Canadian comedian Graham Clark – the man who takes on the Olympic Games

Graham Clark is not worried by the toughest gig in London

When I chatted to Comedy Cafe owner Noel Faulkner recently, he mentioned that Canadian comic Graham Clark was coming over to the UK to play one show only for one night only at the Comedy Cafe and it is this Friday.

I had tea with Graham yesterday afternoon, admirably and surprisingly not just awake but lively after flying over from Vancouver.

“You have the worst possible date for a gig,” I told him. “Clashing with the Opening Ceremony of the London Olympic Games on TV.”

“Yeah,” he laughed. “But I wouldn’t have it any other way. I had a gig the night the Vancouver Winter Olympics started in 2010.”

“So you’ve already experienced what London’s next few weeks are going to be like?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I know what a nightmare it becomes. The rich people are really excited about it, because they’re the ones who’re gonna see lots of things and then everybody else gets screwed because the traffic’s messed up. They sell it as the brotherhood of man and a great coming-together of the world, but it’s really just a good time for rich people and everybody else has to put up with it. Getting everywhere in Vancouver was a nightmare and all the comedy clubs were kaput.”

“There’s no comedy ‘circuit’ in Canada, is there?” I asked.

“Not like there is here in Britain,” Graham explained. “Because it’s such a gigantic country. There’s mini-circuits within the Provinces, but it’s not like here or the US because you would spend so much money going from city to city on a plane – or driving – that you’d never make any real money. There’s a small fringe festival circuit, but not like here.”

“Have you thought about playing the Edinburgh Fringe over here?” I asked.

“Sometimes,” Graham said, “But you just hear stories that it costs a fortune.”

“A couple of hours ago,” I said, “someone told me one of the major agencies this year was unusually honest to a new act they manage. They told her that, if she sells out every seat at every performance of her show at the Fringe this year, she will end up only owing them £9,000.”

Graham laughed.

“So what’s it like being a comedian in Canada?” I asked. “You’re a second rate American.”

“It’s tough,” Graham said. “Really tough.”

“And do the audiences react to material the same in the States and Canada?” I asked.

“In the States, the crowds are more lively,” Graham said. “They go nuts. They clap and shout and hoot and holler. And, as a comedian, that’s great. Even the best Canadian audiences are very sedate. The worst American audiences are still more lively than the best Canadian audiences.”

“American comics,” I said, “sometimes complain that British audiences sit there thinking That’s very funny but don’t laugh.”

“It’s the same in Canada,” said Graham.

“Did you start your weekly podcast to break into a wider market?” I asked. “You saw it as a pilot for a radio show?”

“No,” said Graham. “There isn’t really a place for that in Canada. We pitched it loosely to CBC; but maybe it’s too much in its infancy.”

“And you continue the podcast because…?”

“Because, in Canada, everyone does everything,” Graham explained. “There are people in Britain who just do stand-up. It blows my mind that you could just be one thing. In Canada, you have to be doing stand-up, writing on a TV show or, if something comes up, you act in something or you produce your own shows or do podcasts – and that’s just to make the rent. That’s not piling up riches.

“In Canada, there’s not even that much money in TV. In the last couple of years, I’ve worked on a couple of sitcoms and a panel show and a daily news humour show: but none of them paid very well. There’s only one Canadian comic I know who can fill auditoriums – Russell Peters.”

“So you are exploring all avenues,” I said.

“Yeah,” Graham agreed. “I put a DVD directly online, because that’s the new…

“What Louis C.K. does,” I said.

“Yeah. But it works surprisingly well, even in a smaller microcosm like Canada; it’s easier for people to access.”

“So do you reckon comics have to leave Canada to make it big at all?”

“Yeah. And the whole time you’re working in Canada, that’s hanging over your head. Everybody moves to the States or to Britain.”

“So you, too, have to move?” I suggested.

“Yeah. It’s possible.”

“You thinking about it?”

“Every time I pay the rent,” Graham laughed.

“To the States or Britain?” I asked.

“It costs a lot more to move to the States,” he said, “and I have an Irish passport – my family’s from Antrim – so that makes it very easy to work over here.”

“Would you describe your act as more gag-based or story-based?” I asked.

“More story-based, I guess,” Graham replied, then paused. “I’ve written gags for other people but, for myself, doing lots of one-liners never works: it always comes out sounding too ‘finished’. I don’t have that Jimmy Carr type of delivery where you do accept from him that he is performing written one-liners. People want my delivery to be like it just fell out of my head. If it seems too polished, people don’t accept it from me, which is weird.

