Bernard Manning was one of Britain’s best-known comedians of his era, and was certainly the most controversial. For more than 40 years he entertained – and horrified – audiences with an unsophisticated repertoire that consisted largely of derogatory racist, sexist and mother-in-law jokes.

He was legendary for his bad language, and his name became a byword for a brutally crude disregard for anything remotely to be classed as “normal” sensibilities.

Notorious for his corpulent figure, squashy face, short legs and rasping Mancunian enunciation, Manning became a national figure through his appearances on the 1970s ITV show The Comedians, a programme that reflected an ethos in which it was possible to get away with abusing minorities on the ground that it was mere “harmless banter”.

Changing attitudes in the 1980s meant that he thereafter largely disappeared from the small screen, returning to the club circuit where he had begun his career. Even then, some councils banned him for fear of crowd violence.

Manning protested that he had nothing to apologise for: “I lose no sleep about the gags I tell. Time it right, tell it right and it gets a laff.” He believed his act was successful because it was authentic. Audiences found his gags amusing because they reflected what they thought, and they were delivered in the unrefined language of the working man. “My language is that of the working man, even barristers and judges. If you drop a hammer on your foot, you don’t say, ‘Oh dear’.”

He was seen as the epitome of the raw, nononsense Northern comic, yet at a certain level, his often self-depreciating monologues had much in common with a tradition of Jewish humour that finds dark comedy in life’s cruelties.

“My mother was 95 when she died. I used to carry her down the stairs to make my breakfast,” he quipped. In claiming to be part-Jewish himself, he put his act into the category of the gallows humour of the oppressed.

Manning accused his critics of failing to recognise that ethnic and religious bias is part of the natural order of things. Above all, Manning took pride in his act being honest. As he once put it: “ ‘To thine own self be true.’ That’s from f***in’ Shakespeare, that is.”

For this, he won some unlikely admirers, including the writer Howard Jacobson and Stephen Fry. Jacobson likened him to a modern-day Aristophanes, whose playful but merciless diatribes served as conduit through which the prejudices of the populace could be channelled and harmlessly dissipated. Jonathan Margolis, the critic and his biographer, compared Manning’s comical use of caustic vulgarity to Chaucer’s, and contended that had it not been for his racism, Manning would have been remembered as a true working-class hero.

The second of three brothers and two sisters, Bernard John Manning was born in 1930, and brought up in Ancoats, a poor inner-city part of north Manchester.

He claimed that his immigrant grandfather was a Jewish refugee from Sebastopol who had changed his name from Blomberg. The young Bernard was himself raised a Roman Catholic and served as an altar boy.

His tough but doting mother Nellie taught him the art of crude putdowns. He liked to rub audiences’ noses in the acute poverty of his childhood.

“We slept six in a bed and five of them used to wet themselves. I learnt to swim before I could walk.”

When he left school at the age of 14 he worked at his father’s greengrocer’s shop before going into the Army for his National Service. He always harboured an ambition to join a big band, and in the 1950s he sang in the Oscar Rabin dance band at the Ritz Hotel, London.

When his career as a vocalist petered out he returned north. In 1959, with the help of his father, he opened the Embassy Club, in Manchester, and there began his own career as a stand-up act.

The reputation he built in the north Manchester venue helped him to secure in 1971 a slot based on his stand-up routine for the Granada Television programme The Comedians. Moving almost overnight from £10-per-night gag-master to a national institution, he became one of the wealthiest comedians in the country.

He swiftly became notorious not only for his race gags, but for his swipes at his fellow comics. He told Jim Bowen that he looked like “a trainee corpse” who would “never live to be as old as you look”. Stan Boardman, he said, was “the unfunniest man to come out of Liverpool since the slave traders”. Everyone was fair game. The only minority he thought it beyond the pale to mock were the disabled.

By the arrival of the left-leaning and socially conscious “alternative comedy” of the 1980s, Manning, the exponent of the school of one-liners of the “her indoors” and “them lot moving in next door” school, felt the backlash.

By the end of that decade he was making his living largely appearing four times a week at the Empire and releasing videos. Yet there remained an audience for his act, despite two rather unfortunate public incidents.

In 1995 World in Action clandestinely recorded him entertaining police officers with racist jokes. Three years later his attempt to enliven, at any rate, as he saw it, the audience of the Mrs Merton Show with racist content fell decidedly flat.

When, in 1999, his son took over the Embassy Club, even he did not consider his father’s act appropriate. Bernard Jr sought to transform it into an alternative comedy venue. Yet, at the same time he also turned it into a kind of shrine to his father, awash with Bernard Manning memorabilia. As a consequence, alternative comedians sought a slot there, since it imparted to them a kind of ironic kudos.

Yet by the turn of the millennium, there had been something of a revision of some of the attitudes of the 1980s. Such men as the pop singer Robbie Williams and film director Guy Ritchie now felt confident to proclaim that they were fans of the corpulent Mancunian comic.

From 1999, with increasing concern about his health – he suffered from diabetes – Manning cut down on work considerably. His weight ballooned to 18 stone. He was also left deaf in one ear after a minor stroke.

But he always wanted to continue to the very end. “When I do go, I’d ideally want to do it on stage,” he told those who asked after his welfare.

Bernard Manning remained supremely confident in his own ability. “A joke is a joke is a joke. I am funny. I make people laugh. I fill theatres. I put arses on seats.”

His wife Vera, whom he married in 1956, died in 1986, after which he moved back into his mother’s house. He had always been close to his mother, and was an avid partaker of the steak and chip suppers she liked to cook for him, after his father’s death in 1970.

When she and his two brothers all died in 1995, he was left living by himself with his television, his collection of expensive cars and his beloved Manchester City FC.

Although somewhat inclined to laugh at his own jokes, he was an amiable character in person, and he unostentatiously helped many charities. Asked who his hero was, he always cited Mother Teresa.

He is survived by his son.

Bernard Manning, comedian, was born on August 13, 1930. He died of kidney trouble on June 18, 2007, aged 76