Whoopi Goldberg Presents: Billy Connolly

This performance of Billy Connolly live at the Brooklyn Academy of Music was recorded for broadcast on the American channel HBO, presumably as part of a series in which Whoopi Goldberg would use her celebrity status to introduce a different famous comedian each week and then walk on stage to kiss them at the end and share in their applause. Broadcast in 1989, this relatively short set of around forty minutes is Billy at his best, holding nothing back for the television cameras and allowing his mind to flit freely between topics with his customary lack of direction and without any pretence that this material has been prepared or selected especially for the occasion.

That’s one of the things that marks Billy out from the other famous stand-ups, as apart from his unique stage presence and ability to grip the audience with the most humdrum or scatological of stories, he has a genuine, natural talent to spin material off the cuff, or at least decide on a rough set of topics he wants to talk about and fill in the precise wording later. Taking the audience on a journey that begins in their local New York, travels out to Mozambique and ends in the unpleasant intimacy of Billy’s home toilet bowl, every movement of this meandering, sweary symphony really is the comic at the height of his ability, and would doubtless be quoted endlessly as his other shows tend to be if only it had been officially released over here.

There is a clear foundation for all of this material in the broad topic of air travel, which I found quite fascinating, but I’ll avoid the temptation to amateurishly dissect it and thus drain it of all its comedic energy, much as I want to in a way. The air travel theme seems to act as a means for Billy to keep track of where he’s going, however far he veers from the source, and it’s clearly helped him to generate his usual mix of clever observations, angry philosophising and toilet humour. Oh no, there I go. The show begins with the clean-shaven comedian app...