His club's recently been bought out, as seen in Cocoa Shunter's 'White Tribe' series. Timely to discuss the man.

Even Darcus thought he was alright when he met him.

He's an arse.

Obviously he's an arse. I'm just trying to dump the 'cheeky racism' discussion on The Goodies strand at this door. I'll settle for half-price?

Bernard Manning is racist. There's no doubt about that. Therefore he is an arse.
But...
Should the fact that a 'comedian' is a small minded bigot necessarily devalue his/her racist/sexist/homophobic humour? etc?

Does humour HAVE to be politically correct in order to be funny, or does it just make us feel better about ourselves if we laugh at the PC gags and condemn the non-PC ones?

Of course comedy doesn't have to be PC to be funny, in fact most PC comedy is deathly dull. BM is an arse because he is racist. But the reason he is a bad comedian is because his jokes are unfunny, old, poorly thought out and lazily delivered. There are thousands of British men who could do is act just as well. He's just another ignorant wanker dispassionately telling the same jokes over and over - go into any seedy inner-city pub and you'll meet one. Go on. Try it. It'd be ace!

You just have to see his apperance alongside Richard Wilson on the Mrs. Merton show to see how unfunny and ignorant he is.

But (and in this case it's a HUUUUUUGE but[t], to use an old Nick Abbot gag)that's an interesting point about whether or not the jokes themselves can be taken apart from the 'non-pc' context. Sometimes you might hear something and find it funny even if you're embarresed of the fact, but sometimes it'd be so sickening (normally where the humour's not based on a stereotype but hatred of a paticluar race/sexuality etc.) that laughter's an impossible reaction.

And yes, of course he's an arse.

Has anyone actually seen his act. I haven't (aside from a few gags on the Comedians - but then as has been pointed out, if we judge people by what they said in the 70s then the Goodies and Python were also racist).
I'm not saying you're wrong (I don't know). But it's interesting that someone can be condemned like this, when I seriously doubt any of you have popped into his club and seen what he does.
Does doing jokes about racial issues make you racist? (cf the Ali G "furore" of a few weeks back) Is received opinion always right? Is Bernard Manning as bad as everyone thinks or has he just become a convenient whipping boy?
Like I say I am making no attempt to defend him here, just promote a discussion based on facts. And I'd be interested to see what people have to say.

I say: let's keep facts out of it.

I know this is going to sound like toadying (agree with the professionals and all that...) but I do think Richard Herring has a point. All the way through the 80s and 90s, the received wisdom is that Manning is unfunny, bigoted...oh, you know all the adjectives by now. He's been designed as an all-purpose scapegoat, so that at least all comedy fans can agree on something, right?

Well, it's certainly true that I don't find him funny, but I read quite a good biog of him by journo Jonathan Margolis, who also wrote a dreadful Cleese book and a scarcely better one on Billy Connolly. There's a lot in it about his Jewish roots, and an awful lot about the way he is perceived. It certainly challenges a lot of the stereotypes people carry around with them. Best of luck in finding a copy though - loads of book chain stores (Waterstones for one) banned it, and I must confess that I flicked through the copy I found in a shop while furtively looking around me as if I were reading pornography. But it was good, thought-provoking, sometimes unsettling, but often surprising.

I only really remember seeing Manning on one TV programme in the last 15 years (I missed Mrs. Merton) - and that was on Joan Rivers' hopeless chat show Can We Talk? in 1986. So I don't know if my opinion on Manning really counts, as I've barely seen his act. Can anyone claim to have done so - genuinely? I'm interested.

Manning claimed later that the J.Rivers interview was cut to make her look good - he reckoned he'd outshone her. I dunno. Don't forget there was also the Wogan interview around '86, in which (I only know this from the reviews) he said Ben Elton was "as funny as Rock Hudson giving blood" (this was after Rock Hudson had died of AIDS, obviously). It was after that interview that Manning finally disappeared from mainstream light entertainment.

>Does humour HAVE to be politically correct in order to be funny, or does it just make us feel better about ourselves if we laugh at the PC gags and condemn the non-PC ones?

I am no fan of political correctness. It goes to far in many instances.

But when I heard Manning saying how Black people are not British because of their ethnic origins,I was incensed. He said 'because a dog is born in a stable, it doesn't make it a horse'.

That sort of carry-on is disgraceful. It is not funny, it is distasteful.

Don't forget there was also the Wogan interview around '86, in which (I only know this from the reviews) he said Ben Elton was "as funny as Rock Hudson giving blood" (this was after Rock Hudson had died of AIDS, obviously). It was after that interview that Manning finally disappeared from mainstream light entertainment.

I find it interesting that a comment like that from, say, Chris Morris, would provoke from many a worship of his "god like genius", however, from the fat mouth of Bernard Manning it's suddenly a national disgrace.
Double standards anyone......?

Back in the mid 80's there was some kind of Star- Search hosted by Marti Cane and on which Bernard Manning and Nina Mycshkov were semi-regulars on the judging panel. What suprised me at the time was that never once was he disparaging of an act. No-matter how dreadful it was, he tried to encourage and came across as a reasonable guy. It was suprising enough for me still to remember it now anyway.

I realise that this has no bearing whatsoever on the value of his comedy and doens't excuse racism etc. Just thought I'd mention it, thats all.

