Scottish comedy is world-renowned: robust, dry, self-depreciatory, fatalistic and deflationary, it is a warm humour born of a cold, northern hemisphere country, a place that has known its fair share of tragedy and hard times, a place where no one is above being taken down a peg or two, where pretentiousness is often held up to ridicule and where the ability to laugh at yourself and your misfortunes is vital.

Nowhere were these qualities more evident than in the work of Robert Burns. Burns was, of course, the son of a poor Ayrshire farmer and his early years were hallmarked by the kind of poverty and hard work that would have been intolerable were it not for a strong sense of humour. He is perhaps best known and loved today for the warmth and humanitarianism of his poetry, but his work also contains much vivid comedy. In Tam O’Shanter Burns ponders the tendency of men to ignore the advice of their sensible wives:

Ah, gentle dames, it gars me greet
To think how many counsels sweet
How many lengthen’d sage advices
The husband frae the wife despises!

Less famous, but more overtly humorous, is the poem Willie Wastle: a hilarious account of a man (said to have been an acquaintance of Burns’: names were obviously changed to protect the guilty!) who had the misfortune to be married to the ugliest woman on the face of the planet. In each new verse Burns catalogues the poor woman’s glaring imperfections in grotesque comic detail – 'a whiskin beard about her mou, her nose and chin they threaten ither’ ('a whiskery beard about her mouth, her nose and chin threaten each other’) - before concluding repeatedly with the words 'sic a wife as Wullie had, I wad nae gie a button for her!’ ('Such a wife as Wullie had, I would not give a button for her!)

These lines were written in the late eighteenth century, but the touchstones of Burns’ humour – comic observation and exaggeration, outrageousness – would resurface in the work of the great Scottish music hall comedians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: men like Will Fyffe – the legendary Scots entertainer who, ironically, made famous the song 'I Belong to Glasgow’. (Ironic because Fyffe came from Dundee!) - and Stan Laurel.

Laurel, who would of course go on to partner up with Oliver Hardy in one of the greatest comedy double acts of all time, grew up in Ulverston near Lancaster, but he moved to Scotland as a small boy and his comic sensibilities and timing were forged in the heat of Glasgow’s Panopticon Theatre; a tough venue where underperforming acts would often literally be yanked off the stage with a shepherds crook!

The mid-twentieth century saw the ascent of two comedians who were born within a few years of each other and who would both indelibly change the face of Scottish humour forever.

Charles 'Chic’ Murray was born in Greenock in 1919 and went to work in one of the world’s greatest comedic proving grounds - The Clyde shipyards. Over the years Murray developed a dry, sardonic comic persona – accompanied by his forbidding expression and omnipresent 'bunnet’ – and an unbeatable array of killer one-liners: 'It’s a small world, but I wouldn’t want to have to paint it.’ 'My parents never understood me. They were Japanese.’ 'If something’s neither here nor there, where the hell is it?’ 'My girlfriends a redhead. No hair, just a red head...’

In his later years Murray showed he had more than just comedic skills when he began to garner fame as an actor, appearing with David Niven and Woody Allen in 1967’s James Bond spoof 'Casino Royale’ and as Liverpool FC Manager Bill Shankly in the musical 'You’ll Never Walk Alone’, but it will perhaps be for his role as the curmudgeonly headmaster in Gregory’s Girl that he will perhaps be best remembered. Sadly Murray died in Edinburgh in 1985 at the age of sixty-five. In 2005, twenty years after his death, a poll of comedians named him as 'The Comedian’s Comedian.’

A contemporary of Murray’s, Rikki Fulton began his career as a 'straight’ actor in rep and BBC Radio before teaming up with Jack Milroy to create the 1962 TV series The Adventures of Francie and Josie. The programme starred Fulton and Milroy as a pair of archetypal Scottish chancers and made them household names north of the border, however greater fame awaited Fulton in the late 1970’s when he created and starred in the TV sketch show Scotch and Wry.

With the show Fulton not only brought a host of memorable characters to the screen – including his most famous creation the Reverend I.M. Jolly: a hilarious (but affectionate) pastiche of a certain type of dry, humourless Church of Scotland minister who, for a generation of Scots, would soon become legendary for his Hogmanay messages of sour cheer – he also provided a springboard for a whole new generation of Scottish acting and writing talent, including Gregor Fisher (who would go on to create Rab C. Nesbitt) and Bob Black, Phil Differ, Neil MacVicar and Niall Clark, who would go onto write ground breaking shows like Naked Video and A Kick Up The Eighties.

But the man who would become the living definition of Scottish humour for most of the world was born a generation after Fulton although, like Chic Murray before him, he too would serve a comedic apprenticeship in the Clyde shipyards.

William Connolly CBE was born in 1942 at 65 Dover Street Glasgow and was brought up in the Anderston and Partick areas of the city centre and west end. He began his show business career as a folk singer and he would often introduce his songs with comic monologues, eventually these grew in length to such a degree that they started to become the basis of his entire act. A couple of live albums followed and by the mid 1970’s Connolly was a cult success in Scotland.

All of this was changed dramatically by his debut television appearance on the Michael Parkinson’s prime time Saturday night chat show in 1975. On the show he told a long, potentially inappropriate, joke about a Glasgow man who had murdered his wife and buried her bottom-up so he would have somewhere to park his bike! His performance incorporated many of the fundamentals of Scottish humour: bawdy and ribald it was also shot through with warmth and humanity. Here was outrageousness delivered in the kind of cheeky Glaswegian manner that even genteel old ladies found irresistible. Connolly’s appearance on the show reduced Parkinson to helpless tears of mirth and made headline news. 'That programme,’ Connolly commented, 'changed my entire life,’ and the 80’s and 90’s saw him go onto become unarguably the best known and best loved Scottish comedian in the world, as well as forging a respected career as an actor with a BAFTA-nominated role in the film Mrs. Brown, which saw Connolly starring as John Brown, a consort to Queen Victoria who was played by Dame Judi Dench. However it is as a comedian that Connolly will ultimately be remembered; a stand-up whose off-the-cuff, conversational explorations of formerly taboo subjects like religion and flatulence, did more than anything else to bring the unique Scottish sense of humour to a worldwide audience.

And today, thanks to comedians like Des Clarke, Rhona Cameron, Bruce Morton, David Kay, Karen Dunbar and John Gillick, the Scottish comedy scene is as fresh and vibrant as ever. Indeed, following appearances on Channel Four’s 8 out of 10 Cats and the BBC’s Mock The Week, Glasgow born Frankie Boyle is now well on his way to becoming a household name.

But today’s cutting-edge comics who appear on glitzy TV shows and who fill concert halls up and down the country embody traits and employ devices - irreverence, a disregard for authority and conventions, a satirist’s regard for the truth, and an observational eye for detail - which are not new, which can in fact be found in work written over two hundred years ago, in a lowly farmers cottage in Alloway by Robert Burns, perhaps Scotland’s first famous comedian.

Further Information:

Courtesy of Scottish Government - Scotland.org .