Ken Bigley RIP

Billy Connolly can go back to talking about jobbies now.

so do the Anglo Saxons, viz. Iran-Contra.

I hope he rots in hell.

Explain.

I know it's a bit more complex in this case, but as a you should never ever give into hostage takers' demands. Use diplomacy behind the scenes, by all means, but actaully caving into demands just ends up with more lives lost.

Then again maybe not.

Billy Connolly sparked outrage when he joked about Ken Bigley, the hostage since murdered in Iraq, during his stand-up act. But couldn't it be argued that a real comedian has to take risks to be a radical critic of society, a wise man as well as a wise guy?

By Stewart Lee

During the Edinburgh Fringe Festival a few years ago, a cab driver asked me who my favourite stand-ups were. I mentioned Billy Connolly among the usual international top 10. The cab driver explained that he hated Billy Connolly because he was ''too English''. I didn't know what this meant exactly. Was it perhaps that Connolly had given money away to charity, rarely ate shortbread, and was no longer an alcoholic? Whatever, I understood being ''too English'' was not a good thing. Nevertheless, ''too English'' or not, Connolly remains one of my favourite comics, though as a stand-up comedian myself, and also as the son of a Scottish man I have never met, perhaps I see in Connolly some kind of idealised father figure, and would forgive him anything. Either way, even in the light of recent events, we Scots should be proud of Connolly and rally around him in his hour of need.
If the tabloids are to be believed, in the past week Connolly has committed an even worse crime than being ''too English''. Two inopportune comments about the Iraq hostage Ken Bigley have incurred the wrath of both his audience and a far more important group, namely journalists and opinion-formers who weren't actually at the Hammersmith Apollo gig where the outrage occurred. The assumed funniness or non-funniness of Connolly's comments is, of course, further complicated by the subsequent execution of Ken Bigley himself, adding an especially bleak coda to a previously not especially significant story that would perhaps otherwise have blown over.
Remember, it is not Billy Connolly's fault that Ken Bigley is dead. Don't make the Big Yin the receptacle for your misplaced anger. Given that we went into Iraq in defiance of UN regulations, international opinion and common sense, to transfer blame to a stand-up comedian while Blair and Bush remain in power, even when the WMD excuse has been entirely discredited and the subsequent liberation of Iraq so terribly mismanaged, is patently absurd. When writing comedy about real events, whether serious or trivial, there is an inherent risk of those same events overtaking you.
In 1999, my one-time double-act partner Richard Herring and I filmed a dozen sketches for BBC2 in which Rod Hull kept suffering fatal accidents due to having a false arm permanently wrapped around his Emu puppet. Three days before the first one was due to be broadcast, Rod Hull fell off a roof while adjusting a TV aerial and died. Luckily we had time to re-edit the show to avoid sullying the memory of a comedian we both greatly admired, and looking like we were chasing an adolescent notion of deliberate bad taste, but it was a close thing. Admittedly, Ken Bigley's beheading is more significant than Rod Hull's sudden and unexpected expiry, but it is important not to judge Connolly's comments in the light of Friday's news. Before pontificating on the rights and wrongs of what Connolly may or may not have said, let's remember what a special comedy case Scotland's best stand-up comedian actually
is.
Many comedians feign spontaneity. The actor, comedian and transvestite Eddie Izzard is a master of it, and one cannot help but be impressed by the way he makes tried and tested material sound as if it had literally just occurred to him. Personally, I like prepared material and have a huge admiration for the beautifully constructed routines of Victoria Wood, Reginald D Hunter or Glasgow's own Arnold Brown. But I also love seeing comics caught in the actual act of creation, and Connolly is one of a very small sub-section of stand-ups, including Ross Noble and Johnny Vegas, who will actually go on stage with no specific idea of what they are about to do. I doubt any of the above even owns a pencil, let alone a word processor. But this often ill-prepared spontaneity is both Connolly's major strength, in that you genuinely feel caught in a once-in-a-lifetime experience when watching him,
and his major weakness, in that his stand-up shows are all far too long, lack any shape or structure and, as with the Ken Bigley lines, sometimes charge headlong into complex areas that might have required more preparation.
Apparently the Bigley material was a bit Connolly had been toying with on previous nights during his London run. Whenever I am working up a new routine, especially if it involves controversial subjects, I try it out in small venues, within the context of new-material nights. I have a piece at the moment wherein I hold the crisp advertiser and footballer Gary Lineker accountable for the deaths of hundreds of obese children, and chased the idea around from many directions before it settled into an acceptable shape that drew disgust and laughs in equal measure, rather than just appalling everyone. But as a relative unknown with a sustainable and small cult following, I have the luxury of anonymity denied to Billy Connolly. Nothing I say will make the news. Nevertheless, I don't believe that the literally thousands of fabulous hours of stand-up that Connolly has generated out of thin air
are compromised or undermined by this one apparent error. And, arguably, the Bigley lines were not an error at all, but actually an essential part of what comedy is for.
There are jokes to be made about the Ken Bigley situation. The sickest, stupidest and most inexcusable ones are already being made by you, the public, privately, to each other, drunk in bars or via e-mails at work, while you simultaneously maintain a high moral tone in judging a professional comic's attempt to cover the same ground in a more intelligent and responsible fashion. And you know it. Cast the first stone, I dare you.

