I just read somewhere that he hailed from a family of Jewish immigrants...racist my arse.
Was Lenny Henry deemed racist for his Honkie Jibes in the 70's and 80's? Ermmmm....No!!!
And no...there is no punchline.
How old are you Millom? I only ask because as someone that can actually remember the 70's and 80's I can only ask WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT!
Lenny Henry's "Honkie jibes" - NEVER FUCKING HAPPENED!
This was a man that during the 70's was appearing on the Black and White Minstrel show for fuck sake! He was never some kind of race warrior!
The only time I can EVER remember anyone using the word "Honky" was in the monumentally shite sitcom
Love thy Neighbour starring that Patrick fellah off Eastenders.
Written by................... a couple of white blokes..... Who hit on the word Honky, previously barely heard in Britain..because they had to have something for the black characer to respond with when a torrent of racist abuse was aimed at him.
The rest of you with your cosy "he just took the piss he wasn't racist" bollocks need to hunt out the interview with the fat sweaty poisonous fucker on the Mrs Merton Show.
Caroline Aherne as Mrs Merton: Bernard you're a racist aren't you?
Bernard Manning: Yes! There are people I like and people I don't like. What I hate is these people who think their English because they're born over here. That's like saying that if a dog is born in a stable it's a horse!
It's not that fact that he told jokes about race that I don't like. I think comics should be free to make jokes about anything.
But he was a racist. His jokes about race startedd from the position that he as a white English man was the pinnacle of human evolution. Everyone else was inferior, and right down at the bottom for him were black people who he regarded as pretty much sub human.
One of his "jokes" that was aired on Five live this morning runs thus:
A black man walks into a pub with a parrot on his shoulder. The barman says "Where did you get that ?" and the parrot replies "Africa. There's fucking millions of them"
About half a dozen people came to air to say "I don't see how that is racist". One black guy from Newcastle said "Yeah that was funny, I could laugh at that no matter who the subject of the joke was".
ALL of whom seem to be either subconciously or deliberately ignoring the central premise of the joke. It works through the simple technique of confounding expectations, the audience expects the barmans remark to have been aimed at the man, but the response makes it clear that the question was directed towards the bird. What the joke says is that in the mind of the barman, and for that matter of jokes narrator, the parrot is a closer to being their equal than a black man. A parrot is higher up the evolutionary scale as far as they're concerned.
Yeah really fucking funny.
I don't care if he did know how to time a joke. I don't care how much work he did for charity. I don't care how much he loved his Mum, or how many black or Jewish neighbours he was friendly with. He was an overt racist that believed sincerely that white people were superior to black people and that black people had no right to an equal place in British society.
I started secondary school in the late 70's when NF supporting skins were rife in Swindon schools. All visible ethnic minorities were given a shit time by significant sections of young people, and the presence of people like Manning on TV was at least partly responsible.
Good fucking riddance to him.
Oh and can you people TRY to get your head around the fact that when Ricky Gervias talks about a time "before racism was bad" he was being SATIRICAL! He didn't expect a bunch of idiots to take it seriously. Yes people in Britain were more ignorant about issues of race 50 years or 60 years ago. Prior to the more widespread immigration of the 1950's and 60's, a lot of people hadn't really met any black people.
But was everybody or indeed even a majority racist before 1965? Were they fuck!
Run down a list of the really great comics of Mannings era and try to find any that were as hatefilled as him.
Compare him to, for example, Les Dawson.
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Im 38 mate, and i remember seeing him live in birmingham (in the bull-ring iirc) when he made several honky jibes at the crowd, along with my sister and my brother in law. I can see where you are coming from though. What i would say is that whilst he was calling the crowd honkies, he was also taking the piss out of his own colour.