“When Jimmy Carr goes on stage, you kinda know he is the character ‘Jimmy Carr’. It’s the same thing in America with Rodney Dangerfield or Steven Wright.

“You identify them as a specific character, so they can talk in one-liners; it doesn’t bother you. But some people – like Louis C.K. – talk naturally in paragraphs or in stories. I don’t know if I would accept Louis C.K delivering one-liners, even though that’s what he used to do: shorter jokes.”

“So,” I said, “in your own audience’s view, you just come onstage and chat to them.”

“Yeah,” Graham mused, “I’ve tried a bunch of ways but that’s the way that flows the best for me: to have an idea and push it out on stage.”

“People have to believe it’s…” I started.

“…organic,” Graham said. “Yeah. With me, if it’s too ‘written’, it’s gonna sound that way. I’ve tried different styles of jokes – linked and stories and short and one-liners and dirty and clean – and the one thing that seems to work the best with me is when it just seems to be running off the top of my head.”

“Traditional comics with strings of short gags,” I suggested, “seem to be a dying breed. It’s mostly stories at the Edinburgh Fringe now.”

“Though, oddly, I feel my jokes are getting shorter,” Graham told me. “When I started out, they tended to be longer and have more detail, but now maybe I’m better at editing and want to get to the point faster. The British comics we see who come over to Canada have big, long stories.”

“Does that go down well?”

“It does,” said Graham, “but you could never develop that in Canada because, in the clubs, you need to turn over the laughs faster because nobody’s paying attention.

“In Britain, a whole 5-minute routine can be one story. You’d really have to be very confident to do that in Canada, because people don’t have the attention. They want jokes every 30 seconds. If you’re not delivering that on a Friday night, then they’re gonna drift. We have to be more gag-based than the British.”

As Graham and I parted – he was off to do a radio interview to publicise his show – he said to me: “That was a good interview you did with Noel Faulkner.”

“Well,” I said. “Noel’s like me: he’s got to that age where he doesn’t care – He’ll just say what he thinks.”

“I wish I could get to that stage,” Graham said. “I still worry.”

Twenty minutes later, I got a text message from Neale at the Comedy Cafe, telling me that Graham’s show on Friday – up against the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games on TV – had sold out.

Maybe Graham Clark does not need to worry.

The serious subject of performing a comedy show at the Edinburgh Fringe

(This was also published in the Huffington Post)

Yesterday, someone asked me for advice about their next Edinburgh Fringe comedy show.

The Fringe does not start until next August, but now is the time people begin their preparation.

His problem was that he had a factually-based one-hour show and has fallen out with his on-stage partner. It happens. Fortunately, the person asking me had written the entire show on his own, otherwise there might have been tears over ownership.

“My show is written for two people” he told me. “It’s written for me and a sidekick/straight man. How do I translate that into just me? How would Eric do his act without Ernie? I don’t think I’m gonna find another partner in time. And the show is funny but factually-based. It’s going to end up sounding/feeling like a talk/lecture. How do I manage to keep the thing bubbling?”

“Well,” I suggested. “It’s already a show about true facts. You could tell the truth, say there was going to another person and it fell through. Then you play both parts straight but, in the way you tell the story and in the nature of playing two parts straight, it will be funny. The fact that the other guy is not appearing becomes part of the show, another layer, a sub-plot, added texture.”

“But how do I actually physically perform it?” the newly-solo act asked me.

“Just as a monologue,” I suggested. “Or you could do the old Tommy Cooper thing of literally wearing two different hats, depending on which person you are. That might get a bit tiresome over 55 minutes… Or it might work.

“Personally, I think you should just do it as a talk/lecture. It is the style and personality that makes it interesting. All one-hour stand-up shows are really just lectures made funny by the personality of the performer.

“If you have a one-hour comedy show, it has to be about one central thing, unless you’re a brilliant gag-machine act like Jimmy Carr, Milton Jones or Tim Vine.

“Most of the really creatively successful Edinburgh shows since 2004 (I date everything from Janey Godley’s jaw-dropping confessional Edinburgh Fringe show Good Godley!) have been about one aspect of the performer’s life or a series of anecdotes strung together with one central thread running through.

“That’s the difference between a comedy act that can last 20 minutes in a club (a series of unconnected gags) and a comedy show that lasts 55 minutes (smoothly-linked anecdotes that have an over-all subject and shape).

