Bernard Manning dead

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[luke]

nice one

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here's a discussion about Manning from the Jeremy Vine show on Tuesday, featuring such luminaries as Jim Bowen and Jim Davidson...

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Alexei Sayle: Bernard Manning and the tragedy of comedy
Sour. Self-pitying. Cowardly. These are the defining characteristics of the stand-up comedian, argues Alexei Sayle. How else can we explain the misanthropic tendencies of performers like Bernard Manning?
20 June 2007

On the day Bernard Manning's wife Vera - the woman he referred to as "the bedrock of my life" - died, Bernard hung his DJ in the back of the Roller (number plate, 1 LAF) and, as usual, drove off to do a gig. This is not to say that the man wasn't suffering in some way, but he simply would not have known what else to do with himself.

When he was rushed into hospital two weeks ago, he had to cancel an appearance at his Embassy Club - the first time in six decades as an entertainer that he'd done so. You could see this as professionalism, or perhaps more likely as the action of a desperate and lonely old man who could feel at least half alive only when he was performing in front of a room full of strangers.

I never met the man, nor wanted to, but have met and studied many like him, largely because his generation of old-time comedians present a frightening object lesson in the perils of what being a stand-up can do to you if you don't take care to ameliorate its more malevolent effects. Whenever I've spent time with those traditional gag merchants, the feeling I have come away with on each occasion is one of overwhelming sadness - sadness for all that talent squandered on such base material, and sadness for the audiences who allow themselves to be spoon-fed such foul stuff.

The impulse to become a comic is exactly the same, whether you are a modern kind of transvestite Geordie surrealist who has a 90-minute act solely about talking owls, or an anti-globalisation, counterculture ranter who will only perform in a non-hierarchical fashion whereby the audience is on the stage and he is below them on the ground, or Roy "Chubby" Brown. We stand-ups are people who share a lot more than we generally care to admit to.

First and foremost, we are not team players; with our lone-wolf-like nature, we do not want to share the glory with anybody else. The obverse of this is that we also have to bear all the rejection, humiliation and isolation alone. It is this aspect of the business that has formed the characters of men like Manning and all the other Jim Davidsons, Freddie Starrs etc. For them, the triumphs fade almost as soon as they happen - but the crowds who heckle and won't listen, the club chairmen who start the bingo in the middle of their act, the lousy digs and the long night drives; these are remembered forever and are what turn them into the sour, artistically cowardly, self-pitying and miserable individuals that they inevitably seem to become.

It is not the things that happen to you, though, but how you react to them that matters. And in my observation, more than anything else, what damages these older comedians is that they allow themselves to admit to no sort of internal psychological life, no sort of hurt beyond hatred of other comedians. In particular, they will never admit to ever having done or said anything wrong, ever, in their working lives. It is always somebody else's fault when their career takes a downturn. It is the fault of the pregnant showgirl, or the slimy, liberal (probably Jewish) documentary makers who secretly filmed them telling racist jokes to a howling audience of policemen, or the upcoming generation of alternative (probably Jewish) po-faced comedians who don't know what's funny.

To placate whatever frazzled part of their mind acts as a conscience, Manning and his kind always draw some arbitrary line that they swear they won't cross, like an alcoholic telling himself that his drinking is under control as long as he stays off the barley wine. I seem to remember Bernard stating that though he might use terms like "nigger" and "coon " in his act, he would never, ever tell a joke about "disabled kiddies". You could hear the self-regarding tremor in his voice as he said this, as if he was reluctantly admitting to being a humanitarian of similar stature to Nelson Mandela, Noam Chomsky or Aung San Suu Kyi. He always denied being a racist, claiming that he made fun of everybody, equally - " politicians, bald-headed people, people with glasses on, the lot. I have a go at everybody and that's what makes everybody roar with laughter." I notice he left "nigger, coon and Paki" out of his list, though. Those were the words people objected to him using; I can't remember much of a furore about his specky four-eyed barbs.

These comedians, as well as denying themselves any kind of emotional outlet, are not keen to cultivate any sort of intellectual capacity. They will profess to have no time for such poncey pastimes as literature, art, theatre or the cinema. This means that all they are left with is a vague interest in women, money and sport and an overwhelming and obsessive interest in what they regard as "being funny".

To be among a crowd of these guys, or to be trapped alone with one of them, is a terrifying experience. They are all completely incapable of sustaining a normal, warm, personal conversation, with its to and fro; instead they resort to telling a string of old jokes, or insults and put-downs disguised as gags, in the space where an exchange of ideas or confidences or information might usually fit. This means, of course, that the comedians control the encounter, but at the price of the person on the receiving end of the gags not wishing to repeat the experience, ever. Sometimes you glimpse the bright working-class kid they must once have been - even Bernard, the ambitious greengrocer's son, keen to get on, eager to please.

