Billy Connolly Windswept & Interesting: My Autobiography (Review)
My
wife bought me this book as a wee surprise. Pure dead brilliant so it is - paradoxically! Now, if you
ordered a fish supper with two pickles from the Ubiquitous Chip, you’d know exactly
what you were getting. Same with this book. What I mean is this: If all its
sexual references, profanity, and blasphemy were to be edited, then much of the book would be like trying to read one of those redacted FBI documents. Each
page would resemble a Queens Park Rangers’ jersey, horizontal black and white
stripes.
On
the upside, Billy doesn’t do sexual innuendo. The downside is that he doesn’t
leave any of that sex stuff to your imagination. Billy’s “inhibiter” is broken.
It’s like a comedian form of Tourette syndrome. “Much later, I discovered that
blurting out whatever was on my mind could make people laugh. It’s what I’ve
done as a comedian since the beginning… But as a boy, not having a filter often
got me in trouble.” p. 94. Aye his tics are really funny and often very insightful.
When
we were wee, when reading a book, we would just miss out any big words we
didn’t understand. Some people just say “wheelbarrow” whenever a big word
exposes their vocabulary as limited. Having an “inhibitor” that usually works,
I heard myself saying “wheelbarrow” often with all the !@1#*! etc., but hoping that this noisy flush as
it were would not drown out too much of the toilet humour. Billy Connolly is
too funny to let pernickety (wheelbarrow?) tastes spoil a good meal. Just leave
the Brussel sprouts to one side if you don’t like them.
Billy
is a master of observation, of both human nature and nature nature. He
describes what he sees how he sees it, from skydiving to scuba diving. This autobiography takes you from his troubled and horrendous upbringing in Glasgow to the
four corners of the globe, (to use a mixed metaphor).
His
formative years at school, where he was inoculated against the gospel, are filled
with dark humour. The story of his home life is worse than Dickensian. The book
is full of self-psychoanalysis with some help here and there from his wife,
Pamela.
Billy
has put Glasgow on the map. He is a great ambassador for Scotland. He is a
legend by his own design!
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