Bernard Manning, the infamous comedian who died in 2007, has been attracting a lot of comment on social media recently. The inevitable question ‘Was he a racist?’ still divides people. But many of the views expressed, both for and against, miss the point. Which is that by trying, as we are now, to surgically eliminate all prejudices, cultural and ethnic stereotypes, and anything else that causes ‘offence’, we are not reforming human nature for the better, or bringing about peace and harmony; we are creating a nightmare world in which real human beings are muzzled and straightjacketed. An Orwellian world in which ‘thought crime’ is policed for dissent, while real crime goes unchecked. This tribute to the comedian appeared in the winter 2015 edition of The Salisbury Review:
The name of Bernard Manning, once one of the nation’s most successful stand-up comedians, a veteran of Royal Variety performances and the MGM Grand in Las Vegas (where he performed with Dean Martin), has effectively been banished from public consciousness. One hesitates before mentioning his name in polite company, or – heaven forbid – telling a Manning joke, for he has long been branded a racist and a bigot.
Manning was born in 1930 and brought up in Ancoats, one of Manchester’s poorest areas. He left school at 14 to work in a cigarette factory and for a while in his father’s greengrocer’s; but National Service opened up his world. He guarded Rudolf Hess and Albert Speer at Spandau Prison in Berlin, and, more importantly, sang with the regimental band. After leaving the army, he worked the northern clubs as a big band singer, and started to build some gags into his act; he found he could make people laugh and the gags took over. He became a household name in the 1970s through the popular television series ‘The Comedians’, but by the time of the politically correct 1980s, his act was deemed unfit for mainstream consumption. Manning hit the headlines in 1995 when he was secretly filmed making offensive remarks to a black police officer during a charity dinner in Manchester, for which he was condemned by John Major – though he claimed afterwards that the police officer had congratulated him on his performance. Though he played to packed houses in clubs and theatres across Britain, including his own ‘Embassy Club’ in Manchester, his television appearances were reduced to the occasional interview to the accompaniment of mixed boos and laughter from the studio audience. He died in 2007.
Manning poked fun at the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish; the Germans, Japanese, Americans, Jews, Muslims, Pakistanis, Asians, blacks, Chinese, Geordies and Liverpudlians; at anyone who was old, or young, or fat, or ugly, or on benefits, or who did not laugh at his jokes; and at himself (for being fat and ugly). Inevitably in a society that values inclusion, diversity and tolerance above all else, this was deemed unacceptable. In fact, Manning gave free rein to every prejudice and ‘stereotype’ that was going. He made fun of people for being different; and in so doing he gave vent to the hopes, fears and frustrations of the ordinary person. He voiced sentiments that many shared but would not have dreamed of voicing themselves. But people understood what he was getting at, and that is why they laughed. Manning always said that ‘it was only an act’, and ‘I say it because it makes people laugh’ and he was derided for this by his critics. But those who knew him best – his family and friends – insisted that he was not a racist in any shape or form. Indeed, when he died, his Asian neighbours of over twenty years paid him the warmest of tributes. He was, they said, ‘a perfect gentleman’. The sign ‘Shalom’, which he had above his door (Manning was proud of his Jewish roots), was no idle decoration. Manning was renowned for his generosity and his charity work (all inclusive and no fee), which ranged from sending local old folk to Blackpool for a Christmas day out and paying for a sick Asian child to go to Disneyland, to his lifelong support for the work of the Variety Club.
Was Manning ‘a racist’? Traditionally the term ‘racism’ refers to the scientific, or pseudo-scientific, belief that some races are superior to others and that racial purity is a virtue – the sort of view nowadays associated with proponents of eugenics and the Nazis. ‘Racialism’ refers to active discrimination against those deemed racially inferior as practised in (say) South Africa under apartheid or in the American South. Evidently, neither of these is applicable in the case of Manning. However, ‘racial prejudice’, which is what is usually meant nowadays when the term ‘racist’ is bandied about, is more difficult to pin down. Traditionally, it refers to irrationally or unreasonably hostile attitudes towards those of a different racial or ethnic origin. But what counts as ‘a hostile attitude’? Manning certainly made fun of Asians (including his neighbours) in his act. But did those who had spent the evening laughing at Manning’s jokes leave his act with hostile attitudes towards Asians? There is no evidence for this.
