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Billy Connolly has fond memories of Canada dating back to the 1970s
Nick Patch,
The Canadian Press
27/10/2010[/align]
TORONTO - Billy Connolly still has fond memories of the emphatic embrace he first received from Canadian audiences nearly 40 years ago. It was the early 1970s and the Glasgow comic had just endured a nightmarish seven-week stint performing at a Boston bar, the Harp & Bard, the logo for which was a harp with Robert Burns' head on top ("I should've known better when I saw a beheaded Scotsman," Connolly laments).
He remembers doing material he hated to a hostile crowd. And then he headed north. "I left and came straight to Toronto to McVeigh's, the Irish bar down in Cabbagetown," Connolly said during a recent interview. "I was instantly successful. And I'll never forget it, the relief of: 'Yeah, I'm good. It was a fluke. It was them. It was their fault. It isn't you. It's stayed with me. The relief of that and the joy of it and the welcome I got there, has stayed with me. And it's never gone away."
The 67-year-old will launch an 11-city Canadian tour on Tuesday in Hamilton. It will wrap Nov. 26 with the second of two shows in Vancouver. He'll hardly be venturing into new territory. He explored every corner of Canada for his 2008 travelogue "Journey to the Edge of the World," which was released on DVD and as a book. The trip saw Connolly begin along the East Coast before traversing the Northwest Passage and ending along the coast of B.C.
The trip would also have been an obvious place to mine jokes for the upcoming tour. So, of course, Connolly wasn't interested. "I tend not to think that way," he says over tea at a Toronto cafe. "I don't say: 'Ooh, I must write that down and use it on stage.' ... For years and years, I've taken notes I've never used. I have books of notes that I've never, ever used. Sometimes they come in handy for like a talk show, a little anecdote maybe, but they never, ever make it to the stage. It's a different kind of humour. The things that I think when I'm out on the street are different from the things I think when I'm onstage. They're a different animal. So I don't think along those lines."
Trying to steer a conversation with the animated, excitable Connolly in any particular direction feels a bit like trying to keep a group of young children in an orderly line as they visit an amusement park. Even when he tries to focus on a specific question, the friendly Scot allows his attention to wander down whichever rabbit holes he comes across.
During a roughly 30-minute discussion, he rages against the wasteful spending of the Scottish government, the disdainful attitude of non-smokers and the newfound rigidity of late-night talk-show interviews. Even the term "common sense" sets him off on an entertaining mini-rant.
"I hate common sense and I hate people who claim to have it," he said. "It's as if there's a big pool of it just outside the village and they've got a ladle, they can help themselves to this wisdom. It's usually insincere BS and selfish, you know?"
He also finds fertile comic soil when discussing the three daughters he has with wife Pamela Stephenson. The family lives in New York, which Connolly finds prohibitively expensive. "Iam sort of a walking ATM machine, and I'm operated by sound," he said. "There are two kinds of 'dads' in the world," he adds, before mimicking his daughters' voices. "One is 'DAD,' and that's: 'Have you seen my socks?' or 'have you borrowed my pen?' or 'did you move that CD?' The other one is 'Daaaaad,' and that's the money one. That's the worst. That's followed by $20 bills mysteriously appearing from a slit in my rib cage."
Of course, spontaneity is an essential ingredient in Connolly's comedy. Onstage, his rambling stories seem to get funnier as they grow more disjointed, unpredictable and meandering. He says his best onstage moments are unplanned, but he can't leave everything up to chance, so he has some material prepared in case things aren't going well on a particular night.
And he's made a habit of miking the audience, so he can feed off their reaction. "I don't know what it is I get from them but I know that when I'm not getting it, I feel like I'm dying," he said.
Yet he says he doesn't always have to be funny for a successful show. "Sometimes it's good to see a guy not being dull, but not being funny all the time like a loony, like a clown, like a jack in the box and you press a button and he hops up and gives you a funny," said Connolly, who has a role in the upcoming 3D family film "Gulliver's Travels."
"Sometimes it's good to hear a guy just being interesting, or being sad and sorry about something, or angry about something. Just being himself. Because generally, it's quite an interesting guy who tours the world, he's an adult, he's in show business for a living, he'll have something. It might not be a thigh-slapper, but it might make you think for the rest of your life."
Connolly is among a small club of comics who can lay claim to a successful comedy career spanning more than four decades. He traces the root of his success back to his childhood.
"I was lucky because I was a kind of funny schoolboy, and then I was a funny boy scout, and a funny apprentice, and a funny welder," he said. "Because I was surrounded by funny people, I was very, very lucky. And then I became a funny comedian. But so many guys leave school and become a comedian and they go to clubs and they (do) photo-op comedy. It's sound bite comedy. You're given eight minutes. You know, it takes me eight minutes just to get to the microphone. You can't do an awful lot with eight minutes. So they write for eight minutes, and it does them for a long time, and then they write another eight.
"And so, you can tell what's coming and so it becomes old-fashioned. Whereas you can't tell what's coming with me because I don't know. And if I don't know, you don't know. You know?"
