Review: Billy Connolly at the Seattle Rep
"I'll come back to that in a minute...or I may not." - Billy Connolly is a meandering joy.
Connolly wears a neatly trimmed goatee and long, flowing white hair. He looks more like an aging biker than a comedian. The crowd mirrored him: we heard numerous Scottish, English, and Irish accents before the show, and saw many red heads and gray beards. We sat next to a man who looked like Billy Connolly's elder brother, if he'd been American: aging, hairy, wearing leather and clutching a glass of scotch in his gigantic hand.
Connolly took the stage late, but we were ready to wait. The moment the lights went down, the crowd greeted Connolly with a spontaneous round of "Hello, Billy!" The applause was deafening when he finally stepped out from behind the curtain, a gigantic drawing of himself as Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. Connolly wore his trademark outfit onstage: black-and-white striped pants and a t-shirt with the back a good foot longer than the front. We kept wondering where he bought his clothes.
Here's the key thing to understand about Billy Connolly's stand-up comedy: He laughs at his own jokes, but that's not a bad thing. There are some comedians who are simply infuriating when they laugh at themselves, but Connolly's not one of them: He's a raconteur: he tells stories to amuse himself. Luckily, those stories are also immensely amusing to everyone else. Sometimes he couldn't continue because he was doubled over in laughter.
You may go into a Billy Connolly show thinking of him as a professional entertainer who carefully crafts his act, but you'll leave the show thinking of him more as a beloved uncle -- the dirty-mouthed funny one whom you and your cousins couldn't get enough of at Thanksgiving. This isn't to say that Connolly isn't a professional, but that he's someone to whom the act just comes.
Like any true raconteur, Connolly is led by his stories: Last night his jokes veered wildly. He took five minutes to tell a short joke about Cialis advertisements, but it wasn't because he was stumbling or having a bad night. He just kept being reminded of new jokes to tell us on the way.
There was something intensely riveting to it. The audience followed his stream of consciousness willingly. The willy-nilly paths his jokes and stories took were a joy to participate in. Connolly was dirty and explicit and agressive (he answered any attempt at heckling with a deft "Go fuck yourself!") but he was but intensely likable. The digressions worked. He digressed, and then digressed from the digression, and we followed him at every turn. Every so often he'd pull the story back on track, saying "I'll come back to that in a minute...or I may not." Thoughts came to him and he told them to us almost as if he'd been struck by comedic lightning. He went over time, and the crowd ate it up.
