Barry Humphries was no genius, he was a comedian. Therein lay his genius

Les Patterson, cultural attache, Australian cheese board and DFAT Diversity Outreach First Nations Dance Ensemble: Jesus, I was in the Gumnut Qantas Lounge in Honkers en root to a bit of a yartz deep dive in Ljubljana — bloody beaut of a city name, sounds like a bit of a deep dive itself am I right, ladies? — anyway I was chewing the wichitty at the free buffet, and I’m on the blower to try and get a bit of a yellow velvet rub and tug in the layover, the layover are you with me, when I heard that Bazza had karked it and amazingly not of the clap though he was right up the yartz for decades, a hip replacement, which sounds bloody right cos, let’s face it, who at the end was more unhip than Bazza, are you with me?

Dame Edna Everage, housewife superstar: Kenny left the lawn sprinklers on overnight, the tinkle winkles he calls them, so when I went out this morning to get our copy of The Australian it was wet through and so I had to slowly unroll Rupert’s damp organ on the bathroom floor, which you’d know about Jerry Hall, and lo and behold I see that the Humphries boy Barry has passed, “passed”, that’s how we used to say it, I suppose it means something else now, being a woman trapped in a man’s body now, like when Madge’s husband had that thrombosis on their wedding night.

But poor old Barry! He was a funny boy and I don’t mean amusing. I wouldn’t let Kenny play with him, and I let Milton Orkopoulos babysit. He had ideas. I don’t know what they were, but they were, ideas. Well, eventually I employed him as my manager even though he was hopeless really. Still, it can get very bad for a performer when your manager dies, unless he was Glenn Wheatley. It’s a pity really because Barry was eager to make another trip to Melbourne and meet Bill Shorten, a Xavier boy made good, in Barry’s words, now “Australia’s senior papist”. 

Sandy Stone, Glen Iris resident: Well, I’d been out in Kia-Ora crescent putting the hose over the vehicle of a Saturday morning when Beryl — that’s the wife, Beryl — comes out and says that she’s just heard on 3AR that strange little boy from around here Barry had passed on, and I must say I got a tear in the eye, though it may have been the pollen. Beryl and I, that’s the wife, attended several of his entertainments over the decades and I would say they were very acceptable, very acceptable. We went with Merve and Doris Clissold, parked near Ball and Welch and walked up to the London Hotel to have a chop, and pick up some scorched almonds at Darrell Lea on the way to the Royal. 

We’d taken the vehicle because the Alamein Line can be very intermittent from Camberwell after 9 o’clock at night from memory, and the Clissolds, that’s Merve and Doris, have just moved to Hartwell. They hunger for new experiences… We’re speaking to them again, it’s all cleared up, Beryl was insistent we smoke the peace pipe even though I’m still of the opinion that sorry doesn’t get curried egg out of a burgundy Axminster. Anyway…

Guy Rundle, half-educated critic in that ghastly Australian way, village explainer: The death of Barry Humphries, it Mak U think. He lived long enough for many of the people honouring him from the right to be largely indifferent to his comedy at its most uproarious and genuinely anarchic, and for those praising him from the entertainment world to hate his politics and his views of Australia. But the politics was something he wasn’t joking about, and it fuelled all the jokes he made about everything else. 

The Melbourne Grammar boy, bookish, sensitive and intelligent, was a right-wing elitist from an early age and to the end. He would have seen in the rise of Dan Andrews and Anthony Albanese, two authors of glowing tributes, the triumph of two working-class yobs, and their municipal politics of concrete pours and inclusive Voices, to be the great onslaught of barbarism he had always feared and expected in this country. 

Commentators who assailed him for his anti-trans views a few years ago — “You’re a mutilated man, that’s all. Self-mutilation, what’s all this carry-on? Caitlyn Jenner — what a publicity-seeking ratbag” — were trying to find ways to square his increasingly directly expressed reactionary opinions with the uproarious figure he had been, the Edna of the 1970s and ’80s, freed from her origins in social satire to become a celebrity global satire/clown act on global celebrity.

Let’s face it, Patricia Karvelas interviewing Kathy Lette about him on RN Breakfast, sandwiched between stories about women’s safety and First Nations children’s books, as the ratings plummet week by week, is a Barry Humphries sketch — no line would need to be changed. The man who used the country as a butt of jokes for decades — truly funny jokes, for ourselves as well as others — is being honoured as a contributor to our cultural renaissance. 

