“I was born with a priceless gift, the ability to laugh at the misfortunes of others.”
Dame Edna's hilarious interview with an ABC journalist in Tasmania in 1979
‘Larger than life’: Day Dame Edna was thrown out of Qld parliament
Harvey Lister reveals the day legendary comedian Barry Humphries, in character as Dame Edna, was kicked out of Queensland parliament.
Barry Humphries, born February 17 1934, died April 22 2023
Dame Edna Everage writes: Barry Humphries was an unknown aspiring actor and would-be comedian when I first met him in the early 1950s. It is true that he put me on stage for the first time in December 1955, but it was in order to belittle me and get cheap laughs at my expense and ridicule the great Australian way of life.
How the tables were turned! I became the star and he merely a footnote to my spectacular career. His tragedy was his desire to be an artist and we know what happens to failed artists – Hitler, for example – they either become interior decorators or mass murderers. Barry was spared this fate. He became rich due to my efforts and signed me up to a contract that bound me for life.
He had a lovely family and my heart goes out to them as well as to his unfortunate wives and numerous stage-struck research assistants.
If these words seem uncharitable in the context of an obituary, I am fortunate that The Daily Telegraph, unsurprisingly, was eager to publish them.
Vale Sir Les Patterson
The passing of my distinguished predecessor, Sir Leslie Colin Patterson deserves a tribute.
Barry Humphries, Australian-born comic genius and creator of Dame Edna Everage – obituary
Dame Edna, the housewife superstar, preyed on her audience with feigned innocence while Sir Les Patterson spluttered a depraved monologue
Barry Humphries, the Australian-born comedian who has died aged 89, shocked and delighted television and theatre audiences with his monstrous creations, notably “housewife superstar” Dame Edna Everage and the repulsive “Australian Cultural Attaché” Sir Les Patterson. He rose from being an obscure Dadaist prankster in 1950s Melbourne to the status of international megastar over more than 60 years.
Besides his famous stage personas, Humphries also gave the world Barry McKenzie. The long-running Private Eye strip cartoon in which this naive but hard-drinking and lascivious Aussie expat lurched around Pom-land introduced the British to a whole new vernacular. On a largely liquid diet of “tubes” or “cold ones”, when Barry was not “pointing Percy at the porcelain” he was certain to be “chundering” or “parking the tiger”. His attempts to “bury the pork sword” were always doomed to failure.
Unsurprisingly, McKenzie, along with Dame Edna and Sir Les, did not go down well with all of Humphries’s compatriots “back home”. Many Australians accused him of sabotaging the country’s mission to “achieve” culture, a claim Humphries always relished .
Although television brought his gallery of grotesques to a mass audience, it was those who witnessed one of his live stage shows who had Humphries’ outrageous performance most indelibly scarred on their minds. Edna, in particular, preyed on her audience like, as one critic put it, “a vulture in bird-of-paradise clothing”.
For just a few moments her victims became celebrities, but at the same time learnt the high price that must sometimes be paid for fame. Those who were spared would be simultaneously appalled and delighted with her dissection of the hapless individual’s dress sense, suburban manners, toupée… or whatever weak spot the raptor-eyed Edna chose to pounce on.
Even as a chat show host on prime-time television, Dame Edna subverted the rules. Studio guests – Joan Collins, Cher, Larry Hagman, Mel Gibson – included some of the biggest names in showbusiness, accustomed to deferential treatment from sycophantic television lightweights.
Having the red carpet pulled out from under them – or suffering physical humiliation – was something that some handled better than others, but the audience never failed to enjoy. “Do you laugh at yourself?” she asked Jeffrey Archer with sweet concern, and then added with a slight change in timbre, “Because if not, you’re missing the joke of the century.”
If Dame Edna was an exercise in persecution through feigned innocence (she was, after all, “just a housewife”), then Sir Les executed a very different kind of stage terrorism. Swaggering about in a suit bespattered with the remnants of many a good lunch, one hand clutching a bottle, the other firmly buried – and distinctly active – in his trouser pocket, Sir Les would splutter and dribble his depraved monologue through a set of nicotine-stained false teeth.
It is something of a mystery that such a repellent character could be so irresistible to a live audience. But irresistible he was. Humphries recalled a female Sir Les fan in the front row, who was in such a state of excitement that she slid down her seat, legs apart, shouting “spit on me Les, spit on me”.
