Rise to Fame
A 1975 joke about a wife murdered and buried bottom-up so her husband had somewhere to park his bike wasn't the kind of material BBC primetime expected. Billy Connolly had been a Glasgow welder before joining the folk duo the Humblebums with Gerry Rafferty, and stand-up had crept into his act gradually. But that single Parkinson appearance turned him into a star. His formula wasn't a formula at all, just long, roaming stories that followed their own logic, from shipyard to punchline without a joke structure in sight.
In the Spotlight
He retired from live performing in 2018 as Parkinson's disease made touring impossible. He got diagnosed with both Parkinson's and prostate cancer in 2013, but the cancer responded to treatment. The Parkinson's, as he's put it, 'just rumbles along, doing its thing.' Queen Elizabeth II knighted him in 2017, and BAFTA gave him a fellowship in 2022. Since retiring he's established himself as a visual artist, and says art made his life 'magical at a time when I thought it would be unbearable.'
Side Notes
His mother walked out when he was four, while his father was away serving in Burma. He and his sister were taken in by two aunts in a cramped Glasgow tenement. He had decided he wanted to be a comedian by age 12, but spent the next decade in shipyards anyway. The working-class Glasgow outsider he performed on stage wasn't a persona, it was just him. Known as 'The Big Yin' since his folk music days, the banjo never fully gave way to the microphone in how he thought about himself.