'It's unfair,' Connolly complains

Billy Connolly has complained about the increasingly censorious attitude to comedy, complaining that stand-ups who swear on stage are unfairly branded ‘vulgarian and foul mouthed’.

The 67-year-old said his job was not to cause offence, but to get a laugh. He said: ‘There's a lot of deep and desperate unfairness been going on.’

Even before the current clampdown on taste in broadcast comedy, Connolly was criticised for joking on stage about British hostage Kenneth Bigley in 2004, just before his murder in Iraq.

Speaking at Tuesday's South Bank Awards, Connoly said: ‘I think it was George Carlin who said, “the job of a comedian is to know where the line is and to step over it”.

‘If you swear in a book, you're some kind of clever guy, if you swear in a poem, oh how dangerous he is, you swear in a song - oh my God, what a groundbreaker! You swear as a comedian, and you're a vulgarian and foul mouthed. When did this happen? Who's doing the judging?’

Published: 27 Jan 2010