On celluloid, however, Sir Les was less successful. In 1989 Humphries made Les Patterson Saves the World, a box office disaster universally panned by the critics: “A crass, coarse, facetious flop...” said one.
By the late 1980s Dame Edna had become an institution, though critics began to complain that Humphries’s subversive talent had sold out to commercialism and “safe” television.
But the 1992 BBC television series, Dame Edna’s Neighbourhood Watch, demonstrated that, with Humphries pushing 60, Edna’s cruel wit and powers of audience manipulation were undiminished. With her “possum-picking” vibrating gladiola she would select a member of the audience, apparently at random, and invite them on to the stage.
The victim would be astounded to discover that a roving camera had been let into their house (by Edna’s unsmiling bridesmaid, Madge Allsop), and the audience hooted with delight as Dame Edna gave them a guided tour of everything from the kitchen vegetable rack to the bedroom knicker drawer. Deciphering the “real Barry Humphries”, as distinct from his stage persona, was a task the comedian always delighted in sabotaging.
He would undoubtedly have liked to be remembered as a writer, as well as a performer, and his two volumes of memoir, More Please (1992) and My Life as Me (2002), mean that he certainly will. Apart from a penchant for arcane vocabulary (try “corybantics”, “impetiginous” and “hircine”) the books revealed a deft writing style and a great gift for storytelling.
A lover of literature and collector of rare books (in particular Edwardian ghost stories), the dandyish private man sought the company of literary and artistic figures more than the showbusiness types in whose circles he moved professionally. He was close friends with John Betjeman, the Sitwells, Iris Murdoch and Sir Stephen Spender (whose daughter Lizzie was his fourth wife).
Humphries certainly had his demons, which dragged him for one long period into severe alcoholism, and at other times into deep melancholia. It may be that the regular transformation into Edna or Les was partly an act of exorcism. He once confessed to experiencing on stage the strange sensation of “standing on one side watching Edna doing appalling things to the audience”.
The son of Eric Humphries, a successful building merchant, and his wife Louisa, a genteel, Jew-fearing, Catholic-hating suburban housewife, John Barry Humphries was born in the Melbourne suburb of Camberwell on February 17 1934. The eldest of three, he was doted on by both his parents. His father bought him a Gene Autry cowboy suit to satisfy his early enthusiasm for dressing up, and built him his own kiosk – “Barry’s Shoppe” – at which he sold real groceries to neighbours at inflated prices.
At the South Camberwell State School the young Barry became acutely aware of the difference between his own affluent, comfortable circumstances and those of his working-class schoolmates. He did not fit in.
In 1941 he moved to Camberwell Grammar, where he excelled at English, history and drawing but where his lack of enthusiasm or aptitude for games earned him the nickname “Granny”, which he bitterly resented.
Nevertheless he was not pleased when his father announced that he intended to take him away and send him to Melbourne Grammar School – it meant leaving many friends behind. But his father got his way. Though he was unimpressed by the teachers at his new school his passion for literature was ignited at around this time and he began debating, writing for the school magazine and acting in school plays.
He refused to join the school regiment, boldly declaring to the headmaster that he was a conscientious objector. In his last year at school Humphries became interested in a more amusing form of subversion – Dadaist art, a new passion which led him to neglect his schoolwork. Yet to everyone’s surprise – except perhaps his own – he won a scholarship to Melbourne University.
Before he could enrol there Humphries had to deal with the small matter of military service. This time his claims to be a conscientious objector were ignored. He loathed his three-month stint at Puckapunyal Military Camp, though he contrived to get the job of “scenic designer” for the camp concert. Some months after his discharge, he read in the Melbourne Age of a military inquiry into excessive expenditures at Puckapunyal Camp.
One item singled out was a quantity of red pigment made from the wings of a rare Korean beetle, costing more than £700, which Humphries had ordered from an artists’ supply shop.
At university Humphries enrolled in the law school, a choice partly taken to please his parents. But he found the lectures tiresome, and diverted his energies to further experiments with “Dadaist” events. One elaborate scheme involved substituting the contents of a packet of Lux soap with cooking lard cut to the same shape, then returning it to the shop shelf.
