Bernard Manning

Published: 21/06/2007

Racist Humour? Or Just a Good Laugh?
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
On the Wright Stuff ( Channel 5) on Wednesday I apologised to those viewers who were upset by my remarks the previous day responding to the death of Bernard Manning. I totally loathed the man and had appeared to cheer his passing. That was insensitive when his body was barely cold. I had to understand the effect of my words. Manning never did that or didn’t care. For loadsa beery groupies the millionaire northerner was the last anti-pc man standing for the inalienable right of an Englishman to mock foreigners, faggots and floozies. It was, he said, an ‘act, all just a joke’. So that’s all right then. Is it?

NO. ( CAPS PREVIOUS) Manning used jokes as a cover for malevolent attitudes. At one gig, he pointed to the one black man in the audience and said: They actually think they are English because they born here. That means if a dog’s born in a stable it is a horse’. He repeated this gag on the BBC’s Mrs Merton. His material was drawn from a well of poisonous prejudices. I am glad media outlets wised up to this. Comedians cannot live by freedom alone. Would jokes about baby shagging be funny? Or a Muslim comic mocking the victims of suicide bombers? We all have limits beyond which we cannot go for a laugh. In our complex, globalised world though, those lines and limits are contested. There is no universal agreement about what is acceptable and what is not.

Britons are still arguing over the two Big Brother furores over racist remarks by inmates. Jade Goody and Emily Parr assumed it is now cool to diss black and Asian people. Some viewers agree; I certainly don’t- but can see it is confusing. If people shout at me ‘you stinking Paki’ which they do, you see clearly it is hurtful and racist. But if some joker at a comedy club says, ‘Oi, you, Paki lady, korma tonight was it?
( that too has happened to me) it is just as revolting. So too Jackie Mason’s cruel humour and fringe acts by Asian and black men who slag off white ‘slags’. And yet, and yet, I don’t react with the same revulsion to, say, Jimmy Carr’s material, or to the stereotypes in the Kumars. Both are funny without malice.

I am told some black and Asian people loved Manning’s jokes. More fool they. Or maybe they get post modern irony and I, with my strict views on offence am as old world now as the late Mr Manning. Two of a kind- what a horrible thought.

Published in Evening Standard