the times | Tuesday December 21 2021 3times2
Billy Connolly with
his wife, Pamela
Stephenson, and, left,
with Robbie Coltrane,
autobiography, Windswept & both in the early 1990s
Interesting, headed “F*** Political
Correctness”. Does it inhibit comedy?
“It certainly does. I was watching
television here in America about three
weeks ago and there was a comedy
show on. It was all black guys and
some black women and the audience
was black. It was in that wonderful
theatre in Harlem where everybody
great played. And the comedy was
unbelievably politically incorrect. It
was ridiculous the things they were
saying and it was a scream. The
audience were falling about. The
comedians were falling about. It was
just such a release to everybody to
speak your mind and f*** the
begrudgers. I enjoyed it immensely.”
So black comedians have a licence
that he wouldn’t? “That’s right. They
took the licence in both hands and
swung it above their heads and threw
it into the distance.”
His daughters, he says, “annihilate”
him when he makes a joke against
women, but he says that “those black
guys” taught him a lesson about saying
what you want. I don’t know which
side Stephenson takes in this family
argument, but I can guess. The pair
are an example of opposites attracting.
In her psychoanalytic 2001 book Billy
she describes him as a “survivor of
abuse whose psyche still bears the
scars”. In his memoir he complains
that she scolds him for having so
much anger that he leaves insufficient
room to be happy, but in the ITV film
he defends his anger, saying that, like
happiness and sadness, it is part of
how life is meant to be.
It is true, however, that in print he
rarely allows himself to be angry for
long. Some of his book’s shortest
passages tell of how his mother walked
out on him and his sister when hewas three and, later, how his father
sexually abused him between the
ages of 10 and 14. Writing about
these things led to days of depression.
“It’s away now, but it’s a bit of a pain
in the bum.”
So best not to think about it too
much? “That’s right. You just have to
get on with your life and tuck it away.”
Stephenson, I think, must sometimes
despair of her catharsis-resistant
case study, although by now she may
have conceded that Connolly’s dark
humour is not about fleeing his
demons but taking them on until
they fold, like the Swindon guy. It is
humour adopted from his early
co-workers, joking as they laboured
precariously above the Clyde. “I learnt
in the shipyards,” he writes, “that you
can be funny and profound.”
The book grants more space to his
sadistic aunt Mona, who was left to
bring him up and did so by making
him miserable as often as possible.
(She ended up in a mental institution,
which Connolly generously visited.)
What comes over strongly is how
even as a child he was able to process
the cruelties he suffered, reasoning
that, like the corporal punishments
inflicted by the nuns at his school,
they were absurd as well as unjust.
He was determined to be a good
parent. Today his three adult
daughters by Stephenson live close to
them in Key West. When his son,
Jamie, visits, he still kisses his father
good night.
“I was in that horrible stage of
childhood where every day is
somebody else’s idea,” Connolly says.
“Everything you do socially is
somebody else’s idea. How you dress is
somebody else’s idea. So occasionally
you get ideas of your own and they
are little presents to yourself.”Death?
Oh, that’s
nothing.
It’s a part
of life
you can’t
control
can’t play music — or yodel
The ideas he gave
himself remade him. He
dressed differently from
the other mohair-suited
young men in Glasgow,
for whom a pink shirt
was daring. His style
icon was Max Wall, not
Elvis Presley. He gained
status among the
shipbuilders by making
them laugh. “Archie
Fisher, the folk singer,
told me I was windswept
and interesting. So I
decided to live up to it.”
Yet Stephenson is
surely also right. Being
your own person and
laughing in the dark are
decent ripostes to a
screwed-up childhood, but
do not vanquish it. He tells
me something else about
sharing a bed with her.
“My wife wouldn’t sleep
with me any more because
I beat her up at night in my
sleep. I’d punch her. And
once — my favourite one,
this — I sneezed in her face
in the middle of the night.
I was a nightmare to sleep
with. I got a machine that
helped me to breathe in the night and
I reckoned I was cured, but Pamela
told me I wasn’t cured at all. It just
stopped me remembering it. We went
to a doctor here and he said he would
get me a new machine, but it hasn’t
turned up. So I’m still suffering.”
He dreams he is fighting? “I dreamt
the most violent things and acted
them out. I would fly out of the bed
onto the floor.”
He writes that after his mother left,
everything scared him, and that he
has remained scared all his life. What
scares him now? “It’s a constant
source of strangeness to me. I dream
about people coming up behind me
and I don’t know what they’re going
to do to me, but they’re attempting to
do something terrible.”
Perhaps death terrifies him? “Oh,
that’s nothing. It’s a part of life you
can’t control. It controls you, and
trying to control it is absurd. I’ve been
with people who died and they looked
perfectly happy. My father, when he
died, his eyes were yellow where
they should be white and he had
pneumonia and he was heavy
breathing, and then he stopped and
he started breathing normally, opened
his eyes and they weren’t yellow any
more, and he looked at Flo [Billy’s late
sister] and he looked at me, and he
shut his eyes and that was it. There’s
something peaceful and right and real
and good about death.”
He distrusts people who are happy
all the time. “There’s an edge to
happiness that looks like sadness
sometimes. Life is a mystery and it
should remain a mystery. The answer
is not that there’s an answer. The
answer is that there’s a path and you
find good things in the most
unaccustomed places. You’ll find out
that you’ve been happy all along.
Being happy isn’t what you pick up
from other people. Maybe it’s from
wearing funny clothes and shouting,
‘Ha, ha, ha.’ ”COVER: BRIAN SMITH/GUARDIAN/EYEVINE; BELOW: GETTY IMAGESThe lowdown
Ben Affleck
Billy Connolly: My
Absolute Pleasure is
on ITV at 9.30pm on
Boxing DayAre you ready?
For what?To get into it.
Into what? Game of Thrones?
Omicron data models? A deep,
dark hole of will-we-won’t-we
post-Christmas lockdown anxiety?A complex web of Hollywood
relationship drama.
That sounds so much more enticing.
Hit me.It begins with Ben Affleck.
Does it now?Yes. Then J-Lo gets involved.
Cripes, they haven’t split up again
have they?No. The world couldn’t cope. Not
least Christopher Lloyd.
Doc from Back to the Future?Yup! And he is a fan of Mr Affleck,
let me tell you. The pair co-star
in the upcoming George
Clooney-directed film The Tender
Bar and Lloyd has described
Affleck as “a wonderful actor”.
And why is that interesting? You
promised me salacious gossip!And you’ll get it when I tell you that
Lloyd also said that he doesn’t pay
much attention to Affleck’s “private
life”, which came under scrutiny
(again) of late when the actor made
a comment in an interview with
Howard Stern about his marriage
to ex-wife Jennifer Garner.
Low blow. Unless he was nice?He wasn’t. He said he felt “trapped”
in the marriage and he probably
still “would have been drinking”
had he remained in it (he has been
in and out of rehab, remember).
What a lovely thing to say about the
mother of your children, who has to
look at your PDA-filled relationship
with J-Lo all the time.Quite. He has since said that he was
misrepresented in the interview and,
on the subject of PDA, J-Lo came
to his defence, saying she “couldn’t
have more respect for Ben as a
father, a co-parent and a person”.
Perhaps she and Lloyd can co-chair
the Affleck fan club.Yes. Or the three of them can enter
into some kind of ménage à trois.
Ben-age à trois, more like.
Hannah RogersBen Affleck and
Jennifer Garner