“In your case, you already have the subject. The trick in an hour-long Edinburgh Fringe show is not to find enough gags to fill-up 55 minutes. The trick is to find one story that will last 55 minutes and which, in the telling, will be incidentally funny at regular intervals.

“You should see one of Janey Godley’s shows,” I suggested. “She is possibly the best storyteller I have ever seen and I have seen a few. A lot of other comedians do not understand why she gets such totally OTT rave review quotes for her shows because, as fellow performers on a bill with her at some club, they have only ever seen little bits and pieces of her club act. She doesn’t really do traditional gags. She does personality. She does very good 20 or 30 minute spots, but her real forte is 60 or 90 minute shows.

“And the fascinating thing about her full-length shows is that there is almost nothing ‘funny’ in them at all. The subjects are all serious and very often horrendously sad. But her personality and storytelling makes them very, very funny. I don’t think of her as a stand-up comic. She is a very, very funny storyteller. It’s that Frank Carson line – It’s the way you tell ‘em.”

“Yeah, yeah,” the worried performer said, “You go on about Janey and she may be brilliant. But what do you yourself actually know about performing an Edinburgh show?”

“Nothing,” I admitted. “But most people don’t notice.”

Racial and racist jokes + what comic Bernard Manning told Lewis Schaffer

(A version of this blog was also published on the Chortle comedy website)

Whenever I mention the late comedian Bernard Manning in a blog, the number of hits goes up because some people get offended by the mere mention of him. It is like rattling the cage of a PC parakeet.

Live on stage, Bernard Manning was one of the best technical comedians I have ever seen .

In yesterday’s blog – in passing – I mentioned both Bernard Manning and American comedian Lewis Schaffer.

I normally try not to quote from people’s stage acts but, occasionally, Lewis mentions on stage that an Edinburgh Fringe reviewer once called him “mildly racist”.

He says that is the worst of both worlds.

If you are not racist, you do not want to go see a comedian who is mildly racist.

Equally, if you are a racist, you do not want to go see someone who is only mildly racist.

The only solution, Lewis reasons on stage, is that his act should become more racist.

In fact, I do not think Lewis is remotely racist on or off stage. He can be xenophobic on stage, but that is perhaps a sign that he has ‘gone native’ after too many years living in Britain.

On stage, like Jerry Sadowitz, he hates everyone and everything equally.

Misanthropy is his schtick.

I vaguely know another ‘white’ comedian who often plays ‘black’ clubs. I will not name the comedian because of what follows in this blog, but the comedian has talked to me of how he/she can tell jokes about black culture to highly appreciative black audiences. But he/she cannot tell the same jokes to white audiences because the jokes would be seen as appallingly racist.

To black audiences, they are not racist; they are just very funny observational racial jokes.

Interestingly, about ten years ago, Lewis Schaffer had a conversation with Bernard Manning, though they never met.

“It was around 2002,” Lewis tells me. “I’d been in the country for such a short time, it was all a blur to me. I was at the ITN building on Gray’s Inn Road in London and Bernard Manning was in Manchester and they were asking us about offensiveness in comedy.

“I said what I always say, which is that I personally think you should only tell a joke about any ethnic group if you can tell it to their face and they will laugh AND you can tell it when they’re not around and people who are not of that group will not find it offensive.

“Bad comedians are the ones who can tell a joke only when the people they’re making fun of are not in the room – Welsh people are not here. Let’s insult them. 

“That’s bad comedy. Well, not bad. But not the best.

“Good comics can insult you to your face.”

I certainly agree with that. I saw a show at Bernard Manning’s Embassy Club in Manchester in the early 1980s when there was a black couple near the front of the audience. Manning, of course, zeroed in on them as the butt of his jokes and they genuinely loved it. At the end of the show, they were beaming with happiness and excitement; he had made their night.

Another time, there was a honeymoon couple in the audience who foolishly admitted to Manning that they were a honeymoon couple. What they were thinking about, I cannot begin to imagine. He, of course, did every honeymoon and sex gag he could think of throughout the show. Again, they loved it, loved being the centre of attention, loved him (as it were) giving them a hard time.

So I agree with Lewis Schaffer that a good comic can tell racial jokes to people’s faces. A bad comic can only tell those jokes when the relevant people are out of the room.

“But,” says Lewis, “there is another step. A good comic can tell a racial joke to people of that racial group and make them laugh AND he can tell the same joke to people who are not of that ethnic group and make them laugh. If you can’t tell the joke and get laughs when there are no people of that racial group there, then you shouldn’t tell the joke. You should not tell the joke because it will make the audience feel uncomfortable.”

