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 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.
― Dom Passantino, Wednesday, 20 June 2007 14:20 (sixteen years ago) link