TALL TALES AND WEE STORIES

Funny, furious and foul-mouthed just as you'd expect, this Sunday Times bestselling autobiography is Billy Connolly's raucous run through his life. After 50 years of belly laughs, energy and outrage, and somewhat baggy pants and very long hair, Billy Connolly announced his retirement from live stand up comedy in December 2018. When he first started out in the late 60s he played banjo in the folk clubs of Scotland and between songs would improvise a bit, telling anecdotes from the Clyde shipyard where he had worked. He learned what audiences found funny from his own brilliant mimes to the power of speaking irreverently about politics or explicitly about sex, and soon the monologues got longer and the songs shorter. He never wrote scripts and created comedy freshly on stage in the presence of a live audience. Always with a beautiful sense of the absurd he riffed on his family, hecklers, swimming in the North Sea or naked bungee jumping, and he got away with it, his comedy spanning generations and different social tribes. 330pp.