I am not sure I go along with Lewis on this.

If you can tell a black racial joke to black people and they do not find it offensive – if they find it funny – then the joke is not racist, it is racial. If white people find the joke racist, then I think the problem lies in the people not in the joke.

Lewis tells me: “Just because black people are laughing, doesn’t mean you’re allowed to make the racial joke. It doesn’t mean you can tell that joke to an audience of white people. It doesn’t mean you’re going to get a laugh from it. It doesn’t mean they’re not going to hate you.

“If Bernard Manning could tell his jokes to black people who laughed at them, then the jokes were not racist. But that doesn’t mean he could tell them to white people and not be perceived as being racist. So maybe that’s the problem Bernard Manning had and has: that he was and is perceived as being racist. I’m just saying that. I don’t know.

“I said that on the radio and Bernard Manning – I don’t know how he knew this, but he – brilliantly – said, You are going to die skint.

“It was the first time I had ever heard the word ‘skint’ and what he said is totally true.

“Bernard Manning knew he offended people, but he didn’t care, because that’s where the money was in his world.

“With me, I actually care about people’s feelings and that’s not good for business.”

The god-like comedian Ken Dodd is more mugger than con man + he got a standing ovation in Bournemouth

Morecambe and Wise were not famous.

Yes, they were justifiably famous in the UK. But go to some village in western China and ask them who Morecambe and Wise were.

M&W are and always were total unknowns except in the British Isles.

Fame is relative and mostly regional.

To save my life, I could not tell you who the world water ski champion is. But presumably he or she is a Big Name if you follow water skiing.

The world is full of champions, each famous in their own little world.

I see quite a lot of club comedy and what is still called alternative comedy. Some of the acts are called comedy stars; some may even think they are stars. Audiences even flock to and fill large venues to see some of these people who have appeared in TV panel shows.

But they are not big stars even in the UK. They are minor and transient cults with a few disciples. Admittedly they have more disciples than Jesus did when he started but, just because you can get more than twelve people to listen to you in a room above a pub in Camden Town, don’t start thinking you are more famous than the Son of God.

Unless you are known and regarded in awe by a random 50-year-old housewife in a bus queue in Leamington Spa, you are not famous in UK terms. If you can fill a big venue at the Edinburgh Fringe with 23 year old fans for 27 nights, you are not famous. You are a very minor cult.

Last night, I saw Ken Dodd’s show Happiness at The Pavilion Theatre in Bournemouth. Ken Dodd is unquestionably famous in the UK and the venue was filled with a well-heeled middle-of-the-road, middle class Middle England audience of the type TV commissioners mystifyingly ignore. This audience was the great TV-viewing audience en masse on a rare trip out to see a live show.

Upcoming shows at The Pavilion include The Gazza and Greavsie Show, Roy Chubby Brown, Joe Pasquale, Jethro and Jim Davidson. Never, never, never underestimate the Daily Mail. Their readers are the mass audience. Admittedly Dylan Moran and Russell Kane also have upcoming shows at The Pavilion, but the phrases “sore thumbs” and “stand out” spring to mind.

London-based American comedian Lewis Schaffer has a routine in which he says his ex-manager told him he will never become famous unless, like a currently ‘famous’ alternative comedian, he can be a true professional and tell the same jokes in every show and repeat each show exactly.

Last night, the first half of Ken Dodd’s 5-hour show proved the danger of being too experienced and too professional a performer if you are on a long tour.

There was an audibility problem.

This was partly because the sound system at The Pavilion was occasionally indistinct – certainly where I was sitting, centre right in the audience – and partly because Ken Dodd, after 55 years in showbiz and on his seemingly endless UK tour, has been doing the same routines and telling the same stories for too long. He came on stage and spoke what, for the first part of the show seemed to be a script which he had got so used to he didn’t actually perform it: he just threw the words out. He galloped and gabbled through the words and syllables with the result perhaps a quarter of what he was saying was indecipherable.

And this was an audience with possible inbuilt hearing problems where I half expected the colostomy bags to break during the show to create a tsunami that could have washed the entire population of Bournemouth into the English Channel.

When an established act, instead of saying “Ladies and gentlemen” says “lay-ge-me” and all the other words and phrases are gabbled and elided indistinctly in much the same way, he is not performing an act, he is going through the motions on autopilot. He has heard the jokes 1,000 times; the audience has not (well, not most of them).