The best Ken Bigley jokes, like Chris Morris's Brass Eye paedophilia special, tell us something about our own hypocrisy and that of the newsgathering services we put our trust in. I believe that Connolly's lines, as reported in the press, allude to both these areas. In opining, ''Perhaps I shouldn't be saying this ... aren't you the same as me, don't you wish they would just get on with it?'', Connolly is referencing our inability to stick with a story, and the media's self-sustaining interest in spinning one out. Afghanistan is still a wreck, but we rarely see it reported any more. It's old, boring news. And global tragedies that unfold over years, rather than days, suffer a lack of public interest that aid-workers and fundraisers identify with the phrase ''compassion fatigue''. The line, ''What is it with him and that young Asian wife?'', I believe, deliberately addresses the fact that
whenever we see an elderly British businessman on TV with a young Asian woman it's usually in the context of a story about mail-order brides. This isn't to suggest that the Bigleys' marriage itself was anything but loving and genuine, but at least let us admit that an image our inherent racist suppositions have made us suspicious of is currently being represented to us as the emotive, human-interest angle in a bigger story.
Of course, Bigley's family, Connolly's audience and the press have every right to be upset by these lines, but Connolly has every right to say them. I directed Richard Thomas's Olivier Award-winning blasphemy musical Jerry Springer The Opera, which was performed at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2002. At the moment, Las Vegas hotels want to stage it but are caught in an unprecedented legal loop. After Linda Ronstadt criticised the Bush administration on stage in Vegas earlier this year, to some audience disapproval, casino owners are seeking to indemnify themselves against showcasing acts their customers may be offended by. Is this reactionary American cowardice a mood you want the UK to be engulfed by? Inevitably, challenging work won't get shown. There at least appears to be some righteous moral anger behind Connolly's comments, and an intelligence in identifying a danger area.
You don't have to be a student of comedy to realise that if the same lines had been said by the nation's favourite, Ricky Gervais, in the character of David Brent, with a small posse of office workers looking disapproving in the rear of the shot, they would have been consumed and analysed in an entirely different way. In The Office, Gervais's Brent character is a pantomime burlesque of the unacceptable in all of us, but we appreciate that it is a character. To his credit, Connolly didn't gloss the lines, put them in inverted commas, wear a costume in order to deliver them, or defuse them with the dramatic conceit of having some authority figure on stage to condemn him. He merely offers them up for our consideration, and in so doing credits us, wrongly it might now appear, with intelligence, judgement and some sense of irony.
But to get too bogged down in justifying Connolly's lines morally and intellectually is to miss a bigger point. Namely, should comedy need to be morally and intellectually justified anyway? What Connolly did at Hammersmith, and did brilliantly, was to say exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time. He has a genius for inappropriate behaviour. It's not such a long journey from what journalists are already calling Bigleygate back to Connolly's 1975 Parkinson appearance, when he joked about a Glaswegian man burying his wife with her bum sticking out of the earth so that he would have somewhere to park his bike. Parkinson wept. My mum wet her pants. And, the sterling work of The Beatles and Monty Python notwithstanding, it was finally clear that the 1950s were at last over. It is moments like this that bring that stand-up comedian close to the status of the holy fool.
In the year 2000 I finally brought a mild obsession with Native American clowns to a close, having stayed on the Hopi reservation in Arizona and seen the pueblos and plazas where they would have performed. I'd been researching a novel set in the region, but became sidelined for two years by a fascination with the pueblo clowns, part holy men, part fools. Soon afterwards I gave up stand-up for three years, due in part, though not exclusively, to anxieties about my own role raised by my reading. The Hopi clown's function was to manufacture inappropriate behaviour. The clowns would spend months studying the social tensions of their pueblo before, on special feast days, exploding them with carefully considered transgressive acts - simulated sexual assaults, absurd interruptions to sacred ceremonials, parodies of their oppressors' Christian services, incoherent reinterpretations of the life of
Christ and obscene scatological acts. The American army officer John G Bourke's 1881 pamphlet The Urine Dance Of The Zuni Indians Of New Mexico was one of many texts that led to the invading powers' active suppression of the pagan comedians of the pueblos, driving the clowns literally underground. Likewise, in 1975, Connolly, who had previously urinated on stage whilst dressed as the Pope, was escorted to a Belfast theatre by armed policemen. And now he's under siege once more.
But look at the Native American model. In those close-knit communities, perched on the high mesas, the pueblo clowns pushed at the limits of socially acceptable behaviour and showed the people, for better or worse, what lay beyond. Great comedy can act as both a social barometer and a social pressure valve. Connolly, more than any other performer in recent months, has shown that.
Our sympathies must go out to Ken Bigley's family. But we must also back Billy. Increasingly, opinions are manufactured and distributed by the same giant media machine: broadcasters like Fox are in bed with the Bush administration and, post-Hutton Inquiry, the BBC is running scared from the might of the Blair government. On some small level, people like Billy Connolly stick a spanner in the spokes and, just for a moment, make us aware of the mechanism. Nowadays we need him more than ever. Support your local wiseman.