The right has glommed onto him, of course, with a half-dozen joyless, humourless diatribes about how funny and joyful he was, and how the PC police don’t get the joke. Which is to not get the joke magnificently. These are the same gang who turn wowser whenever they need to make a political slam, who hounded Tom Ballard out of TV because they didn’t like his jokes, who treat the glorious occasion of a woman senator at a birthday party at a strip club — giving some jerks as good as they get — as yet another occasion for pathetic pearl-clutching.

Barry Humphries wasn’t affectionately joshing Australia, or sticking it to the Brits, or any of that. He moved to London 65 years ago, and only came back for tours and visits. He wrote stylishly and movingly about his childhood in Melbourne’s plane tree-avenued, ornate-verandahed eastern suburbs, and holidays in Healesville and the beach. He thought of it as a beautiful city destroyed, and heritage campaigns could always rely on him to send an angry letter to The Age when something was threatened.

He liked the wild creativity of Australian slang, the product of Irish and Northern English culture freed from the strictures of Catholic theocracy and low-church chapel. He gave it a surreal twist — and exaggerated how much of that was due to him, as opposed to the idiom itself. 

But the source of his creativity, its endlessly directed and transformed aggression, the bare-knuckled wild ride of the stage shows, was not only a memory of how much he had hated the complacency and tedium of the country once adolescence had dawned, but how much he hated that the country was in himself. The unending energy of his comedy was created by this never-resolved contradiction of which he was far from the only victim: to come from a place with no real high culture, to want to have come from somewhere that has, and to yet realise that all one’s originality comes from this cosmic error of birth. 

His irredeemably mediocre country of birth

Thus Humphries’ great joke was that the nation of his birth, by being convinced of his genius, showed how incurably, irredeemably mediocre it was and would always be. Humphries — the devotee of Huysmans, Vathek, Firbank (Ronald, not the Melbourne girls’ school; though sistered to a brother APS school, Firbank is still too declasse), Schwitters, na gCopaleen — didn’t want to be a comic genius. He wanted to be a genius without adjectives, and to have come from a place where the distinction could be recognised.

Yet he also knew that had he been the Etonian-Oxbridgaeian, the Cafe Centrum habitue the other side of his being craved, he would never have found anything resembling the wellspring of comic brilliance he tapped for several decades. He was one in a line of such Australians, which takes in James McAuley, the creator-father of Ern Malley, and Christopher Brennan, our first modern poets, going backwards, and which, in the other direction, by no means ended with Bazza.

He may well have recognised that early, judging by his forays into parody, starting with the pseudo-Dada exhibition he staged at the Melbourne University Student Union building in 1955 (the Union — which saw the burgeoning career of Humphries, Menzies, the writing of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, Barrie Kosky, and much more — is about to be demolished for apartments by the university, leaving not a rack).

Works included “Pus in Boots” (custard in gumbies), cakescapes (Victoria sponges squeezed between glass to create Heidelbergesque vistas) and “Something to Catch the Eye of the Public” (a long glass shard sticking straight out of picture frame). But successful parody is an admission of defeat, a perfect arc describing the failure to escape great artists’ influence. Humphries didn’t want to parody Marcel Duchamp; he wanted to be Marcel Duchamp, in a country where no one knew who Duchamp was, and having hair sitting on your collar would, as Humphries recalled, have people yelling “Hey, kid, where’s your violin?” out of cars at you.  

That was the proximate source of his alcoholism, as it had been of Brennan’s and McAuley’s. There were others; Humphries’ Dada issues were a little overdetermined. His father was one of eastern Melbourne’s more important suburban builders, one of the first to feature thoroughly modern buildings — Bauhaus-style villas — in the estates he built (now, like Camberwell’s Golf Links estate, wholly integrated into the suburban fabric). To live in a place your father has built is to be a princeling of sorts, and sets one up for permanent disappointment when you leave the realm of childhood. His mother was — and who knows whether any of this is true? — as measured by Edna, and the recollections in his two memoirs, a certain type of mid-century parent, whose envy at their child’s success and separateness manifests itself in a relentless undermining. 

The Edna phenomenon

Without that, or Humphries’ perception of it, Humphries’ characters would never have become the world-clowns they turned into. The first Edna monologue, “an Olympic hostess”, was famously inspired by Ray Lawler’s suggestion that Humphries, then on a regional tour of Twelfth Night that Lawler was directing, create something of his back-of-the-bus imitation of local worthy ladies who formed the welcoming committee for the company. Edna thus began in ingratitude, and the initial act, a standard revue piece of the time — a “Moonee Ponds” housewife responding to the government’s invitation for people to billet athletes for the 1956 Olympics — is given a deeper energy by the performer’s contempt for her serene, blithe self-satisfaction.

