Bernard Manning Bites the Dust

[booder]

quote author=The Baron link=topic=24741.msg504626#msg504626 date=1182540267]
A point brought up in this thread a few times is "Why is it ok to mock the overweight and old but not certain races/religiongs?"

It's a good question and tough to answer but I do think there is an answer. Why are races/religions more easily offended than other "different" groups?

It comes down to past persecution I think. Fat people and old people, to my knowledge, haven't been persecuted on a national or global level like say Black/Jewish/Asian people have in various parts of the world.

Taking the piss out of someone overweight or old wont ever make them feel that "their people" are/were oppressed like it can with the race or religion issue.

These issues of the past create a higher sensitivity level. Sometimes far too high.

more people commit suicide due to being mocked about their weight than about their race, so not strictly true.

True.

But would 12 cartoons in a Danish news paper cause half the overweight world to start a terror campaign?
[/quote]

no.  anybody embarking on a terror campaign due to seeing a CARTOON , obviously had a distorted perspective on the world already.

[The Baron]

quote author=The Baron link=topic=24741.msg504626#msg504626 date=1182540267]
A point brought up in this thread a few times is "Why is it ok to mock the overweight and old but not certain races/religiongs?"

It's a good question and tough to answer but I do think there is an answer. Why are races/religions more easily offended than other "different" groups?

It comes down to past persecution I think. Fat people and old people, to my knowledge, haven't been persecuted on a national or global level like say Black/Jewish/Asian people have in various parts of the world.

Taking the piss out of someone overweight or old wont ever make them feel that "their people" are/were oppressed like it can with the race or religion issue.

These issues of the past create a higher sensitivity level. Sometimes far too high.

more people commit suicide due to being mocked about their weight than about their race, so not strictly true.

True.

But would 12 cartoons in a Danish news paper cause half the overweight world to start a terror campaign?

no.  anybody embarking on a terror campaign due to seeing a CARTOON , obviously had a distorted perspective on the world already.


[/quote]

There were many who were upset by the picutres who didn't commit terrorist acts though. They were level headed enough to be pissed off without the bombs and flag burning etc. Obviously, to us at least, they too are over sensitive.

However they probably think overweight people killing themselves is pretty ridiculous.

En masse racial and religious sensitivity would far outweight any other type.

[booder]

En masse racial and religious sensitivity would far outweight any other type.

 obviously

[AndrewT]

Bear in mind that the storm about the Danish cartoons was deliberately whipped by Muslims for political reasons. The protests about Salman Rushdie's knighthood in Pakistan at the moment are the same. Unfortunately, so many Muslims defer moral and political decisions to the religious elders that a few fundmentalist imams can cause a lot of trouble.

[I KNOW IT]

Whenever anyone shouted "fat bastard" to Bernard Manning his reply was "rich fat bastard" if you dont mind

[AndrewT]

Here's his self-penned obituary, which he wrote last month.

--------------------------------------------
Shortly before he died, my old mate Spike Milligan said he wanted an inscription on his tombstone to read: "I told you I was ill.'

Well, now that I'm gone, I want carved on my gravestone these words, in letters so small that any visitor will have to move right up close to read them: "Get off! You're standing on my privates." Oh, I know there'll be a few who won't mourn my passing, like mothers-in-law up and down the country. I'll never forget the day I took my own mother-in-law to the Chamber of Horrors in Madame Tussauds. Suddenly, one of the attendants whispered to me: "Please keep her moving. We're trying to do a stock take." The one bad thing about dying quietly in Manchester is that I cannot fulfil the solemn promise I made to the old battleaxe. "When you die, I'm going to dance on your grave," she once said. To which I replied: "I hope you do, because I'm going to be buried at sea."