Another was the “Heinz Russian Salad routine”, as he told Gyles Brandreth: “Surreptitiously spilt and splashed in large quantities on the pavement, tinned Russian salad, consisting largely of diced potato in mayonnaise with a few peas and carrot chips thrown in, closely resembles human vomit. While disgusted pedestrians would give it a wide berth, I’d kneel down by one of the larger puddles, produce a spoon from my top pocket and enjoy several mouthfuls.’
He also mounted a number of Dadaist exhibitions, featuring decomposing cakes sandwiched between glass (“Cakescapes”) and a pair of old shoes filled with custard, entitled “Pus in Boots”.
He increasingly absented himself from lectures, and his university career ended without academic distinction – indeed, without a degree.
His father found Humphries a position in the wholesale record department of EMI, where his job involved smashing stacks of discontinued records to smithereens. Disillusioned with this soul-destroying activity, and defying the entreaties of his parents, Humphries took up the acting baton again in 1955.
Touring the country towns of Victoria as Orsino in Twelfth Night, he was “the only actor who ever got a laugh on the line ‘If music be the food of love’.” He desperately wanted to play Sir Andrew Aguecheek.
It was on this tour that Edna, or an early incarnation of her, was born. Many of the company’s performances were followed by a tea prepared by the local Ladies Auxiliary or Country Women’s association, and later Humphries would amuse his fellow actors on the tour bus with a harsh falsetto in imitation of these well-meaning women.
After a brief romance he married Brenda, a dancer, and they set up home in a tiny flat in the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn. In his last performance of 1955, a revue entitled Return Fare, Humphries revived the character he had created as a diversion on the bus. The newly christened Edna, who regaled the Melbourne audience with descriptions of the modern suburban amenities of her Moonee Ponds villa, went down a storm.
Early the next year, Humphries moved to Sydney with his young wife to join the Phillip Street Theatre in a new revue. But when the run came to an end 18 months later, Humphries, by now drinking heavily, returned to Melbourne without his wife.
After playing Estragon in Waiting for Godot, he took two rather different parts in concurrent productions: Colonel Pickering in Pygmalion, and, in matinée, a beast of Aboriginal mythology in the children’s play The Bunyip and the Satellite. After a sell-out “farewell” revue Humphries left Australia with a new wife, Rosalind, a former ballet dancer, in the spring of 1959. After a tour of northern Italy they arrived, practically penniless, in London.
His first job in England was on the night shift at a Walls Ice Cream factory, where he had to reject irregularly shaped packets of Raspberry Ripple to avoid blocking up the production line. During the day he auditioned for stage parts.
After playing Jonas Fogg in a poorly received run of the musical Sweeney Todd, he took the part of Sowerberry the undertaker in Lionel Bart’s new stage musical, Oliver!, and also understudied the more substantial role of Fagin. He took the same role in Toronto and later on Broadway, where he made friends with Peter Cook (who was appearing in Beyond the Fringe), went to parties hosted by Jack Kerouac, and had tea with Salvador Dalí.
On returning to London he was booked by Cook to appear at the recently formed Establishment Club in Greek Street, Soho. Edna, whose in-jokes about Melbourne’s suburban mores were lost on a British audience, died a death every night of the week for three weeks – a humiliation that would become a spur to Edna’s vicious victimisation of future audiences.
Humphries was more successful in The Bedsitting Room (1963), a post-nuclear farce written by John Antrobus and Spike Milligan (who also co-starred). Though the money was good, financial and domestic security were threatened by Humphries’s increasing appetite for alcohol.
Despite the Establishment Club debacle, Cook showed faith in Humphries and asked him to create a comic strip based on the “Earls Court Australian” – an increasingly prevalent phenomenon in London at that time. He teamed up with the artist Nicholas Garland and the pair gave birth to Barry McKenzie. Unlike Edna, Barry rang bells with the British public and became a popular feature of the Eye. He lived almost to the end of the decade.
A smattering of stage performances kept Humphries in touch with a live audience, including playing a Brechtian tramp with a Liverpool accent in another Lionel Bart musical, Maggie May.
For a month during its run he had the curious experience of commuting to the theatre for his nightly performance from Halliwick Hospital in Winchmore Hill – a rehabilitation centre for the depressed and disturbed.
It was the first of several bouts of treatment, though as he later recalled: “I felt that the assortment of tablets that I had been given may have been mis-prescribed, since they seemed to interfere with the pleasant effects of alcohol. In the interests of my health, therefore, I stopped taking them.” Unable to abide by the curfew, he was expelled from the hospital.
