Billy Connolly

Gerry’s passing had a profound effect on Billy. ‘I loved him very much when he died,’ said Billy. ‘I was texting him, and the sicker he got the more deeply I loved him and realized all the good he’d done me in my life. He was so helpful for my head, and the way I thought about myself. It gave me great pleasure to make him laugh when he was sick. I reminded him of some of the funny things we had done when we were performing together, and he was laughing on his death bed. I’m very, very proud of that. I saw him off and said my goodbyes properly, laughing on the phone. I knew that he knew I loved him. And he told me he loved me. He said I was the funniest man in the world. It was Gerry who made me think like an artist. He said: “What you do is art. You’ve got to think of it like that. So when you apply Oscar Wilde’s ideas, it’s for you, and not necessarily for everyone else. If you do it for yourself, that’s where you hit the heights.” When I lose control on stage and start laughing I’m at my happiest as far as the art goes. If I think it’s funny, it fucking is. It’s very selfish; I’m doing it for me. That’s what Gerry taught me.’

But how on earth did Billy, a welder in the Clyde River shipyards, manage to break out of the life he was expected to follow, leap onto the folk scene as a banjo player and singer with Gerry in The Humblebums, then segue into a comical banjoist, before his metamorphosis into Billy Connolly the stand-up comedian? And on top of that, how did he then find his way to American television, thence to some of the top film jobs Hollywood had to offer? Marry the prettiest cast member of Not the Nine O’Clock News? And now a visual artist no less? Astounding. I can only reiterate what I penned to end the original Introduction:

Billy’s real story is an utterly triumphant one. Not a day has passed since I met him thirty years ago without my shaking my head and marvelling at his miraculous survival of profound childhood trauma. His ability to sustain himself beyond those days is equally impressive, for once he was known to the world, another challenge presented itself: to survive the trauma of fame. Every person who comes to public attention experiences an alienation of self, the formation of a deeply unsettling chasm between his true inner self and his public persona. The danger lies not in the confusion of those two, as is commonly thought, but in the widening gulf between them. Fortunately, Billy’s survival skills ever sustain him. When I first asked the essential, penetrating question of how he always managed to summon the resources to turn trauma into triumph, I was hoping for insight and a lucid explanation. What I got was: ‘Well, I didn’t come down the Clyde on a water biscuit.’

The following is an attempt at a sensible answer.

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