My dodgy past has affected everything I said or did, but it’s never depressed me
that pines for the 1960s and 70s, and another that sees this as sentimental, rose-tinted twaddle.
“I look back on it with great joy,” says Billy. “It was a great bunch of people – folkies, jazzers, poets, storytellers, people that knew obscure music and played weird instruments, all of them vaguely hippy and strange. It was totally unique.”
If there’s one word that describes Billy’s rise to stardom, it is ‘organic’. He never really choreographed his comedy, nor calculated his career moves, and he certainly never coveted fame. His humour connected with people because it was drawn from them.
“I’ve always admired ordinary people – the electrician, the nurse, the secretary. You’ll see them in the pub, roaring with laughter, not a comedian among them,” he says. “Ordinary people are great at comedy. They wish they could do it – they don’t know they can.”
A natural class clown, he fell into a puddle aged seven, and was so gratified by the other kids’ laughter that he decided to stay in a little longer. “When you’re vulnerable, you’re funny,” he says, “and most comedians have a darkness in their lives. You turn it to suit yourself – you’ve survived it and it gives you this comedy edge.”
Billy has darkness to spare. He was constantly belittled by his aunts, who resented having to raise him, regularly beaten by his schoolmasters, and sexually abused by his father.
“You can get rid of most of it,” he says of what he has endured, “but there’s a bit that will always stay with you. I hate watching afternoon television, when you see a woman on with her child who’s been sexually abused, and she’ll say ‘her life is ruined’, with this wee girl just sitting there.
“You have to be careful how you treat people, because they’ll come to ways to treat it themselves. I found it with forgiveness – once you forgive a person it floats away from you. You’re the victim – you should be free.”
Then and now, optimism is Billy’s default state.
“I was always a reader and a dreamer,” he says, “and had a great expectancy for the future. My dodgy past has affected everything I said or did, but it’s never depressed me.”
Aware that his stage days are behind him, Billy has had time to reflect on a career that will live long in many people’s memories.
Fame still blindsides him – “you don’t wake up famous, you wake up scratching yourself like everybody else” – and he’s never been one to chase accolades.
Twice topping Channel 4’s 100 Greatest Stand-Ups, Billy found the label simply added pressure, like carrying around a heavy rucksack.
He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2013, and insists it’s been “dead easy” to laugh about. He integrated the illness into his act, calling out the “symptom spotters”, and entering the stage to Jerry Lee Lewis’s Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.
“It’s like living with another guy, it’s weird,” says Billy. “My wife sleeps away from me because I punch her in the night. I recently went fishing in Utah with my son, and he said I was laughing and singing in my sleep. But the next night, I was fighting again. I have to choose where I sleep and who I sleep with very carefully.”
He breaks suddenly into a laugh. “That”, he says, eyes twinkling,
“is very good advice!”
Tall Tales And Wee Stories by Billy Connolly is published by John Murray Press, £20.