Live at the Hammersmith Odeon

Billy Connolly’s method here is pure digressive momentum: an opening crack about Carol Thatcher walking out of an earlier show wanders into Rottweilers, pit bulls treated like sharks on leashes, and twenty minutes on the domestic horror of synthetic Crimpolene trousers. He does not set up punchlines so much as start talking, get sidetracked by a grotesque image, and chase it until the audience gives up trying to predict where the story is headed.

Filmed during an extended run at London’s Hammersmith Odeon in June 1991 and released on video later that year, the show caught Connolly right as he was crossing over to American television on the sitcom Head of the Class. Despite that impending shift toward broader US fame, the set on stage is unapologetically coarse and local.

The backbone of the set rests on Scottish stoicism colliding with bodily indignity. He recounts childhood trips where boys were herded into the grey, freezing North Sea, then balances them against the misery of a sunburned, food-poisoned holiday to Spain.