A new series on hatred begins Monday at 8pm on Radio 4. In the first show, Anil Gupta (producer/writer on Goodness Gracious Me) meets various people who hate Pakistanis. It includes an interview with Manning, apparently.

I just saw that in The Radio Times and came here to say as much. Ah well, you beat me.

There's a new series of I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue on Monday as well, if that's any follow up to this thread?

The reason he's an arse is not what he says, it's why he says it. There is a slug-brained type of sub-human (who has you thinking that natural selection doesn't work) who find ethnic minorities funny in the same way as they find a dog riding a bicycle funny- I saw East is East where a bunch of hooch-brained teenagers were pissing themselves just because Om Puri 'spoke funny'. Manning goes for easy laughs, not only by telling racist jokes but by repeating them for years enabling fans of Manning return to hear them again and again. They go home having had a good laugh with their prejudices intact. So no matter how many times he insists that he likes curry (which of course is only eaten by those who feel that 'Britain is enriched by the flavour its ethnic minorities bring to it' (Sam Brady 1999)) he is an arse who talks shit for cunts.

Ah, Sam Brady. ITV Teletext's professional Northerner who gives you the cliches straight, no fancy Southern mucking about. Sadly, too obscure to make much out of attacking him here though.

>Ah, Sam Brady. ITV Teletext's professional Northerner who gives you the cliches straight, no fancy Southern mucking about. Sadly, too obscure to make much out of attacking him here though.

Does Sam Brady actually exist anyway? (If he does, he must be being paid a lot by Teletext to be still there after about 8 years or something - they don't want to lose him, after all.) Mind you, Johnny Homer who used to slate albums in much the same way on the Oracle pop pages may be the same Johnny Homer who contributes vaguely-researched features on London born celebs for Robert Elms' LondonLive/GLR show. Anyone know if they're one and the same? Anyone care?

Jon Homer did re-surface briefly as a writer for Melody Moker in the mid-90s (the original Oracle Teletext was scrapped in '92). Sam Brady allegedly appeared on some rubbish late-night talk show in the late 80s, I think, so there have been sightings of someone claiming to be him. But this has nothing to do with Bernard...

I think non-pc jokes can be funny as long as you are laughing at the joke rather than the offended party.
e.g
"insert victims name/race here" comes into a bar with a dogshit cupped in his hands:
'look what i almost stepped in' he says

ok, so it wasnt very funny but i wrote it anyway to try to illustrate my point.
-------------------------------------------------------------
part two
Can we bring Chubby Brown in at this point? (the fat foulmouthed racist twat)
I've always though of him and manning as pretty much the same person. Those two seem to be separated and given their own corner of the comedy world to live in.
The sooner someone sneaks up and kicks em off the edge the better!
Chubby is slightly funny at times (i've seen bits of his videos now and then) but not worth wading through the filth for....
Manning i havent seen in action at all. But both of 'em turn up here in blackpool with worrying regularity.My mate was dj at a club which manning did a monthly appearenc at - I'll ask him if he was funny. I refused the offer of free tickets at the time :)

and he was rubbish.

I was working behind the bar at a holiday camp, and they'd booked him for the "owners' weekend", when all the poor suckers who had actually bought static caravans were treated to an exclusive entertainment "extravaganza". I really wasn't looking forward to the show because I took PC quite seriously back then and I was easily offended. The ents staff and some of the bar staff were defending him by saying "Yeah, he's racist, but he's such a great *performer*, that's why he's had such a long career" etc. So I paid particular attention to this aspect of his act so that I could refute it afterwards (I was also attempting a degree of impartiality because his defendants had been criticising my PC stance as one-sided and narrow-minded - I wasn't just watching his act looking for points to criticise, although I'm sure I couldn't have been completely objective). Sure enough his delivery was lazy and dull - his timing was OK, but if you'd never heard of him you wouldn't have guessed that he'd been doing this job for 30-40 years. I can't remember any of the jokes but I remember some them being racist, even more of them being sexist and being offended by them - I also remember saying that I'd heard many of them before in one form or another and even those that were new to me I found myself muttering the punchline before BM got to it, they were so obvious. He neither surprised me nor entertained me. He was exactly what I was expecting. In this case, the old argument "if you haven't seen him, you can't judge him" doesn't really stand - everyone who has posted to this thread already knows what BM is like without having to waste a few hours watching the idiot.

Now I'm late for work.

Thanks Louise
The rest of you can carry on with your speculative bashing now.
It's what I thought it would be like too (though I had heard that he was meant to be good at the technical side of comedy).

My speculation is that he belongs to another time (like many of our grandparents I would imagine) and has had trouble adjusting to the changes in the world and so has stuck his reactionary heels in cos he thinks he's making some kind of point (bit like a more unpleasant version of the Landlord interestingly).

I saw Stephen Fry on 'Open To Question' (discussion show for intelligent teenagers, back in the 80s. Scrapped in the 90s due to lack of intelligent teenagers.) and he was explaining what 'alternative' comedy meant to him - not being hateful or malicious about people just for their background. Then he admitted that, unlike his friend Ben Elton, he liked Bernard Manning "because he just makes me crack up" (said sincerely). Doesn't prove much, except that some people do like BM for his ability, overlooking some of the material.