Helpless with laughter-making

By WARREN GAMBLE

Laughter trails Billy Connolly like a cloud.

Even when he's talking about something serious it hovers expectantly, threatening to break and drench everyone within earshot.

It speaks volumes - and Connolly sure can - that he steps off a 12-hour flight from Los Angeles at 8.30am on a grey Auckland morning and is still tears-in-your-eyes funny.

That may be part of his job, but you get the feeling he just can't help it. With that wild hair, wide eyes and Glaswegian brogue, he's a danger to your sides.

Which makes it hard to interview the 60-year-old Scots comedian and actor, in New Zealand to star as an American soldier with Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai, being filmed in Taranaki.

You become another audience. I gave away trying to write notes early on, and later the television cameraman was laughing like a donkey and the newspaper photographer could not focus.

That was when Connolly was asked about the Scots' reputation for economy.

"We're tight as two coats of paint," he says warming to the theme.

"We're the only people in the world who watch pornography backwards just to see the hooker giving the guy the money back."

Connolly laughs along, and then switches to a historic explanation for the miserly cliche.

It came, he says, from a Victorian-era building collapse that nearly bankrupted the city of Aberdeen and led to a prudence pilloried by the Music Hall entertainers of the day.

In self-defence, Connolly says, Scots collect jokes to show they can laugh at the image. Things like "copper wire was invented by two Scotsmen fighting over a penny" or "the Scotsman who dropped a 10p piece and he bent down to pick it up and it hit him in the back of the head".

We digress, though, because Connolly's humour is far more than a collection of jokes.

It is, in fact, one big digression; a freeform stream of offbeat consciousness, absurd notions, outrageous statements - with the odd friendly expletive or five thrown in.

On the America's Cup: "I don't give a ... about the America's Cup. I have tried to understand it but I think it's rich people being excessively boring.

"They sail in a straight line and they turn a corner and everybody gets excited and I think ... don't you get out much?"

It will, he says, never replace sex or football (he is a big Celtic fan).

On George W. Bush: "He's just another numpty in a long line of numpties. He's replaced a fat liar, and he replaced the numpty's father and he was another liar obsessed with secrecy."

On airport security: "One of the questions they ask you is, 'Do you have earth with you?' I say I never leave home without a big bag of earth, yeah, and pockets full of gravel and a big bag of horseshit. I don't know about you.

"It's a terrible time to be a comedian because you go to the counter and they say, 'Did you pack your bag yourself?'

"You just want to launch into 15 minutes about the Arab guy who helped you pack your bag - 'Oh no, Mohammed was giving me a hand' - but you daren't."

Connolly is briefly serious about the reason he is here, a serious role in the film about American soldiers hired by the Emperor of Japan to train a new army instead of relying on traditional Samurai warriors.

He has already shot scenes in Japan and Los Angeles with Cruise, a captain to his sergeant, and says his co-star is a "delightful fellow".

"I did not expect him to work so hard.

"Me, I'm of the other persuasion because I used to be a working guy, I used to be a welder so work does not fill me with joy.

"He [Cruise] works all the time. You have to be good because he retains his energy all the time so you have to do the same."

Connolly says he enjoys playing it straight on screen - he was acclaimed for his role opposite Dame Judy Dench as a Scottish servant to Queen Victoria in Mrs Brown.

Comic roles in films are much harder, he says.

He recalls working with Auf Wiedersehen, Pet actors Jimmy Nail and Timothy Spall (who also appears in The Last Samurai) in the ageing rock band comedy Still Crazy.

"We are all kind of funny guys, but you are stuck with this dialogue.

"What you really want to do is change it, add and subtract but you can't.

"You have to do it the same way all the time to get different angles."

It is, he says, like telling a joke that's dying all the time.

Connolly is spending about two months filming in Taranaki, and at some stage will be joined by his New Zealand-born wife, comedian-turned-psychologist Pamela Stephenson.

One of their three teenage daughters - he also has a daughter and son from his first marriage - may tag along, although Connolly says they are increasingly finding excuses to be elsewhere.

The family have homes in the Hollywood hills, an estate in Perthshire, Scotland, and a "wee house" on an island near Malta.

Stephenson, brought up in Takapuna on Auckland's North Shore until the family left for Sydney when she was 4, still has a number of relatives here.

Despite his opinion on the America's Cup, Connolly is keen to pick his boating in-laws' brains on sailing.

His manager gave him a sailing dinghy for his birthday last November, but he says he hasn't a clue what to do in it.

The boat is called Big Jessie, the name his father sometimes called him when he cried.

It is a small part of the childhood abuse he lived through in the tenements of Glasgow.

Abandoned by his mother at age 3, physically and emotionally abused by an aunt, sexually abused by his father for years, Connolly turned to the stage as one way of escape.

His troubled early life was laid bare two years ago when Stephenson published a candid biography of her husband.

Stephenson, a former star of satirical show Not the Nine O'Clock News, is now counselling Hollywood stars.

Connolly says he has had an extraordinary reaction to the book from all sorts of people, despite being initially reluctant to do it.

"It was Pam's idea and I didn't really fancy it much because if you tell my life story quickly it sounds like I'm a victim, and I'm not."

He wants people in "rotten" situations to know it will pass; that you can survive anything; that with a wee bit of help from the right people you can put abuse aside and get on with your life.

He would hate people to think he is bragging about coming from a poor background to fame and fortune.

"I don't like people like that.

"I want them to say, 'He came from there and he's still laughing'."

And so are we.

After the interview Connolly's plane is delayed and he stands around with a cup of coffee, turning any subject into a funny story.

Like the last time he did an outdoor concert in New Plymouth and accused the bikers in the audience of having training wheels.

Or how his actor friend and fellow Scot Sean Connery calls him "boy".

Or the time a Los Angeles airport official mistook him for Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia - he fluffs his hair and puts on his glasses.

"I said, 'He's ... dead'."

Finally, the publicity people take him away.

As he disappears down a corridor you can still hear them giggling.