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None of that really helps if you are a Black or Asian person in the audience who has been singled out, has been upset by the use of racist language and stereotypes, and now has to decide whether to laugh along
I'd wholeheartedly agree with that Haus, and this pretty much:
He was, however, a comedian who decided that his comfort zone and his sense of himself as inconoclast, champion of freedom, populist and so on was more important than challenging the use of racist language and racist stereotypes in his humour
… though looking at his life, it seems extremely unlikely that he ever would have challenged himself and his material in this way for a variety of reasons, some of which are given in The Independent obituary – pig-headness for one, and the construction of himself as in opposition to “trendy” progressive comedians - part of his appeal to his “core” audience. I’m not defending him to be solely to be contrary, I find these shifts in attitudes, and the responses to them made by the likes of Manning, fascinating, largely because they point to ideas about language, race, class and their intersection. I find this sort of discussion a lot more interesting than posts saying "he's a piece of shit and I'm glad he's dead”.
The Independent obituary is really fascinating on that score. It mirrors a few of my perceptions of him as a comedian and points to the roots of his humour in working class cullture. Part of my resistance to simply dismissing him as a bigot comes because I'm aware he's in a sense emblematic of the white working class - he's a kind of Guardian poster boy for everything that's evil. There's a lot of discourse that paints the white working class as nothing more than pigshit thick and reactionarily racist - and I think you can see some of this going on with Manning and the reaction to him. He's simply another working class racist and all the complexities of his background, the culture he came out of, the reasons he took the positions he did are dismissed. I think he's a more complex figure than a lot of commentary would allow for. |
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'V' hand, palm facing the body, is placed so that the fingertips are just under the eyes. The hand swings straight out.
'C' hand.
'A' hands are held side by side before the chest, palms facing each other and thumbs pointing forward. In this position the hands move alternately back and forth, toward and away from the body. 
hand are placed at the lips, and then the hand is thrown down.
hands, side by side, move straight down a short distance, as if outlining the sides of an unseen individual.