Comedy review: Billy Connolly, The Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Published on Friday 18 September 2009 10:39

BILLY CONNOLLY **** THE USHER HALL, EDINBURGH

CALL it shock tactics or simply ingratiating yourself to the locals. But after a few early technical gremlins with the sound, from which he drew much mimed amusement, Glasgow's most famous son began this super-fragmented show ("because I haven't worked in ages") by outing himself as an Edinburgher.

Granted, he'd only actually traced a further branch of his family tree. But Billy Connolly hollered his outrage at excesses of the tram system and Holyrood as if he'd never decamped to Hollywood.

Somehow, the still sprightly – and in one memorable routine, moonwalking – 66-year-old manages to remain both a Force of Nature and Everyman, or at least, EveryScot.

Striding on to the stage before a mocked-up image of him as Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, this was vitriolic Scotsman, his peerless mastery of swearing demonstrated with a tour-de-force deconstruction of the appropriate rhythms and metre to employ when abusing a plumber. His seemingly spontaneous inability to deliver a straightforward anecdote may seem almost quaint now, grandfatherly even. But this scarcely credible increase in his meandering suits his advancing years and there's a real joy in witnessing how a routine that was petering out suddenly bursts alive again.

With his deeply personal, unabashed style, last night's material on cursing and his wilfully jingoistic, just-the-right-side-of-ironic foreigner bashing might seem like staples of the contemporary stand-up circuit. But he created this in large part and truly bestrides the generations of live comedy, endearingly acknowledging admiration for Chic Murray in a couple of lovely anecdotes.

Connolly's undiminished capacity for mischief and sheer exuberance suggest he'll be entertaining us for a while yet.