His saving grace was an astonishing gag rate of perhaps one potential laugh every ten seconds. And the material is gold. You couldn’t go wrong with that material. But Doddy was getting laughs because the jokes (when heard) were good, not because of any technical skill in the delivery.

There are very few successful gag tellers in modern alternative comedy – Jimmy Carr, Milton Jones and Tim Vine are exceptions not the rule. Most successful alternative comedians nowadays tell stories: not necessarily funny stories, but stories told funny.

Ken Dodd mostly told gags in the first half and funny stories in the second half (in which he found his feet more). But it struck me that his slightly more old-fashioned (or let’s say traditional) approach was very similar to inexperienced circuit comics today.

He told stories as if they were gags, with token links between each story, but with no over-all arc. If he told ten stories, the first and second might have a token link and the seventh and eighth might have a token link, but there was no over-all progression, no shape, no thread to the stories. So the over-all effect was like getting beaten round the head with gags by a mugger for five hours, not drawn into a personal fantasy world by a con man, which is what a stand-up comedian is.

It struck me Doddy’s unlinked gag structure was very like comics new to the current comedy circuit who have some material but can’t stitch it into a unitary act. They can do 10 or 15 or 20 minutes but are not yet capable of putting on a 60 minute Edinburgh Fringe show.

I suppose the transition from beating people into submission with barrages of gags rather than bringing them into your own personal world with smoothly-linked stories is a relatively recent development which Doddy has no need to embrace because he has so many gags and stories which he can throw at the audience from his years of experience.

Because he is so experienced and so good, I could not tell how much of the second half was scripted and how much he was just plucking and throwing in gags and stories from a mental storehouse.

One ad-lib which surely must have been planned and, indeed, ‘planted’ was a piece of banter with the audience in which Dodd asked a woman “How many children do you have?”

“Eight!” came the unexpected reply.

Dodd professed bewilderment at this and meandered for a couple of sentences about her husband, then asked:

“Have you sewn up the gap in his pyjamas yet?…. (pause)… You know what they say… A stitch in time saves…” (Immediate audience laughter – though strangely not as much as it deserved)

This cannot possibly have been an ad-lib. It had to have been planted in the audience because he feigned bewilderment at the initial reply of “Eight,” which he would not have done in the way that he did if it were not a lead-up to the punchline.

There were also glimpses of an unexpected (to me) Ken Dodd – a ventriloquist act with a Diddy Man doll that almost verged on being post-modernist and a sequence in which he was doing a series of very passable regional accents and which went into a whole non-Ken-Dodd realm.

Small numbers of the audience left during the single interval – including the friend I went with, who had been exhausted by the first two and a half hours – she went paddling in the sea by the pier and then found a strange Greek Orthodox priest intoning his way through a Paschal Celebration in a small chapel watching by an old woman with a bell and an old man in a shabby grey suit. He had started at 10.00pm – about halfway through Doddy’s show – and was still intoning, watched by his two fans, at 15 minutes past midnight after Doddy’s show had ended and we went to see if he was still going strong.

Whether Christianity or Ken Dodd’s shows will last longer is a moot point, but they probably have the same fans.

At the end of Ken Dodd’s Happiness show, people rose from their seats to leave while still clapping and, partially blocked from leaving by other people possibly with mobility problems, this turned into a standing ovation and a sudden flutter of flashes as people with mobile phones snatched quick photos of the god-like Doddy on stage.

The standing ovation in both the stalls and the balcony was warm and heartfelt and passionate but perhaps was more for being a national institution than for the show itself.

It was an event as much as a show.

Much like Jesus preaching to the converted, in retrospect, it will be loved, treasured and much talked about and the Master’s fame will spread, though perhaps neither further nor wider nor to western China.

In defence of racial jokes, Bernard Manning and Jimmy Carr but not this British Asian bloke I saw

(This blog later appeared on Chortle, the UK comedy industry website)

I once put on a show at the Hackney Empire theatre in London where a top-name comic refused to introduce or be on stage with comedian Jimmy Carr because, in the preceding week, Jimmy had been much criticised in the press for jokes about gypsies. Especially one gag:

“The male gypsy moth can smell the female gypsy moth up to seven miles away – and that fact also works if you remove the word ‘moth’.”

I had no problem with Jimmy Carr nor with the joke. Told in his particular dead-pan persona, it is a beautifully-crafted joke. From some other comic, it could have been very ethnically offensive. From the Jimmy Carr on-stage character, it did not seem to me to be offensive. It is/was a joke.

