move on to some extremely personalised accounts of Billy’s flight abroad for Comic Relief, which launches him into his air travel safety routine that’s been performed elsewhere, though with the usual touches unique to each performance. It’s fantastic to see the comedian making some quite clearly unreasonable demands for a greater quality of service in the Third World, perhaps as a stab at his own increasing wealth and status during this period, and the funniest side of it all is that any sense of knowing irony is completely buried under what seems like genuine anger. Maybe it is, maybe he really does believe in the godlike status afforded to him by his peers, but he never tackles Jim Davidsonesque areas of prejudice in any of his rants, so it never seems threatening.

The second half of the show sees this knowing satire of middle-class values balanced out very nicely by some toilet humour of the most basic level, the most basic level being Billy imitating different types of fart sound into the microphone and actually succeeding rather well. His re-enactment of suffering from an itchy rear in public, and the extent to which people fail miserably to conceal it, ought to teach a thing or two about hilarious observational comedy to the gathered comedians present in the crowd, while his closing routine about the trauma of being sick rang so true with me that it was almost disturbing, particularly as I was recently sick for the first time since about 1997 and had developed something of a phobia about it inevitably happening again. But it was my own fault for drinking milk with a hangover. And then for eating that shepherd’s pie I’d left in the microwave overnight the following day. I am an idiot. Judging by the teary eyes of the audience, it’s clear that some of them can relate to the stories of public farting, and it’s only really a discussion over environmental protests that ends up predicting an inevitable Nazi uprising in reunified Germany that I didn’t enjoy an awful lot, partly because the material is so dated and also because a man striding across the stage in wide Nazi steps wasn’t the most original joke on the circuit by 1989. No, he’s much better when talking about farts.

As a fan of inventive, hard-working stand-ups, I have a huge admiration and respect for Billy Connolly and am looking forward to seeing more of his material in the near future in the form of the seemingly limitless bounty of DVDs and videos that have been released over the decades. He’s someone I haven’t really run across before as the comedians I usually see perform in small, darkened rooms in Edinburgh throughout August, working for love and often losing a large money in the process (especially if a big name like Ricky Gervais sets up a crowd-stealing show in the vicinity), and this comparatively short and sweet performance was the perfect introduction, without being any sort of compromise and only selling out in the positive sense.

The show isn’t available on DVD, despite being recorded by television cameras, but I think a VHS release was available at the time in America, as well as an audio CD that may or may not have been bootlegged. Needless to say, the version I watched was far from legitimate, but still captured the excellent performance as originally filmed. It’s comforting to know that Billy Connolly is big in America, something that’s been confirmed by his more recent ‘Live in New York’ DVD, and it proves that you don’t have to share the sort of background and ideologies that he has in order to be thoroughly engrossed and amused by his yarns. It does help if you’ve had at least some unpleasant experiences in a toilet though.