In the end, though, Manning was simply being himself, an unhappy man who was not capable of change. His proud boast was that his motto was "To thine own self be true", though he could not resist adding: "That's from fuckin' Shakespeare, that is."

Those who should really be ashamed of themselves are the revisionists who sought to rehabilitate him: those such as the full-time contrarians at Living Marxism who gave his biography a good review, or those critics and comedy completists looking for the latest reputation to restore, who asserted that his mixture of bile and old pub-gags was him being "ironic " or "postmodern", or that he was an expression of some kind of undiluted and authentic working-class culture. Bernard Manning wasn't any of these things; he was just a halfway decent comic with a horrible act.

The holy grail of comedy: making people laugh

It's an odd thing, stand-up comedy. You go to some bar or theatre or club you would never normally visit, sit with strangers, and watch another stranger try to make you laugh. One minute you're going about your business. The next you're falling about.

Being a punter at a stand-up gig is nothing like going to a rock concert, or a violin recital, or a play, all of which can drag any and every type of emotion from us. Comedy is alone in focusing on one physiological reaction: laughs.

But how do stand-ups make us laugh? Dylan Moran, a comedian who spends more time thinking about these matters than most, has a theory. "If someone has just come back from holiday," he explains, "and they show you some photographs, and say it was all wonderful, and that the sun wasn't too hot, you're bored out of your mind. Nothing could be more boring than other people's happiness. But if they tell you the hotel was crap, how the toilets leaked, how they all got sick - it's a wonderful story. Something bad will have happened to you in the past, but it didn't happen this time. It happened to them. And you can enjoy it."

Or, as Mel Brooks once said: "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die." For whatever reason - our maliciousness; our latent survival instincts; our terror of death - the misfortune of others is fecund comedic material. For this reason, most stand-up is licensed schadenfreude.

The young Welsh comic Steve Williams, though, thinks malice is a small part of the equation. His most successful material comes from what the audience shares, rather than what they don't. "Sex and relationships are the big ones," he says. "Those are the universal life experiences, and the biggest areas for any comic. There is always something funny about things that everyone does, whether it's buying a house, or going to Ikea, or cleaning the car."

"The job of the observational comic is to look at all those things that normal people gloss over, and to find the odd thing - the anomaly - in it. When you do that, you make people look again at their ordinary lives, and that's funny."

Not all comics are "observational", although all observe. There are political comedians and surrealists and one-line merchants. There are slapstick artists and anti-comedians. There is Jimmy Carr. But all turn the ordinary stuff of life into something altogether different, irregular, and, they hope, funny.

For Bill Hicks, however, comedy was not a perversion or a deconstruction of life. It was the thing itself. "If comedy is an escape from anything," he said, "it is an escape from illusions. The comic, by using the voice of reason, reminds us of our true reality, and in that moment of recognition, we laugh, and the 'reality of the daily grind' is shown for what it really is - unreal... a joke.... The audience is relieved to know they're not alone in thinking, 'this bullshit we see and hear all day makes no sense. Surely I'm not the only one who thinks so. And surely there must be an answer.' Good comedy helps people know they're not alone. Great comedy provides an answer."

Hicks was messianic about comedy, and pushed at the limits of his audiences' taste. A comic saying tasteless, unsayable things in front of an audience is part of his or her remit. They say what we can't. It was the basis of Bernard Manning's extraordinary career.

Analysing why one thing gets a laugh, and another doesn't, can be a mug's game. Sometimes, something's just funny. A laugh is the solution to an equation that stretches and baffles even the most accomplished comedians. The only way to know how a joke will go down is to stand up, tell it, and listen.

ED CAESAR

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Hundreds see Manning off

More than 500 mourners lined the streets of Manchester today for the funeral of Bernard Manning. En route to the crematorium, the comic’s horse-drawn hearse pulled up outside his Embassy Club, where the railings were lined with floral tributes. One read: ‘To the irreplaceable Bernard Manning. A generous, genuine man.’ Frank Carson gave the eulogy at the funeral, which was also attended by Cannon and Ball, Jim Bowen, Stan Boardman, Roy Walker and Roy "Chubby" Brown.

Many of the comics had defended Manning against charges of racism immediately after his death from kidney failure last Monday at the age of 76. At the time, Bowen said: ‘It was never his intention to hurt or upset. I have seen people of all different races at his gigs enjoying themselves. I hope his legacy will be as a talented stand-up who made thousands laugh.’

Around 400 more mourners attended Blackley Crematorium, including former Manchester United ace Dennis Law and ex-Coronation Street star Bruce Jones, who played Les Battersby. The service was relayed by loudspeakers to those who could not fit into the chapel. During the hour-long funeral service, the trademark I Laf number plate from Manning's Rolls-Royce stood at the foot of his coffin. Tributes were also read from many who could not be there, including, Manchester United boss Sir Alex Ferguson, Shirley Bassey and Tom Jones. The service ended with Frank Sinatra's My Way.

