No Laughing Matter...

Bernard Manning died last week and probably very few of my friends or family will shed a tear.

But I must admit that I found some of his gags quite funny – and to a middle-class, right-on, educated lefty like me this quite a guilty pleasure because at the end of the day he was a sexist, homophobe and racist.

Manning’s argument was that he was none of those things and that he picked his targets based on what he thought would get a laugh rather than what the political orthodoxy was at the time. So in many ways he always saw himself as very much an equal opportunities comedian as he didn’t discriminate or focus his gags on one particular race or group but instead let everyone have it.

But, of course, a lot of those gags did have black people as the butt of the joke, and if you tell enough of those jokes then the thinking is that it’s OK to use the dreaded ‘n’ word to describe black people. And the same argument follows with women or gay people.

Jim Bowen, however, did make the point that Manning’s humour was no worse than using a wheelchair user or a vomiting pensioner as a source of humour in Little Britain and I sort of see that.

Comedy is a serious business and the death of Manning temporarily opened up an interesting area of debate about what we can laugh at and what we can’t. And as a would-be comedy writer this is an area that does fascinate me.

So I’ll sign off with one of my favourite Manning gags – and before anyone gets upset please remember that Manning himself was from a family of immigrant Jews.

‘World War Two was tragic for my family because my father died at Auschwitz. He fell 40ft out of a watchtower and broke his spine.’