Perhaps Manning’s attitude towards Asians, and anyone else he poked fun at, was unjustified because it was ‘irrational’. Except that if it were irrational, nobody would have laughed. Manning’s audience laughed precisely because he revealed something about them and their prejudices, which they recognised to be true. In which case, it must be those who laugh who are at fault: to laugh at Manning is to reveal that you are ‘a racist’. Manning, then, merely played on our prejudices and stereotypical perceptions of others, and it is these that need to be exposed for what they are. But this will not do either. We do not choose our prejudices any more than we choose our emotions, however much we – or others – might wish to suppress them. Besides, our prejudices, along with our ‘stereotypical’ thought patterns and generalisations, are an integral part of our make-up as human beings. Without them, even the smallest decision would have to be preceded by an impossibly lengthy and complex cost-benefit calculation to establish the optimal course of action. Without them, we would never have survived in the first place – for while we were attempting to make a purely rational and impartial appraisal of the situation, the snake would have bitten us. We are in any case not disembodied calculating machines, but social and cultural beings whose needs and interests, hopes and fears, indeed our very rationality, are socially and culturally determined. Like it or not, our prejudices are the distillation of our collective experience; or as Dr Johnson put it, ‘one good prejudice is worth ten reasoned arguments’.
What was Manning’s take on the world? For a start, he thought that we pandered too much to the sensitivities of our Celtic neighbours: ‘There was an Englishman, an Irishman, a Scotsman and a Welshman captured by the Iraqis, who said ‘we’re going to shoot you but you can have one last request’; so the Welsh fella said ‘I’d like a thousand Welshmen singing Land of my Fathers’, the Scotch fella said ‘I’d like a thousand pipers playing Flower of Scotland’, and the Irish fella said ‘I’d like a thousand Irishmen doing the River Dance’; and they said to the English fella ‘what’s your last request?’ He said ‘Fucking shoot me first!’ Manning was a keen observer of regional differences: ‘A Scouser went to a prostitute. She said, ‘Do you want a blow job?’ He said, ‘Will it affect me dole money?’ Or ‘I go to Liverpool twice a year to visit my hub-caps’. He liked to draw attention to demographic change: ‘I was in Bradford last week and I felt like a spot on a domino; they wait for it to snow in Yorkshire so they can count the population; dial ‘999’ and you get the Bengal Lancers’. He liked to include the disabled in his gags: ‘There’s a blind fella walking through London with his blind dog and the blind dog slashed up his leg and the fella next to him said ‘that’s the nicest thing I’ve seen in my life, that dog just pissed up your leg and you give it a dog biscuit’; ‘yes I’m just finding out where its mouth is … it’s going to get a kick in the bollocks’’. He enjoyed repartee with members of the audience who were elderly (‘Was it cold in the ground this morning?’) or not blessed with good looks (‘You’re an ugly bastard aren’t you!’). He enjoyed repartee with his fellow comedians, like the American, Jackie Mason: ‘He’s about as funny as woodworm in a cripple’s crutch’. He made fun of himself: ‘When I was born, I was so ugly they had to give the midwife gas’. Colour was no bar: ‘All the black footballers they want to play for England, and they all say they’ve got a little bit of English in them; and there’s one fella, his excuse is his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather ate Captain Cook’. And nobody could accuse Manning of being twee: ‘Do you know what I’d like? I’d like to be on the Antiques Roadshow, and a little old lady comes up and says ‘how much is this worth?’ And I’d say ‘do you want to know what that’s worth? … Fuck all … Now fuck off with it!’… That’d liven Sunday evenings up’.
There is no doubt that Bernard Manning did cause offence, and that much of his material was crude and tasteless – but so what! He was playing to working class men in a rough area of Manchester, not an audience of liberals at the BBC. His offence was not that he was ‘a racist’ but that he ridiculed the great orthodoxy of our time – the utopian project of creating an inclusive multicultural society, where all forms of difference are celebrated and all people are equally valued, a project whose success necessarily entails vigorous policing of all deviant thoughts and utterances. Instead he drew on the shared experiences and prejudices of his community, his own people, to make them laugh; and in so doing reinforce their shared loyalties and sense of identity. The dogma of multiculturalism, which we see now being effected in modern-day Britain in the form of ethnically and racially segregated communities who have little sense of a shared identity, is founded on a fiction, which is precisely why it lends itself to ridicule. Bernard Manning duly obliged. He told the truth … and that is why his audience laughed.
