"Funniest Comedian PAT CONDELL vs BILLY CONNOLLY"

Patrick Condell (born 23 November 1949) is a British writer, polemicist, and former stand-up comedian. In his early career, he wrote and performed in alternative comedy shows during the 1980s and 1990s in London, winning the Time Out Comedy Award in 1991. He was also a regular panelist on BBC Radio 1's Loose Talk programme. In early 2007 he began uploading to the internet short filmed monologue polemics primarily about religious authority, authoritarianism in government and left-wing politics, and the societal effects of Muslim immigration into Europe, which have featured on the front pages of websites such as YouTube and LiveLeak. They have also been published on DVD, and also as a book of video transcripts. As of June 2017, Condell's YouTube channel has over a third of a million subscribers, with over 70 million views. Condell was born in Dublin on 23 November 1949. He was raised in England as a Catholic. His father was a compulsive gambler working in a betting shop until he was sent to prison for stealing money; he subsequently died of leukaemia. The Condell family in consequence was impoverished, moving repeatedly from home to home. Condell was educated in several different Church of England schools in South London, saying of this time, "I found myself segregated in assembly and shunted into another room while everyone said their morning prayers. The whole pantomime seemed hollow to me even then. Once you become aware of the gulf between what people profess to believe and how they actually behave, it's hard to take any of it seriously." Condell left school at 16. His first job was as a dish-washer in the revolving restaurant on top of the Post Office Tower, now known as the BT Tower in London, for five shillings an hour. He became a vegetarian in 1976 after watching a deer being butchered. Condell did a number of jobs including working in a furniture warehouse, as a welder at the Ford Transit plant in Southampton, as an office clerk for a shipping company, volunteering on a kibbutz in Israel and then doing six years of logging in Canada.

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Sir William Connolly CBE (born 24 November 1942) is a Scottish former actor, artist, musician, presenter, and comedian. He is sometimes known, especially in his homeland, by the Scots nickname The Big Yin ("The Big One"). Known for his idiosyncratic and often improvised observational comedy, frequently including profanity, Connolly is regarded as one of the greatest and most influential stand-up comedians of all time, having topped many polls conducted in the United Kingdom. Connolly's trade, in the early 1960s, was that of a welder (specifically a boilermaker) in the Glasgow shipyards, but he gave it up towards the end of the decade to pursue a career as a folk singer. He first sang in the folk rock band The Humblebums with Gerry Rafferty and Tam Harvey, with whom he stayed until 1974, before beginning singing as a solo artist. In the early 1970s, Connolly made the transition from folk singer with a comedic persona to fully-fledged comedian, for which he is now best known. In 1972, he made his theatrical debut, at the Cottage Theatre in Cumbernauld, with a revue called Connolly's Glasgow Flourish. He also played the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. In 1972, Connolly's first solo album, Billy Connolly Live!, was produced, with a mixture of comedic songs and short monologues. As an actor, Connolly has appeared in such films as Indecent Proposal (1993), Pocahontas (1995), Muppet Treasure Island (1996), Mrs Brown (1997) (for which he was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role), The Boondock Saints (1999), The Last Samurai (2003), Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004), The X-Files: I Want to Believe (2008), Brave (2012), and The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014). On his 75th birthday in 2017, three portraits of Connolly were made by leading artists Jack Vettriano, John Byrne, and Rachel Maclean. These were later turned into part of Glasgow's official mural trail. In October that year, he was knighted at Buckingham Palace by Prince William, for services to entertainment and charity. Connolly announced his retirement from comedy in 2018, and in recent years he has established himself as an artist. In 2020, he unveiled the fifth release from his Born On A Rainy Day collection in London, followed by another instalment later that year. During the filming of the ITV documentary Billy Connolly: It's Been a Pleasure, he described how art had given him "a new lease of life".

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