I don't think the Commission for Racial Equality will be holding a wake for me, either. Nor will the Lesbian and Gay Rights lot or the feminists. They were always banging on about how I was sexist or anti-gay. It was their campaigning that kept me off mainstream television for years, while filling the airwaves with a bunch of fifthrate so-called comics who were about as funny as a dose of bird flu and whose acts had all the humour of a funeral parlour. (Trust me, I'm in one now and there's not a laugh to be had anywhere). In their obsession with turning comedy into a branch of Left-wing politics, they forgot that the only point of jokes is to make people laugh. And that was what I was good at, whether I was on the cabaret circuit in Manchester or at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Well, at least I won't be seeing any of the po-faced, politically- correct brigade where I'm going. I had quite enough of them in my lifetime.

What they never understood was that I was an equal opportunities comedian. Unlike them, with all their little checklists and taboos and easy targets, I never discriminated against anyone or anything. I was quite happy to get a laugh out of any situation. All that mattered to me was whether the gag was funny or not.

"I had a distant German relative who died at Auschwitz. He fell out of one of the watchtowers."

Now that's humour, precisely because it's close to the edge, unlike so many of the tired, comfortable, right- on lines about George Bush in which modern comics indulge, massaging the consciences of their middle-class audiences instead of giving them raw entertainment.

Oh, I can see the other obituaries already: "Bernard Manning, racist bigot", the smug types will say when they hear of my departure. But that's not what the great British public, especially in Lancashire and the rest of the North, will say. They knew that I was a funny bloke. That's why they kept flocking back to my own cabaret club, even when I was barred from the airwaves. And I was never a racist. That's just an easy, catch-all term of abuse bandied around by the media elite against anyone who does not follow their agenda. It was just meaningless. When told by some toffee-nosed southerner that I was prejudiced, I used to say: "Have you actually seen my act?" They would then admit they hadn't. "Then you don't know what you're talking about. You're the one who is prejudiced because you are pre-judging me." If they'd ever bothered to turn up at one of my shows, they'd have soon discovered I told gags about everyone, including all sorts of politicians and the Royal Family. In fact the Queen once told me with a smile, after a Royal Command Performance, how much she liked my act. If it was good enough for her, it should have been good enough for anyone.

Racist? Rubbish. Did these selfrighteous critics know that Clive Lloyd, the great West Indian cricket captain, asked me to perform as part of his testimonial? Or that I did a fund-raising event for the Lancashire and India wicketkeeper Farokh Engineer and another for the great black boxing champion John Conteh? For goodness-sake, I was multi-racial myself, a descendant of Jewish immigrants from Sevastopol. Throughout my life, a sign with the Jewish greeting 'Shalom' hung by door of my home in North Manchester. I was born in 1930 in the Ancoats district of the city, and I never lived more than five miles from my birthplace. I always loved Manchester and her people, though that kind of loyalty and sense of belonging is never understood by the metropolitan elite who despise their own country.

My dad was a greengrocer and it was a tough upbringing, for the North was in the pit of depression and money and food were short. I was one of six children and was forced to share a bed with all my siblings, some of whom regularly wet the bed. In fact, I learnt to swim before I could walk. I remember one night, my mother asked me: "Where do you want to sleep?" I replied: "At the shallow end."

I went to an ordinary local school and left at the age of 14, taking up a job at the Senior Service tobacco factory in Manchester. From my earliest years, I had a bit of a talent for performing, singing in choirs and at work. Then, when I was 16, my life changed dramatically on being called up to serve in the Manchester Regiment of the British Army. Even though the war was over, I had to go out to Germany, where I was one of the armed guards watching over the Nazi hierarchy locked up in Spandau prison. For a 16-year-old, it was a bizarre experience, standing over the likes of Rudolf Hess and Albert Speer with a Bren gun.

Back home, I was a good enough singer to make it as a professional. It looked like I'd really hit the big time when, in February 1952, I was booked to sing at the London Lyceum theatre with the Oscar Rabin Big Band, with the show to be broadcast on the radio. But the very day I was due to take to the stage King George VI died, so the event was cancelled. I'll never forgive the King for dying like that. He left me high and dry.

