Billy Connolly is wrong to say Scottish humour doesn't exist

It’s obviously a wild generalisation and designed to provoke a response, and if there is one thing we know about the Big Yin it’s that he knows how to push the right buttons in a nation with a notoriously thin skin.

Scotland has a unique and definable sense of humour and Connolly himself has been one of its greatest architects. Our humour is often disrespectful of status, rough round the edges and passionately in love with the idiosyncrasies of language, especially the words that you shouldn’t use in the front room.

At the heart of Connolly’s argument is a truism that is worth reflecting on. He is a believer in the universal journey of comedy as it soars above local, regional or national constraints to reach out to audiences everywhere. But universality does not eradicate comedy’s roots nor does it mean that great comedy must be universal.

Here’s where we agree. Take Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times playing the diminutive everyman battered by social forces bigger than himself. It is a universal theme that you can trace across the 20th century, in the work of the great Czech novelist Jaroslav Hasek, whose character The Good Soldier Shweick is similarly universal.

Schweick is a diminutive and incompetent soldier whose uselessness protects him as armies trample and grenades explode around his feet. A universal love of the little guy is visible in the Mr Bean franchise, a cartoon catastrophe who can barely get out of bed without inviting chaos.

All of them are variations of the hapless little man fighting the travails of the world. The theme is clearly visible in Rab C Nesbitt too, but for all the archetypal similarities linking Chaplin, Shweik, Mr Bean or Rab, only one of them wears a semmit and lives in the ghostly remains of the Govan shipyards.

That is the root of Nesbitt’s universality, but to admit that there are universal characters is a far cry from denying local context or cultural specificity.

Ironically, it was Billy Connolly himself who offered up a very different vision of the downtrodden worker, one who towered over his bosses, brought mirth to shipyards and marvelled at the con-men, storytellers and radical poets who worked alongside him on the Clyde. In a surreal way. Connolly and his characters stood up to power rather than accept his embattled role.

Localising the universal was what Connolly did best. He would cringe at the thought that he was the master of a great legacy, but in this case, cringe he must.

The Passion of Jesus Christ is one of the great narratives of the Christian world, celebrated throughout Europe and Latin America and rendered epic in the medieval mystery plays, the paintings of Albrecht Durer and most recently in Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion. But by far, the most salient representation in my lifetime was when Billy Connolly broke with Christian convention and set the Last Supper in Glasgow.

It is difficult to think of a universal story so deeply saturated in Scottish attitudes. It brought the divine into a landscape of decay. It was disruptive and anti-authoritarian, challenging the Catholic church and the ragbag of orange bigots that used to protest outside Connolly’s controversial concerts.

His monologue drew on scatological public house humour and raw unvarnished story-telling. The language was indigenous to Glasgow, placing a once revered parable into the local vernacular. The phrase “Jaggy bunnet right on the heid” became Connolly’s descriptor of the moment that Jesus is tortured by a crown of thorns.

It was uniquely Scottish not simply linguistically, but in the way that it set out to vulgarise the precious and ransack convention.

THE Crucifixion was a mind-blowing, ground-breaking and iconoclastic landmark in modern Scottish comedy. It cleared a path for Frankie Boyle’s political savagery, Kevin Bridges’s keen observations of Scottish life and Janey Godley’s stairheid denunciations of Donald Trump and Theresa May. The influence is there again in Chris McQueer’s Hings, short stories populated with surreal council house characters caught up in madcap circumstances.

Such was the power of Connolly’s localness that it never travelled particularly well. The Crucifixion had only a marginal impact outwith Scotland, where it circulated underground like a banned record, hidden away from parents and posh neighbours.

It was punk before the word was in widespread usage and so, despite his own argument, Connolly has gifted one of the most compelling examples of truly original Scottish comedy.

Scotland even has a sub-genre of jokes that defy Connolly’s argument – jokes that only Scots would understand. In the main they are jokes predicated on language and pronunciation. A woman goes to the dentist and sits on the chair. The dentist says “comfy?” And she says “Govan”. What do you do if you find a trumpet in your garden? “Root-it-toot.” There are 10 cows in a file, which is nearest to the Middle East? “Coo-Eight.”

Even the most banal jokes we learned as children carry the promise of daftness yet to come. What’s the difference between Bing Crosby and Walt Disney? Bing Sings and Walt Disnae. I’ve tried to decode the joke for relatives abroad and it collapses under the weight of explanation.

Connolly’s argument allowed him to return to a now well-worn cliche that all jokes have their roots in the stoicism of Jewish humour. It works in theory, until you remember the opening line of the great Arnold Brown’s set. “My name is Arnold Brown. I’m Scottish and Jewish. Two stereotypes for the price of one. What a bargain.”

Yes, there are jokes that are common around the world and gags which mutate from one culture to another, but there are also endless jokes about meanness, stupidity and mother-in-laws, which derive their reputation not so much from “universal humanity” but from power and an ugly hatred.

Watch how the stereotype mutates – in central Scotland the mean, skinflint character might be from Aberdeen. In London, he might be from Scotland, and in large swathes of central Europe, he was historically Jewish. The joke mutates, but the underlying power and contempt remains the same.

Equally, jokes about stupidity have often said more about the teller than the joke itself. Who can forget that famous postcard image of Bernard Manning onstage starting a joke about a “thick Paddy” when projected behind him were the names of famous intellectuals – Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, Heaney et al.

In the years when Bernard Manning was at his risible height, the IRA had taken its war to England, and so discrimination against the Irish was permissible in large parts of public life. Although “thick Paddy” jokes spread globally, in America the Poles became the victims. Far from being a sign “universal humanity”, they were a product of social breakdown.

Similarly, “dumb blonde” jokes began to appear simultaneously with the rise of feminism and reflect a cultural yearning among some men to put women back in their box.

I am one of Billy Connolly’s greatest fans and when I listen to The Crucifixion I can even forgive his bizarre detours into Highland sycophancy and royal brown-nosing, but arguing that there is no such thing as Scottish humour is to deny his own formidable role in our national creativity.