William Tell and the Lone Ranger

I was half way through dismissing this as just another BrainyQuote attribution (i.e. about as reliable as a Boris Johnson soundbite) when I came across this on twitter. Now I am not a Tweeter and so I don't know how authentic this is. Something tells me however (quite a few things tell me, in fact) that this is not Billy Connolly himself but the agent for a forthcoming Australian tour. For starters, surely someone like Billy Connolly would have more than 3,039 followers?

This tweet is in any case dated 1 November 2010. I can attest to the fact that this "old joke" (as The Grauniad called it in 2011) has been around since long before that, and (call me a cynic but) unless someone can show me an earlier Billy Connolly reference I am never going to believe he was the first to crack it.

Wikipedia, on its William Tell Overture page, has a note to say that 'The quote has been attributed to Jack Guin writing in The Denver Post in 1962. (Brooklyn Barrister (1962), Volume 14, p. 107.) Variations of the quote have also been attributed to Dan Rather, as E. Gene Davis cited in 2007 in Get 'Em Laughing, (p. 329), for Trafford Publishing, and David Frost on BBC News, 23 March 2013, in "A Point of View: Hi–yo, silver screen.")'

I haven't been able to establish exactly who Jack Guin is, or was; presumably he was a journalist on the Denver Post. Attributions to Dan Rather are common on the Internet, as for example this Australian website (Victorian Opera), which has it in the form "An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger."

Dan Rather is an American journalist, whose credits include being anchor man on the CBS Evening News for 24 years, beginning in 1981 when he succeeded the legendary Walter Cronkite in this role. I am inclined to believe that if not Jack Guin, then he, rather than Billy Connolly, may have been the first person to make this remark. And yet I can find no record of when or where he said it or wrote it.

Without a reliable attribution, a quotation is not a quotation. And at the end of the day, this question is really just asking you to provide your own punchline to a very old joke.