But soon I found that I was even better at telling gags than I was at singing and in the late 1950s I opened my own club in a converted billiard hall, Manchester's famous Embassy Club. The venue attracted many of the biggest names in British showbusiness including Matt Monro, and even the Beatles. It also led to my show on ITV called The Comedians, which was so successful that in 1978 I was even asked to play at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Indeed, my act was an equally big success on the other side of the Atlantic, though I had to adapt the material for American audiences. So Irish jokes became Polish ones, such as: "This Polish man gets a job in Californian zoo. One day a workmate says to him, "For $2,000, would you have sex with the gorilla in that cage?" The Pole thinks for a minute and then says, "Yeah, all right. But on three conditions. First, that I don't have to kiss her. Second, that you don't tell any of my mates. And third, that you give me a fortnight to get the money together". I supposed the animal rights lobby would get me on that one.

But despite my TV appearances being reduced since the Eighties, I've still managed to enjoy a long and fruitful career. I wouldn't have changed any of it for a moment. I was glad I managed to make it into my late 70s, but then there was always a very strong survival instinct in my family. I had an uncle who was still having sex at 74. Which was lucky, as he lived at Number 72. It was also a contented end, which reminds me of another longlived uncle, a bus driver who went peacefully in his sleep - not screaming like his passengers.

And as I look down now on all the over-paid executives who have made such a mess of television and undermined true comedy, and as I sense the affection from the mass of the British public, I know that I am the one having the last laugh.
--------------------------------

[Colchester Kev]

  RIP Mr. Bernard Manning 

[fearisthekey]

Wow, pretty composed bit of prose there. Would have been nice to see more of him on the telly.
 

[Rookie (Rodney)]

RIP Mr. Bernard Manning 

[AdamM]

the gorilla joke is funny, but why a Pole?
would the joke have been less funny if it was "a fella got a job in a zoo"

[johnbhoy76]

They haven't been (or in Mannings case weren't) convicted because they aren't/weren't breaking any laws, and are both hugely popular comedians.

It's almost fruitless to debate Bernard Manning. There is no middle gorund. Those who like him hold him in very high regard, but those who dont like him seemingly think he is the anti-christ.

Speaking for myself I never said he should be banned.

I think if a comedian wants to tell racist jokes then that is up to him. I agree if you ban racist jokes then you start down the path of banning all jokes.

This does not take away from the simple fact that Bernard Manning was a racist comedian who wasn't even funny.

Ban him? he's not good enough to be banned!

If want to defend Bernard Manning's racist ramblings then go ahead but do not try to lump all his critics into a big fluffy liberal PC bandwagon.

Also this idea that "The nation" are concerned with immigration is nonsense. A load of Daily Mail readers in the home counties are concerned as they are spoon fed scare stories every day. The rest of us are just getting on with our lives.

Michael Howard made immigration the Tories main issue in the 2005 election and they took an absolute drubbing at the polls because 90% of decent people are concerned with....

If I get sick will there be a hospital bed for me?
If I have kids will there be a decent school for them?
If I get a pay rise how much extra tax will I pay?
Is it safe to walk down my street at night? etc........

That's what most normal people are concerned with. They don't care if the lady who serves them in Asda is From Poland or Paisley.

The Mannings & the Chubby Browns appeal to the other 10%

[TheChipPrince]

I think Bernarrd Manning made a lot of money by making a lot of people laugh, he was good at what he did... Simple as that as far as i'm concerned... RIP

[johnbhoy76]

Good Article here by Alexei Sayle on the bold Bernard & comedy in general

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article2682450.ece

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?
Published: 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 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

[ifm]

LOL Alexie Sayle!!!
The bloke who penned such wonderful comedy songs such as "S**t P**s B*****k W**k"
A true comedy genius eh? 

I really think that in order to write such articles you need to be at least on some sort of level playing field as the subject matter.
In his own words he never even saw manning perform LOL
Isn't Sayle a committed communist? are they not responsible for the subjugation of millions, starved and repressed??

[booder]

This does not take away from the simple fact that Bernard Manning was a racist comedian who wasn't even funny.  IMHO

F Y P