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There are 370 shows at the forthcoming Magners Glasgow International Comedy Festival. At 369 of them, the performers will be following the two unwritten laws of comedy: find your own voice and write your own material. At one of them, a man in a black Spandex one-piece and “banana-fied” ugg boots will perform a set “inspired by Billy Connolly’s classics”.

Gary Moir, a former winner of Stars in Their Eyes, makes much of the fact that he, like Connolly, is a failed welder from the Glasgow shipyards. Normally, this would qualify him for delivering Chinese meals or restocking the freezers in Asda, but not Moir.

He had wearied, so his legend goes, of people telling him he was as funny as Billy Connolly. So shipbuilding’s loss would be comedy’s gain. But instead of becoming Gary Moir, hilarious individual performer who wears normal clothes and relies on his own imagination, he became the Big Yin, a Connolly tribute act.

He is not alone. There are a host of banjo-strumming, glottal-stopping faux Billys out there, appearing in the sticky-carpet clubs that Connolly played in at the start of his career. (They are also available for weddings, parties and corporate events, for people who imagine their big day would be improved by a singalong version of D-I-V-O-R-C-E.) Moir’s show has been a Glasgow Comedy Festival sell-out for the past three years; this time around, he is expected to fill the Barrowlands.

When Connolly started out, the Barrowlands was a dance hall. He played folk clubs and function rooms: his career-starting Billy Connolly Live! was recorded in the Tudor Hotel, Airdrie. Back then, Connolly was a fresh voice, an accent never heard before on Michael Parkinson’s BBC chat show.

He cheekily mixed up scatology and social observation with spoof songs. Among the mother-in-law gags of the 1970s, reimagining the Last Supper as a bar room rammy was bold and original. He swore like he was still working in the shipyard and made jokes about subjects — masturbation, flatulence, piles — that many of his audience would blush to discuss with their GP.

It was sensational and shocking, while being accessible in a way that the alternative comedians of the next decade never quite pulled off. But it is a product of its time and place: Connolly’s stand-up is a period piece, tied to a time when buses were orange, green and operated by the corporation. Neither Moir nor the other tribute acts on the circuit have adopted the purple beard or flowery shirts favoured by the latter-day Connolly. He has not sung In the Brownies, or worn the big banana boots that Moir copies in his stage costume for 30-odd years. The originals are where they belong — in a museum.

Unpleasant illnesses, evil families, problem drinking . . . the material that took Connolly’s audiences into wild, uncharted territory is now available back-to-back on television. The fabulous Glesca patter has been cleaned up and repackaged for telly, radio and in the acts of plenty of comedians who can stand up on stage without hiding behind somebody else’s hairstyle.

Connolly himself has run into difficulty dealing with contemporary events — there was a huge uproar in 2004 when, at the Hammersmith Apollo, he made a joke about the hostage Kenneth Bigley, who was soon to be beheaded in Iraq.

So the tribute acts such as Moir stay on safe comedy territory. He even borrows other comedians’ lines and puts them into his phoney Connolly mouth. Does his bum, he asks the audience, look big in his catsuit? It was Arabella Weir, not Connolly, who originally posed that question. He ploughs on regardless, with a charmless discussion of the size of other parts of his anatomy. It is about as daring as Kate Middleton’s dress sense and as challenging as an episode of Fireman Sam.

Of course, the audience that goes to see the Big Yin does not want to be taunted or challenged or made to feel uncomfortable. If they did, they would stay in and watch a Sarah Silverman DVD. They are going for nostalgia, for the values of the1970s wrapped up in a fancy-dress outfit. It’s not grown-up and it’s not very funny.

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