My personal list of great comic geniuses isn’t that long. At the very top there’s Robin Williams and John Cleese. Along with Barry Humphries. Last week saw the passing at 89 of the legendary Australian comic and writer, famous for his mauve-haired, acid-tongued stage character Dame Edna Everage.
As young man, Humphries never felt quite at home in postwar Melbourne, bridling against its claustrophobic, white middle-class values. A committed Dadaist, the young college student countered this mindset through surrealist art and theatre work.
“New Zealand and Australia were political democracies: but the sense of moral repression, of the crushing weight of propriety, was extraordinarily strong. Barry Humphries’s outrageousness – his dandyism, his Dadaism, his various stage personae – were all aspects of the one rebellion against that oppression,” wrote C.K. Stead in The London Review of Books in 1992.
Dame Edna emerged as Humphries’ glittering diamond, compressed from his observations of suburban Melbourne housewives and his own mother. Though she was shy in her first appearances, there was little that was sympathetic in the increasingly self-absorbed character. As her fame grew from Australia to Britain and beyond, Edna’s dresses became more gaudy (my favorite was a print of Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’), her hair more mauve, her spectacles more elaborate, and her narcissism deeper. With his outrageous pre-Kardashians character, Humphries was first to parody the celebrity who is “famous for being famous.”
The class-conscious Dame Edna expanded beyond her provincial beginnings to became something mythic: a theatrical version of the devouring mother archetype. She was a comic Kali, clutching a gladioli instead of a dagger.
As a fan, I’ve read Humphries’ autobiography and several biographies. And I was lucky enough to see him perform live twice, in London and Seattle. I remember these performances as masterpieces of comic improvisation and musical theater. Dame Edna always referred to his audience as “possums,” and made mock-sympathetic reference to the unfortunates in the cheap seats (“What do I call you…? I know…Les Miserables!”)
In one dementedly inventive set piece she would invite a terrified woman from the audience onstage, where a little table was set up for her and the megastar to share a nice snack and a heart-to-heart about microscopically mundane domestic matters. Dame Edna would try to stifle her boredom by returning to her favourite topic: herself.
A nightmare from the antipodes
The character was outrageous in her appearance and comments, and her male counterpart even more so. Sir Leslie Colin Patterson was a gleefully appalling caricature of a certain variety of Australian male of Humphries generation, and what some would today call ‘toxic masculinity.’
The hard-drinking, high-living, casually racist Sir Les generally appeared in a shabby suit dappled in drink and food stains. A pair of seventies-style platform shoes, some snaggletooth dentures and rosacea-like makeup completed the clownish look - but not quite. For full shocking effect there was a python-like length of cotton inside one pantleg. (With respect to the latter, Sir Les spoke of "holding down his enormous incumbency.")
The pickled and priapic Sir Les, “former Cultural Attaché to the Court of Saint James and Chairman of the Australian Cheese Board,” was a nightmare from the antipodes of the globe and the mind. More than a leaky tap of double-entendres,he was a firehouse of filth, blasting the first two rows at his theater performances with a shower of spittle and blue humour. Australian literary critic Clive James once observed the character is “a reaction so extreme you have to wonder at the provocation.”
Sir Les was the first to appear in Humphries’ theatre performances. The hard-drinking Aussie bureaucrat once magnanimously introduced Dame Edna this way: “I want you to put your hands together on her opening, and give her the clap she so richly deserves.” And after a lightning-fast costume and makeup change, the megastar from Melbourne monstrously tottered onto the stage, six and a half feet tall in heels.
Humphries, the most popular one-man performer in the world, stayed fresh and topical for almost a half century, and engaged a global audience with a string of television programs in which Edna would kibbitz with real world celebrities like Cher and Robin Williams, while always retaining a sense of her superiority. Edna preferred to think of these exchanges with famous guests as a “a monologue interrupted by a complete stranger.”
Beneath the artifice of Humphries’ characters was a fierce intelligence and a love of word play. An expert on late nineteeth century British authors, he authored several books, including his two-volume autobiography and a novel. And it goes without saying, unlike most ghostwritten celebrity efforts, his works were self-penned. (One of the most hilariously profane books I’ve ever read is Sir Les Patterson’s guidebook, The Traveller’s Tool.)
What a drag
It’s ironic given all the accolades across the global media for the man, few commentators have failed to note one singular fact: though straight himself, Humphries had fashioned himself into the first drag queen of global reknown, performing in an inspired manner for adults, rather than children. It’s doubly ironic given the controversy surrounding Humphries in his final years, involving comments made about transgenderism in 2018. In response The Melbourne International Comedy Festival stripped his name from their top award, “The Barry,” in 2019.
A childhood friend and actor, Miriam Marolyes, says the decision distressed the comic genius, who was also arguably a pioneer in gender fluidity. (When Humphries first came to Britain in the early sixties and made a name for himself performing in a string of nightclubs, he modeled his dress and hair after the 19th century Irish author Oscar Wilde. According to one biographer, his offstage look inspired the young John Lennon and the other Beatles to grow their hair out in a similar fashion.)
Expatriate Renaissance man
It’s seems we’re now living through another age of moral repression, with its “crushing weight of propriety,” via social media machinery that polices any stray remark, joke, lyric, narrative or plotline for potential offense. There are fewer opportunities left for the kind of subversive, politically incorrect humour that Humphries mastered. You won’t find much of it on university campuses, in college pubs, or theater stages.
He left the world too soon. An expatriate Renaissance man who could range from parsing Aussie cusswords to expounding on the ancient Greek archetypes at the heart of comedic theater, the brilliant Barry Humphries entertained and informed the world in a way we may not see again for a very long time. If ever.
RIP Barry. May we continue to find clips of your inspired comic moments online, unscrubbed by the commissars of cancel culture.
This is gold.. Any reader can possible catch a read on my piece..
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“Jason jumped on me as the guards left”
“He pounced at me and grabbed me by my neck, my eyes felt like they will pop out.
“My capillaries about to burst.”
“He choked me till I was flooding with saliva.”
“A blue tinct was palpable in my saliva.”
“I started rolling like a headless chicken.”
“ A headless decapitated animal spreading blood everywhere.”
“This led me to a dystopian delusion.” I thought my time has come.”
“Amidst the pain, I took off like my baths submerging myself inside the bath tub filled with water. I was in surreal ecstasy mode..
“After I heard a firing sound. All my senses came back and I see blood all over my body.”
https://kallolpoetry.substack.com/p/he-consumed-me-everyday-so-i-devoured?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2