Sean Connery and Michael Caine’s disastrous visit to a comedy club: “I’ll smack you through the fucking wall”
His tenure as James Bond saw him deploy more than his fair share of well-time quips, but comedy chops weren’t something typically associated with Sean Connery during a decades-spanning career that saw the gruff Scotsman attain legendary status.
A true icon of popular culture, no impressionist has ever honed their act without imitating his signature Scottish brogue, with the Academy Award winner boasting one of cinema’s most unmistakable accents. He was a man of action more than humour despite being made into such a regular figure of fun, which made sense when he was clearly a man not to be trifled with.
Standing at over six feet tall, having a background in bodybuilding, and being awarded a black belt in the Kyokushin discipline ensured that he was a tough cookie, which inevitably meant that suffering fools was something he didn’t have a single second of time for. A notorious gangster pulls a gun on him while shooting a movie? Nae danger, ‘Big Tam’ just disarmed him and sent the would-be assailant packing.
Plenty of actors make their names playing tough guys, but Connery was the real deal. As a British thespian who first made waves in the 1960s, he was nigh-on obligated to hit the town regularly and enjoy a tipple or ten, which came close to ending in disaster on several occasions when he was out on the tiles with fellow A-list export and close friend Michael Caine.
Caine had himself come from the Peter O’Toole, Robert Shaw, Terence Stamp, and Richard Harris school of ‘work hard, play even harder’ – even if the latter disputes claims that he was a fiend for the sauce despite mountains of evidence to the contrary – so they were a match made in heaven. Or hell, depending on where they ended up, how they ended up there, and who they met on the way.
Connery could be funny with the right script, and he was a naturally gregarious fellow, but he’d never be caught dead starring in an out-and-out comedy film. It didn’t appear to be something he was interested in, although he did decide to make a trip to a club in Los Angeles to see if his funny bone was capable of being tickled during his downtime.
Bringing Caine along for the ride, the high-powered pair were left crushingly disappointed when they took their seats and discovered the person on stage wasn’t funny in the slightest. As fellow performers who’d wilted in front of live audiences before, the duo maintained a dignified silence because they’d been in that exact situation themselves earlier in their careers.
However, a rambunctious group behind them weren’t quite as forgiving, dishing out heckles to the poor comic who was probably nervous enough already, regardless of whether or not he’d spotted a pair of Oscar-winning legends sitting in his midst. When the comedian began to crumble, Connery stepped in to defend his honour.
“There was a group of English guys behind us who were heckling him, and he couldn’t handle it,” Caine confessed to Rolling Stone. “Finally Sean got up, lifted the leader off his chair and said, ‘One more word out of you lot and I’ll smack you through the fucking wall, now give the kid a chance.'”
It would have been a sight to see the ringleader of the hecklers being struck with the realisation that in addition to being an absolute dickhead and making the poor stand-up feel even worse about bombing, none other than the original 007 had grown so sick and tired of his behaviour that he was physically removed from his seat and threatened with taking a battering if he didn’t sit down and shut the fuck up.
The obvious downside is that it may have ruined the comedian’s set, but from Caine’s recollection, he was shite anyway. The fast friends only wanted to have a quiet night out, catch up, and have a few laughs, but instead, they were subjected to a succession of awful gags before being forced into making threats of physical violence.
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