Humphries’ acolytes, which included Humphries himself (he was once, early on, caught giving a London cab driver a tenner tip to say “It’s an honour, Barry” or somesuch) liked to claim that Edna, as a work of art, was sui generis. Or Sue Generis, I guess, a bank teller who lives in Highett, with her friend Desley. But Edna’s obvious precursor was Ethel Malley, the grieving sister invented to write the covering letters for the Ern Malley hoax (“I don’t know much about poetry myself…”), and written by the junior partner in it, Harold Stewart, who, like all good literary wives, typed the manuscript and fired off the letters. The Edna figure is the drover’s wife suburbanised, eternally stuck in the quotidian, not knowing what the fuss — exploring, annexing, art — is about. She’s our viewpoint that there might be nothing to fuss about at all.

That the hostility is mixed with a deep nostalgic fondness — “the French doors, my son Kenny calls them the reindeer doors, because of the frosted reindeer on them” — was why it gained such huge laughter. Humphries records that it was the reaction to that gag, laughter of recognition, which rolls longer and deeper than laughter from a reveal, that really made it clear he was on to something. 

Who or what was being mocked in that first encounter between ego and alter? Edna wasn’t from Moonee Ponds, a working-class suburb, whose housewives would have had an entirely different comportment to the ebullient Edna, chosen by Humphries to be as far from Camberwell as possible, so his mum might not twig. But she wasn’t from Malvern either. You can pinpoint Edna to about eight postcodes in eastern Melbourne, in an arc from Glen Iris to Kew by way of Camberwell, a world and its tastes shaped by women in the most suburban city in the world, and keenly observed by a builder’s son sent to a school for the children of doctors and barristers. Melbourne was the essential Anglosphere, middle-class city, and in the middle of that was Camberwell, and there was a boy reading Wilde and looking at Beardsley prints, and there you go.  

Edna was a hit from the start in her hometown. But it took a decade and a half to make her a national and then a British hit, and there was a lot of failure along the way. Humphries was a jobbing actor and understudy in the mild and witty Phillip Street revues in Sydney, in the first Australian Godot, and then as understudy and Fagan in Oliver in London, as the act — beloved by the Cambridge crowd creating Beyond the Fringe — died a death at Peter Cook’s Establishment Club. The drinking became large enough to throw a shadow.

When back in Melbourne, whose middle-class was a small town, Humphries’ drunken exploits were famous/notorious. He would replace soaps in ladies’ shops with perfectly shaped bars of lard, or eat a pile of glistening, vomitous tinner Russian salad off the footpath, or have a friend play a blind man on trams, whom Humphries would then abuse, and jump off, as the “blind” man pleaded to the shocked passengers, “Forgive him! Forgive him!” By the mid-1960s, most of the Myers’ floor staff had a Humphries story, less funny as the years went by, eventually annoying and sad.

The demon drink

That all changed when he finally met with success as Edna in the late 1960s. It got worse. How could it not? Success confirmed that Humphries was a comic, not a genius waiting to emerge, if he could just finish that… whatever he wasn’t finishing. Or starting. Whatever other demons there were, those were the higher-order ones. By the end he was getting up to the acme of the high-functioning alcoholic’s achievement, the Patrick Hamilton level of three bottles of Scotch a day, waking up with other men’s wives in hotels in cities he didn’t remember coming to.

He recalled once that, from a destroyed hotel bed, he had been swearing on the phone to an angry husband that he didn’t know where his missus was, when a slender hand appeared from between the dirty-plate loaded sheets, scattering bottles, grabbed the receiver, and said: “Let me talk to him.” You don’t stop doing this until you have to because it’s great, and craps all over writing, as a way to live. When he quit in 1974, after a second psychiatric hospitalisation, it was less a decision to not drink, as to not die. 

By then he had created Sandy and Les, and the shows, a dozen in various combinations in 20 years, had a settled routine, with Les opening, in a long routine, in his filth-encrusted white suit, gangster/safari-ish, uniform of the Whitlam government’s proud push of Australia to the world. But the satire was vestigial really; Les was a grotesque, humanity not merely as stomach but cloaca as well, gleeful with it, naughty nappied baby. Sandy would then enthral one half of the audience and bore and confuse the other, a fusion of Diary of a Nobody and Melways. There would be a third try-out of a new character, none of whom ever really took. Interval and then Dame Edna.

