Humor & Life Quote by Billy Connolly

Connolly’s “citizen of the world” stance isn’t the glossy, backpacker slogan it can sound like in lesser mouths. It’s a comic’s passport: a way to step around tribal loyalties and get straight to the human material. The line “I like it that way” is doing quiet work - it pre-empts the accusation that cosmopolitanism is rootless or naïve. He’s not claiming purity; he’s declaring preference.

The real bite is in “some people are pretty badly represented.” Connolly aims his skepticism not at ordinary people but at the machinery that speaks for them: politicians, media caricatures, nationalist narratives, the whole ventriloquist act. It’s a classic Connolly move - warmth delivered with a blade. He suggests that the “world” is wonderful precisely because the official story about it is so often rotten. You don’t meet “the French” or “the Iraqis” or “the Glaswegians”; you meet a person, and the person is usually “delightful.” The punchline is moral, not sentimental.

“They all want so little” lands with double resonance. On one level it’s generous: most people aren’t asking for domination, just dignity, safety, a decent life. On another level it’s an indictment: if the baseline is so modest, why does the world keep failing to deliver it? Connolly’s comedy has always treated pomposity as the enemy and ordinary desire as the truth. Here, the joke is that our grand identities are loud, but our needs are small - and we still let the loudness win.