A wake was held after the service at the Embassy Club for Manning’s closest family and friends.

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It says something that Bruce Jones was there, considering he was involved in racial abuse...

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I do like to be beside the seaside…
By Arnold Brown

In July 2006, I went with Keith Palmer, the Director of The Comedy School, up to Blackpool to see Bernard Manning at a club on the sea-front for a Channel 4 documentary to be screened after his death, “Bernard Manning R.I.P.”, a bizarre obituary…

As one of the founder-members of the right-on “p.c.” “Comedy Store” and “Comic Strip” in the early 1980’s, I obviously had conceived ideas about this particular performer and his racist, sexist ideas. Channel 4 wanted to find out my reactions after seeing this ‘alternative comedy’ bête noire live for the very first time.

The club itself was in a 50’s time-warp, run-down, slightly sleazy and packed with about 100 punters who definitely knew what they had come for: a great night out, lots of cheap laughs about foreigners and minorities, fuelled by a never-ending supply of booze. The audience was unashamedly working-class, men and women, a mixture of the middle-aged, a number in their twenties and thirties and a sprinkling of obviously regular elderly fans, some of whom Manning even seemed to know by first names.

He actually sat on a chair on stage (he’s now 76, seriously overweight and trying to cope with the ravages of diabetes) in front of a tacky old-fashioned aluminium-foil curtain, introduced by a toothy, grinning compere whose heyday had long since gone.

As indicated, Manning is quite frail now, obviously well past his “Comedians” TV prime, but he still managed to keep up a briskish pace throughout, albeit having to be bolstered up now and then by occasionally bursting into song (his early days were as a singer with the big show bands of the 1950’s). Shrewdly, he chose Scottish and Irish favourites with which the audience could even join in, clearly always pressing the right nationalistic buttons. Strangely enough, I found this aspect of working-class culture rather moving, but maybe I can put this down to my inherently middle-class patronising pre-assumptions about the dangers of patriotism…

To be fair, throughout the evening there were a few brilliant jokes (the one about the chicken crossing the road is a classic), his timing is still pretty good for his age and he managed to maintain a beatific, avuncular demeanour – always a benign, cheery glint in his eyes – even while spouting the most vicious of his jokes. Despite all this, it was a depressing thought that there is still an audience for such mostly misanthropic material.

Keith Palmer was the sole member of the African Caribbean community in the audience and within 10 minutes of the start of his act, he was brutally picked upon:

Bernard Manning: “I see we’ve got a black fella in tonight. Where are you from, son?”
Keith Palmer: “London.”
Bernard Manning: “Where are you from before that? I think he thinks he’s English.”

Then he went on to say:
“Just because a donkey’s born in a stable, it doesn’t make it a horse.”

Manning went on to suggest that he would pay for Keith to go to any country he might care to choose… The audience lapped it all up. This was their kind of comedy. Very, very racist.

The fact that the media – TV, radio etc. – have long since marginalised this brand of offensive “humour” is satisfying, but less comfortable is the knowledge that there will always be a hard-core minority who seek it out and relish it. Usually at the lower end of the social order, these are the ones who still need a scapegoat to blame their lack of economic success on, and who better a target than minorities – and all types of foreigners – with their different customs and life-style? Being of the Jewish persuasion, I can obviously understand where all this blatant demonisation can lead to… Or am I just being paranoid?

Throughout the evening, there was an obvious contradiction between the frequent exhortations by Manning that “we should all look after each other blah-blah-blah” and the hateful underbelly of his act.

As Keith explained at length on the train home, the tirade of abuse he was subjected to was so traumatic, he actually switched off for the rest of the act – and I can sympathise with this. In such a hostile environment where everyone else is applauding the most racist attitudes on stage, the person at the butt of the diatribe is humiliated, demeaned and insulted.

Sadly, it was all too predictable. In the safe knowledge that the whole club shared his obnoxious views, Bernard Manning was given carte blanche to say exactly what he knew the audience had come for: an evening of hate-filled bile.

Afterwards, when Channel 4 filmed Keith, myself and others challenging him on all these issues, time and time again Manning dismissed our criticisms with the allegation “It’s just a joke”. This was emphatically belied later by one of the cameramen telling us that on Manning’s mantelpiece at home is proudly displayed a bust of Enoch Powell. Remember him and his “rivers of blood” speech?

A final thought. When asked what limitations in terms of content or subject matter he imposes on himself, he pondered for a moment and said that he was disgusted with comedians like Jo Brand referring to tampons in their act. This seemed pathetic and misogynistic when compared to his choice of material, for example being quite at home making a gratuitous nasty crack about the holocaust. It’s a very strange world…