COMEDY REVIEW : A WEE BIT OF VIVID SCOTTISH HUMOR

Billy Connolly is a comedian whose hail-fellow-well-met presence has been fondly welcomed by the United Kingdom rock establishment (he was featured on the Live Aid program). He’s a Scot, and a former welder and folk singer, qualities that alone would hardly lead us to great expectations toward a night of bust-out laughter. After all, what can we look forward to hearing about those wild and crazy people in Glasgow?

The answer, as was seen in Connolly’s stop at the Mayfair Thursday, is plenty. Glasgow isn’t the sole subject of Connolly’s delivery--though he offers vivid notes on those wee fat Glasgow women who aren’t really fat at all but wear fat hand-me-down coats buttoned at the neck, and mannered provincial entertainers who sing longingly of Scotland as if they weren’t standing in the middle of it.

Connolly, a slender man with longish light brown hair and a Van Dyke and dressed in a harlequin shirt, black slacks and raspberry spats, looks like an off-duty fifth musketeer. He was absolutely inscrutable in the face of the raucous, boozy yelling and laughter of expatriate Britishers whose homesickness was agitated by his appearance and by the incessant trickle of empty beer bottles rolling down the aisle toward the stage.

He is, after all, U.K. And he is a young person’s comedian. He’s quite familiar, as he vividly shows us, with the miserable falling-down drunk, where one clutches the toilet, “calling God on the big white telephone.”

He is also a first-rate storyteller, who acts out and embellishes his tales with a vividness that draws you closer to the campfire (he never finishes his tale of visiting Nepal to play in an elephant polo match, but after visualizing the varieties of omnivorous beasts and creepy-crawlies that surround and invade his hotel, you’re glad to see him alive). He has a poet’s sense of imagery--Aberdeen’s harshness is forever defined by the Mohican hair style plastered to the side of one’s skull by the wind. And he has an actor’s ebullience and visceral sense of how to play a crowd.

Thanks to Connolly, we know now that there is a genus of Scottish canine known as “the brown dog” or “the (expletive deleted) dog,” which doesn’t sniff anything or stop to cock its leg anywhere, or to mate, but trots on with purposeful Scottish single-mindedneness toward a destination no one knows.

Connolly, here for two nights as part of a national tour, has energy and engaging presence. Although some of his references are chancy (plane crash jokes are not funny right now, nor are references to the mentally handicapped) and his language is rough (he does, after all, have his welder’s flashbacks, as when he stands on a showroom carpet that is four times as expensive as his house), he’s free of any drug references, and his carnal notes are of the No-Sex-Please-We’re-British school of corporal fastidiousness--the big sex scene in his act is something overheard in a hotel room.

He gave generously of himself opening night. He is well worth standing a pint for, anytime he wants to come back.