[jambutty]

You made me and thousands of others laugh.

The sad news is that Charlie Williams has died aged 78 after an illness.

Some people may feel that using the grinning icon for the post is out of order but the two sad icons (mad and frown) are not appropriate and Charlie Williams really did make people laugh.

Rather than put it in my own words I found the following on the Internet.

A more unusual story is that of Charlie Williams. His father was a Barbadian who served with the Royal Engineers in the First World War and settled in Yorkshire, where Charlie was born in Royston, near Barnsley, in 1929. He left school at 14 to go down the mines, and became a semi-pro footballer at 19, going on to spend 12 years playing for Doncaster Rovers, before eventually becoming a comedian. He was one of those who broke through on Granada TV's show The Comedians and dug out a reasonably successful career, including a stint hosting The Golden Shot.

I always felt that Williams deserves more respect than he's received. There weren't many black teenagers down the pits in the 1940s, nor black professional footballers in the '50s nor black comedians in the '60s. The man was a pioneer, and his account of his life is worth anyone's attention. Mind you, he seems uncertain whether it's going to be enough and he sprinkles a fairly substantial chunk of his joke book through the narrative.

The jokes too have their interest - if you're a student of British club comics in the 1970s, it's an invaluable record - but it's the social story that's more interesting. I could have read more of it. (And that's not true of every book on this site.)

I don’t know the author’s name.

However Lenny Henry had this to say about Charlie Williams:

"You have to understand that Charlie Williams was perfect for the time that he appeared. It was a brilliant thing, this black Yorkshireman who played football with Doncaster Rovers, who'd had the wartime experience of white Yorkshire people, who talked like them, who thought like them, but who just happened to be black. And when he can along it was astounding to hear this bloke talking like "Eh up, flower, eh. Hey, have you ever been to supermarket where they have the broken biscuits?". I think it was a huge culture shock for people. And Charlie exploited this to the full.

He had the Roller and the big house and he was the king of comedy for a while and God bless him, good luck to him. Because at the time, nobody was doing what he was doing. He was playing the fat belly, bigoted Northern comedian at their own game, and, I think there were some jokes that he did that keep being quoted.

"The joke which we've all done - "If you don't shut up I'll come and move in next door to you" - and that joke said:" Look, I'm aware that this is what some white people think, so I'm going to say it first before you guys say it." I think quite a lot of black comedians at the time did jokes like that because they wanted the audience to know that they knew. "I know what you're thinking. He's a big ******.' All those jokes. "Ooh, is he going to come and move in next door and going to run off with my daughter or wife?"

It was all those fears of black male domination and being invaded, being overrun by the immigrant. And I think those comedians exploited those fears, but also told some good jokes along the way. And I went through a period of thinking it was all bad, man, and my stuff's a reaction against that. But actually, in the stuff that I did in the early days, I made just as many mistakes as those guys did. I just think it was the times and you did what you had to do to get by. I don't think there was any harm meant by it. I think you did what you had to to survive in a predominantly white world.