2. The 1950s were ended by the 1960s.

3. It doesn't seem to have occurred to Stewart Lee that even when he's improvising, Billy Connolly as Billy Connolly is just as much 'in role' as Ricky Gervais as David Brent, and also that the commentariat is 'in role' when attacking Connolly in role as Connolly.

4. 'Don't you wish they'd just get on with it?' isn't really a very funny joke either.

5. Peter Cook was a very funny man, but unlike Billy Connolly, unfortunately, he's dead.

6. Gary Glitter might be able to offer Billy Connolly some tips about nice retirement spots.

7. Billy Connolly's hairstyle is a crime against humanity:

http://images.google.com/images?q=tbn:z2ysg_LThfUJ:hem.passagen.se/mrprofit/bilder/billyconnolly.gif

8. As a Scot, I agree with the taxi-driver who thought that Billy Connolly is 'too English'.

the humour lies in the idea of saying something so 'outrageous' combined with the suspicion that enough people deep down are thinking something along those lines.

he should've just started a meme on stage revolving around the names of chocolate bars instead tho. comedy (all)gold!

I don't get the bit about "giving money away to charity", what's he trying to imply exactly? Connolly was definitely funnier on the booze than off it - bit like Mark E. Smith being better on amphetamine sulphate than off it.

Sure comedians may have to take risks, but if they fail so stupendously then they fail as comedians.

"I believe that Connolly's lines, as reported in the press, allude to both these areas. In opining, ''Perhaps I shouldn't be saying this ... aren't you the same as me, don't you wish they would just get on with it?'', Connolly is referencing our inability to stick with a story, and the media's self-sustaining interest in spinning one out. Afghanistan is still a wreck, but we rarely see it reported any more. It's old, boring news. And global tragedies that unfold over years, rather than days, suffer a lack of public interest that aid-workers and fundraisers identify with the phrase ''compassion fatigue''. The line, ''What is it with him and that young Asian wife?'', I believe, deliberately addresses the fact that
whenever we see an elderly British businessman on TV with a young Asian woman it's usually in the context of a story about mail-order brides."

this passage cuts connolly rather too much slack. a pretty rose-tinted view of some bluntly insensitive comments. the fact that taking risks can provide great comedy doesn't justify *every* risk a comedian takes.

you see this is bollocks too, he's referencing our inability to stick with a story by calling us out for eh......STICKING WITH THE STORY.

The Bigley joke was disgusting and simply unfunny. I hope this ends the wretched bastard's career. The Thai wife thing... wrong thing to say at the wrong time. Yes, older wealthy Brits go to Bangkok to pick up and marry younger women. Yes, there is a wealth of potential jokes in this. But not at the expense of someone who has now been beheaded.

i thought that was just a movie...

Bigley article angers Liverpool
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/merseyside/3746588.stm

I hear that the next celebrity the Tories are trying to attract to their side is Michael Owen.

the plethora of mouthy Scots gits who have descended, hyena-like, on this thread...

We only kill our own. Then we eat them with our mouthy mouths. But if Connolly's on the menu, I'm going vegetarian.

Lee's article seems to miss a couple of points - comedians can be shocking but they still have to be funny, and not everything unpleasant can be written off with the 'irony' tag.