Politics & Power Quote by Billy Connolly

Nostalgia, in Connolly's hands, isn’t a soft-focus longing for “the good old days” so much as a backstage pass to an era with better costumes and punchier soundtrack cues. He picks the 1920s and 30s not for their politics or their actual lived brutality, but for their cultural surface: jazz, tailoring, neon confidence. It’s the comedian’s instinct to go straight for the vivid props. “I love the music and the style and the optimism” is a three-beat rhythm that lands like a setup, each noun a louder drum hit, building toward the real fantasy: watching New York being built.

That detail matters. He doesn’t want to “visit history” in the museum sense; he wants to stand on the street while the myth is under construction. New York rises here as a symbol of sheer human nerve - steel, money, migration, chaos - the kind of collective gamble that reads, from a safe distance, as exhilarating rather than exhausting. The subtext is almost tender: modern life feels over-managed, over-documented, pre-chewed. He’s craving a time when the skyline wasn’t a finished product, when possibility looked physical.

The little “you know” at the end is classic Connolly: a disarming shrug that invites you in while sidestepping the awkward truth that the era he’s romanticizing includes Prohibition violence, segregation, a Depression. Comedy often runs on selective memory. This one turns selective memory into a wish to witness ambition before it curdles into nostalgia.