“Edna had to become someone else,” Humphries observed, defending the huge TV shows of the ’80s, when the Dame, in Opera House hat and a dress a sequined rendition of Munch’s The Scream, had become a sort of Mere Ubu, her television style shaped by a brilliant producer, and the first to use the mere fact of celebrity to generate content, Edna assembling a selected audience of B-, C- and D-listers to torture remorselessly, some in on the fun, some skewered and rotisseried.

On stage, it was a full 40 minutes, beginning with audience participation, segue-ing to domestic grotesquerie and ending in flying gladdies and singalongs. The gasping laughter it induced came from lingering on the edge of cruelty throughout, getting some poor woman who had come for a nice night’s entertainment on stage, putting her shoes in a net, and relentlessly returning to the possibility of her toe fungus throughout. 

Whatever satire had been there was now homeopathic. Whenever satire returned, in that third slot, it failed. Humphries tried Warrandyte ’60s poseur Neville Singleton (Neskafka society), union leader Lance Boyle, West Australian ’80s businessman Daryl Dalkeith, and the only one that gained some traction, spook-bearded avant-garde filmmaker Martin Agrippa, auteur of unflinching classic Caged Women.

Martin made about three appearances. Neville Singleton was too well-observed, a character study, to have any staying power. Lance Boyle was mirthless exaggeration and spitting hatred, which was fuelled again by paradox. Humphries, pained by urban destruction, could not admit that the people standing in a line against it were university trendies and the Communist BLF, while the bourgeoisie didn’t give a damn, as long as the dividends kept coming in.

His fairly lame self-written obituary that The Age had him pen in 1981, published yesterday, uses the figure of BLF leader Norm Gallagher as a measure of future decadence. Gallagher saved the Regent Theatre from becoming a 50-storey skyscraper, as the grandees of the Melbourne City Council had wanted. Humphries could never get a handle on his misoproleny. One suspected that the fey and sensitive builder’s son might have got the occasional ribbing from father’s workers, on-site, and never forgot or forgave. Max Gillies nailed the political satire better — as Humphries himself once observed — with the writing of diverse hands, chiefly Patrick Cook and Don Watson and, hmm, hermmm, throat clearing.   

Satire does nothing, as Peter Cook noted, pointing out Weimar cabaret’s great success in preventing Hitler’s rise to power. But you have to think it will change the world to do it at all, and when it doesn’t, the humour drains out the underside, as it did for Thurber and Waugh, now for John Cleese, and eventually for Humphries. His anti-trans comments were something any angry retiree on a Noosa terrace could have said in a low-blood-sugar moment.

Barry made it out with minimal damage, as the current outpouring shows, of people Edna would have ripped the piss out of, and Humphries would have tried to skewer with far less success. Out of the struggle with the curse of being Australian, he created a body of work that could only have been Australian, consecrated by that great final event of Anglo Australia: the Sydney 2000 Olympics opening ceremony, with a thousand Ednas amid dancing Victa mowers.

You couldn’t do Edna now, because the Ednas are doing it; The Real Housewives of Melbourne is pitched at the join of reality and self-parody. You could do Sandy; indeed Sean O’Beirne’s brilliant series of written monologues, A Couple of Things Before the End, is that continuation (and surely deserves a staging). You couldn’t do Les, even in a maximum security prison one suspects. Quite aside from anything, a taste for the belly laugh, the gasping-for-breath moment, the real losing it, is receding as something people value as a necessary release. 

For the Melbourne and then British middle class, a Barry Humphries show was a chance to really lose it, in a safe space, all the more to retain continence outside. The progressive class now on the road to class power appear to have reverted to the values of the bourgeoisie’s puritan precursors: all self-control, all the time. No wonder they’re all ill. He achieved the genius he always sought, in a form he never got over, spent nearly three-quarters of a century half-in half-out of a series of magenta velvet suits and maternity-size floral-print frocks, and what could be more truly Australian than that? What is there to add in the end to his satirical heft, but a pompous, name-dropping, overly prolix review in a gone-in-15-minutes online daily?

Sandy Stone: Well, that was — a bit too long. Now I have to go and get a few cashews to put around the table for a canasta evening tonight for the Tingwells, Jock and Val Pertley, and we’re taking another chance on the Clissolds, the Ashburton Lyons tombola having been called off on account of woodbeetle. That’s it for the week. I’ve got a little calendar doo-hickey on this phoneawotsit where you remove chores one by one as you’ve done them. It’s wonderful, very satisfying when you’ve finally got everything done, then there’s nothing at all. Still, at least you can say you’ve seen it.  

Note: several lines in here are direct lifts from the Humphries’ oeuvre.