What ye laughing it?

Despite such difficult origins, Billy soon discovered his gift for making people laugh, while serving an apprenticeship as a welder in the Clyde shipyards. While it was music that provided his first entrance into showbiz, playing the banjo in a band called The Humblebums (alongside Gerry Rafferty, incidentally), Billy soon noticed that audiences loved his between-song banter. So when the band split up in 1970, he decided to go solo as a comedian - and never looked back.

From Govan to Hollywood, Billy has of course come a long way. Paradoxically, his gallows humour and x-rated material has not stopped him from becoming a firm, almost cozy, establishment figure, resulting in the recent award of a CBE. Despite behaving himself in front of the Queen, Billy still managed to turn the air blue after the ceremony, ticking off a photographer who attempted to take his award out of the box with the words: "Get the f*** away from my medal. F*** off."

Oops, I did it again

Despite his recent acting success in the film "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events", 2004 was a rather dark year for Connolly. Vilified by an outraged tabloid press (with whom he has battled for years) for his off-the-cuff comments regarding Ken Bigley at a live show in London, Billy was forced to apologise for his remarks, despite the fact that he believes his words were taken out of context. "Someone's taken that out of the building and printed it flat on a piece of paper, and they've printed it wrong" he recently told The Guardian.

No doubt he'll bounce back. The Big Yin has made a career out of laughing in the face of propriety, proving time and again with wit and intellect that he's far more than just a larger-than-life swearing Scottish shock-monger. As this quote shows:
"Who discovered we could get milk from cows? And what the f*** did he think he was doing at the time?"