A member of the shadow front bench told me a mildly racist joke recently. Surprisingly, it made me laugh. I used to find racist jokes dismally unfunny but these days, because I’m not allowed to find them funny and might even be visited by the police for committing a hate crime if I did, they’ve taken on a samizdat quality. So – involuntarily, maybe, officer – I laughed. Context helps, of course: it’s funnier because the joke came from a civilised and intelligent human being whose job would be lost as soon as the punchline was delivered in public (go on, Dave, have another one of your witch-hunts). Much funnier than if it had been related by some fat, sweating, antediluvian oaf in a Manchester working men’s club. Then it would hardly be funny at all.

To state the obvious, jokes rely on a tension between the preamble and an unexpected resolution of the punchline – if there is no tension and the punchline is not unexpected, then it isn’t funny. It isn’t even a joke: it’s more of a simple insult. Which brings us to the late Bernard Manning, whose passing last week was not met with universal gnashing of teeth and wailing. By my estimation, some 70% of Manning’s jokes ended with the punchline “Piss off, you black bastard”, or similar – often with no preamble at all. Quite often that’s all he would do – pick on some poor mug in his audience and insult him or her for being a different colour to everyone else and suggest he or she go back to running a curry shop or swing through the trees, etc.

That’s not comedy: it’s bullying. And it’s also pandering. The joke I heard from a Conservative politician was funny not because it was racist, but because it was nonconformist, even subversive about the new orthodoxy in the Tory party. Bernard Manning’s “jokes” were the precise reverse of this: they were utterly conformist. He said exactly what his audience both expected and wanted him to say. They laughed out of a strange sense of gratitude, I suppose.

Manning became funnier, however, on the rare occasions he was let loose on television – and particularly when he was interviewed on chat shows. His material was no better and one had to put up with his interminable, bone-headed speeches of self-justification, of how he had lots of “coloured” friends and did great work for charidee.

But sooner or later he’d say something shockingly crass or offensive and the prohibition television usually puts upon racist humour would be undermined. And, as a consequence, we’d be forced to raise a smile. Again, officer – involuntarily.

Manning’s death provoked a fair amount of hand-wringing; was he disliked largely because he was working class – after all, middle-class comedians such as Ricky Gervais get away with jokes which might be considered racist? Was it because he was right-wing? I think not: I suspect it was because he wasn’t very funny. Racist jokes might make you laugh, but it doesn’t follow that racism itself is funny.

The lesson, I think, for those who loathed Manning for his undoubted racism is this: the greater the prohibition imposed upon jokes about minorities – be they black, disabled, female, whatever – the more people are likely to find them funny.

Not because the rest of us are inherently racist, but because we are inherently naughty. It’s the act of transgression that makes us laugh.

The different shades of genius

There was one of those terribly unsettling and divisive stories in the national newspapers last week about a little girl who has been designated a “genius” at the age of two. Georgia Brown apparently has an IQ of 152, explains difficult words to her friends, can count to 10, is able to draw a perfect circle and has posited a plausible grand unifying theory of physics. Well, okay, I made the last one up but you get the gist.

Her parents are especially proud that she is able to distinguish between various colours. And so you can imagine the scene in hundreds of thousands of British homes on Friday morning as forlorn and confused toddlers stood in the front room next to a spread-eagled copy of the Daily Mail, their proud dads looming over them holding aloft a wax crayon and shouting, in increasingly desperate cadences, spittle beginning to run down the chin: “No, BLUE, you stupid child! It’s BLUE! Now for God’s sake remember that . . .”

Certainly, that was something like the scene in my own front room. But after removing the crayon from her nose for the 15th time, my daughter got there, bless her. Genius, you see.

The BBC’s big crime is chasing after yoof

I don’t suppose it takes a colossal intelligence to present Crimewatch – look sincere and solemn, but also reassuring, after the violent rape reconstructions and help out the coppers when they’re lost for words. Try not to snigger when some thick chav in a balaclava attempts to hold up a building society and is persuaded to sign a withdrawal slip with his own name.

That being said, Nick Ross and Fiona Bruce did a rather good job; the public trusted them (important, I would guess, for a programme such as Crimewatch – imagine how seriously we’d take it if it were presented by Ant and Dec and Simon Cowell). Ross and Bruce both slip into a somewhat sententious demeanour at times, but that, I suppose, rather goes with the territory, just as the presenters of the Antiques Roadshow sometimes look simultaneously smug and shifty.

Now, though, Ross and Bruce have reportedly been told to clear off so the BBC can “revamp” the programme with younger presenters – and, you suspect, dumb the thing down in the process, making it more salacious and sensational. As it stands right now, Crimewatch is just on the right side of public service broadcasting; the slightest shimmy to the left and it will be little more than one of those exploitative cop shows that they put on Bravo late at night.

Little by little, the programmes that the BBC can justifiably claim are public service broadcasting are either axed or changed beyond recognition as the corporation bursts a blood vessel attempting to seduce its dwindling yoof audience. The issue with Crimewatch is less about ageism and more about the licence fee.

* * * * *

A 16-year-old girl called, improbably, Lydia Playfoot, is taking her school to court because it will not allow her to wear her “chastity ring” – a piece of cheap finger-jewellery symbolic of her refusal to have sexual intercourse until she marries, say, an insurance loss adjuster called Howard, a decade or so hence.

Lydia comes from Horsham in West Sussex, where there is a thriving “Silver Ring Thing” movement imported from the United States – along with a particularly uncompromising and rigorous strand of evangelical Christianity. A year or so back I met some of the kids there who were making the pledge never to have unmarried sex and receiving by means of – to my mind – inadequate reward, a silver ring. The kids were fine, if a bit blank-eyed and smiley in a David Lynch or J G Ballard sort of way. But the dads . . . the dads! . . . now they were really scary. It was almost entirely girls taking the pledge, natch, and their fathers stood at the back of the school hall glowing with a peculiar mixture of religious zeal and proprietorial satisfaction. “Isn’t this sort of brainwashing?” I asked one chap. “If a brain needs washing, then we should wash it,” he replied, through grimly clenched teeth.

So far as I’m aware, Jesus Christ never once insisted on the wearing of jewellery; not even ankle bracelets. You just hope the High Court sees it that way, too.

* * * * *

A quite marvellous double act from The Hitchens Bros appeared on BBC1’s Question Time last week. Chris and Pete sat at either end of the table – presumably so that they couldn’t scratch or bite one another on camera – and sprayed bile in all directions, although mostly at each other. For perhaps the first and only time in the programme’s history, the politicians, seated in between, appeared sane, rational and likable. Except for Shirley Williams, obviously. If Channel 4 is looking for a couple of political presenters who will estrange even more people than that unlovely combo of Piers Morgan and Amanda Platell, they should sign up Chris and Pete immediately.

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