Despite a legacy tainted by PC-baiting provocation, many will remember Humphries with affection as the carnivalesque Dame Edna and foul-mouthed Sir Les Patterson
hen any well-loved entertainer dies, it’s sad. Now Barry Humphries has died, and maybe it’s more so – because we’re losing not only Humphries, but his alter egos too, characters more fleshed-out and better known to the public than Humphries himself.was among the most enduring personas comedy has ever seen, and undoubtedly one of the greatest.
You don’t need to be Sigmund Freud to trace the source of Humphries’s outre comedy back to his repressive upbringing in 1930s Melbourne, and specifically his mother, who divided the world into things that were “nice” and things that were “uncalled for”. No one in mid-century Australia was calling for a mocking comedy that ridiculed suburban mores – and by association, narrow-minded, unsophisticated Australia itself.
Humphries must have been tickled by that: getting a rise out of people was a compulsion. You could see his sad late-career brush with transphobia, which saw his name, as consistent with that. But it wasn’t. It’s significant that Humphries’s remarks about trans men were made offstage, not on. I’m not saying his stage act was more polite, far from it.
But in his act, which was always meticulously prepared, he knew precisely how to calibrate offence and aggression. It was applied not with a bovver boot but with one of Dame Edna’s spindlier heels. It probably helped that Humphries was a scholar of provocation, having fallen hard for the dadaists as a young man. “Surprise and discomfort” were the qualities he admired in them, qualities that are present and gloriously incorrect in most of his work.
Like many great comic acts, Humphries doesn’t easily fit into any tradition or movement. Edna wasn’t a drag act in any conventional sense. The jokea woman , for whom her audience delightedly suspends its disbelief. Humphries disliked the term “satirist”, too, and while there’s a strong strain of satire in Edna and Les’s shtick, there’s something more carnivalesque at play too. Something wilder, and more anarchic: Humphries cited Spike Milligan, another lord of misrule, as an influence.
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