When Brendan O'Carroll was just a chiseler and Roy "Chubby" Brown was Roy chubby baby, there was Bernard Manning. For 40 years the millionaire Manchester club owner has been the embodiment of everything unacceptable in comedy. If the best can be liberating, opening up prejudice for dissection, Manning represents the other side of the coin: the reinforcing of demeaning stereotypes, the dehumanising of swathes of the world's population. In 1996, a World In Action researcher secretly taped him at a police function, telling jokes so offensive that Manning was criticised in parliament.

So what were we expecting at the first appearance in the Republic of this master of the Irish joke? He's still a comedy monster, but more of a battered dinosaur than a demon. Feeling sorry for Manning doesn't come easy, but on Sunday night he was a pathetic spectacle. In the old days, he strutted the stage like a portly bantam cock, taking on all comers. But now Manning's in his own old days - he's 71 - and the years and bad health have robbed him of that swaggering insolence and cigar-chomping arrogance. Although many of his jokes were funny enough, even that legendary timing often deserted him.

He was still offensive, of course, in a half-hearted kind of way. In a set barely an hour long, he insulted Jews, the French, black people (invariably referred to as "coons" or "niggers"), Pakistanis, Poles, Italians and the Irish. The Irish jokes went down surprisingly well with the audience, who cheered this faltering shadow of a past performance, a demonstration of loyalty and kindness to an old man, once so proud in his contempt for others, who is now a comic irrelevance.