In a Guardian interview in 2006, Jimmy said, “If you’re doing wordplay, there is no real place to take offence. It’s like taking offence at a crossword puzzle… People don’t come and see my show and go, ‘That’s what he thinks’.”

I think if the late Bernard Manning’s live act – much attacked by knee-jerk PC supporters who never saw it – were performed today, word-for-word, by Jimmy Carr or Jerry Sadowitz, then trendy journalists would give it a four or five star review. Because they don’t believe (despite the gypsy jokes) that Jimmy Carr or Jerry Sadowitz are actually themselves bigoted.

But people do believe in retrospect and without having seen and heard him deliver jokes live on stage, that Bernard Manning’s live act was racist. Because they’ve read or heard other people say it’s a fact.

I did see Bernard Manning perform live three times. He was very funny. I also once had lunch with him. It seemed to me he had a bit of a superiority complex – he thought he was a bit better than the other Northern Comics of the time – but then he probably was. And he was very funny in a hard-edged, cynical way not un-reminiscent of the current Jimmy Carr on-stage persona.

The first time I saw Bernard perform live, at his own Embassy Club in Manchester, was probably in the early 1980s. It was one of the slickest professional shows I have ever seen in my life, performed in tacky, glittery decor like a cheap Hong Kong Christmas party that Butlins had staged for holiday campers in the mid 1950s.

The room was filled with ordinary down-market punters who clearly seldom went out and were be-suited and dolled-up for their Big Night Out. The only comparable thing I’ve seen was a Sunday night show at a Masonic hall in Easterhouse, Glasgow, which felt like it was set in South Vietnam circa 1968. The exterior (the walls were topped with barbed wire & broken glass) and location of the venue (a lone building in the middle of what felt like and very possibly was a free-fire zone) looked like something out of Escape From New York and the punters were middle-aged blue-rinsed women in over-tight sparkly dresses and dark-suited men looking uncomfortable wearing tightly-collared shirts and seldom-used ties.

What struck me about Bernard Manning’s act at the Embassy Club in Manchester for his very mainstream, very middle-of-the-road, probably Labour-voting but very conservative early-1980s audience was that, for the first third of the act, he used the word “cunt” very liberally. It was all over the place. This was at a time when the word was unacceptable in alternative comedy shows (which were only barely starting) and never heard on feature films, let alone in straight middle-of-the-road live punter shows. The use of the word “cunt” tailed-off after the first third of the act and had disappeared entirely by the final third.

It only struck me the next day that this was part of Bernard’s professionalism.

The show had been due to start at 8.00pm.

At 30 seconds before 8.00pm, Bernard appeared on stage and briefly introduced the first act. There then followed competent singers, competent comics. Nothing hyper-special. But satisfying. There were two breaks. In one, there was a charity raffle. In the other, chicken-in-a-basket. Throughout the show (as was the way with Northern clubs) you could order drinks at your table and there was a constant flow of staff bringing drinks from the bar to tables. It was a visible money-making machine and the paying punters got value -for-money. They got what they paid for.

At the climax of the show, they got Bernard Manning doing his stand-up act – he was the one they had come to see – and they expected his act to be rude and shocking. That was why they had come. He delivered. It was cunt-this and cunt-that and cunt-the-other at the start. After he had established the act was rude and shocking, he just got on with good, solid gags and had no need to say “cunt”. He had delivered what they expected and, next day, those punters would be able to tell their friends and workmates: “Ooh, our Bernard, he were so rude. It were proper dirty.”

Even there, I am perpetuating a stereotype.

The second time I saw Bernard perform live, there was a young honeymoon couple in the very front row who foolishly admitted the fact to him. He, of course, went for sexual jokes throughout. They loved it. At the same show, there was a black couple in the audience. He went for them as well. They loved it. Afterwards, they were laughing and joking with him.

I also saw him make anti-Semitic jokes.

He was part-Jewish.

I have seen the brilliant Jerry Sadowitz make what most people would consider anti-Semitic jokes.

He is Jewish.

The London-based New York comic Lewis Schaffer tells the best Holocaust joke I have ever heard.

He is Jewish.

Recently, I saw a new-ish comic, a British Asian, make an anti-Indian joke.

It should have felt OK – like a Jew telling a Jewish joke against Jews – but, to me, it felt racist.

It is relevant that he is a new-ish comic.

It’s the way they tell ’em.

A joke is a joke is a joke.

It’s the way it’s told that makes it funny. Or racist.

There is a difference between racial and racist jokes.

The sign of a non-racist society is that anyone can be the butt of a good joke.