An Australian tour in 1965 marked a brief period of reform for Humphries. A new show, Excuse I, in which Edna sported upturned diamante spectacles for the first time, was another hit.
Back in London (and back on the booze), Humphries made his BBC debut in an esoteric live weekly review, The Late Show, alongside Establishment Club stalwarts like Eleanor Bron, John Fortune and John Bird. There followed a revival of Oliver!, in which Humphries was Fagin, then a run as Long John Silver in Treasure Island, during which he took to drinking rum on stage “in the interests of verisimilitude”.
This was followed by another spell in a nursing home and another season in Sydney with a new one-man performance called Just a Show (1968). Concurrently he held a “Retrospective” in a Sydney art gallery featuring, among landscapes and a series of portraits of Australian prime ministers, a large circular paddling pool filled with custard, out of which projected the corners and spines of a large number of books. It was entitled “I was reading these books when I felt sick” and sported a price tag of $6,000.
He returned to England, without his wife, to perform his first London one-man show. This time the English audience took to Edna Everage. After the opening night one critic wrote of her gladioli-hurling finale, which went on to become a hallmark of almost all Humphries’s live shows, “it was one of those magic moments in the theatre where the audience becomes truly happy.”
His own television series, The Barry Humphries Scandals, followed. It was doing well enough until a song, written and performed by Humphries impersonating Edna impersonating Vera Lynn, incurred the wrath of his BBC bosses. Called “True British Spunk”, this innuendo-ridden pastiche of a wartime morale booster was recorded for the last episode of the series. Because of it, the show was never broadcast.
Out of work, Humphries took to drinking before, or instead of, breakfast. After a violent fit in which he smashed up his entire glass collection, his father sent his wife Rosalind to collect him. He moved back to Melbourne.
The drinking continued, and after one particularly heavy session Humphries awoke on a patch of wasteland. He had been severely beaten up. He spent the next few months in hospital, from where he managed to file his weekly column for the Melbourne Age.
It was a visitor to the hospital who introduced Humphries to Alcoholics Anonymous, an organisation which profoundly impressed him and, ultimately, saved him. After one more binge, he checked into a clinic. There, in the company of the doctor who ran the hospital, he enjoyed a large glass of brandy. It was his last drink.
It took two years for Humphries to regain his confidence. He stepped back into the limelight in 1972 with the release of a film based on his Private Eye strip cartoon, and directed by the Australian Bruce Beresford. It was called The Adventures of Barry McKenzie.
Humphries co-scripted the film and appeared in it as Edna – spuriously written into the film as McKenzie’s aunt. The part of Barry McKenzie was played by Barry Crocker, who went on to achieve greater recognition as the singer of the theme song to the Australian soap, Neighbours.
The 1970s were a boom time for Humphries. The film, though not much admired by the critics, was a box-office success, and the rest of the decade saw Humphries yo-yoing between England and Australia with a succession of shows.
In 1974 there was a sequel to the first film, with a ludicrous urban-vampire plot, called Barry McKenzie Holds His Own. It was most notable for the scene in which Edna arrives at Sydney Airport to be greeted by prime minister Gough Whitlam. Whitlam actually played the part himself and, while the camera was rolling, improvised the greeting, “Arise, Dame Edna!” The title stuck.
The London show Housewife Superstar was a critical point in Humphries’s career. Besides confirming that Edna, Dame as she now was, had a large and loyal group of English fans, it was also the occasion on which Leslie Colin Patterson, the self-proclaimed Cultural Attaché to the Court of St James, first launched his vulgar, vituperative self on an unsuspecting public. He then took the show to New York, but it flopped.
On television, meanwhile, the 14 episodes of ITV’s The Dame Edna Experience in 1987 were redefining the British chat show as celebrities submitted themselves to Edna’s crushing mockery.
In 1991 Humphries introduced American television viewers to Edna with a one-off special titled Dame Edna’s Hollywood, supposedly filmed at her Beverley Hills mansion. American television audiences never embraced Edna quite as wholeheartedly as the British, however, possibly because a significant portion of the audience failed to get the joke. In the American media it always had to be spelled out that “Dame Edna” was really a man called Barry Humphries.
The turning point came in 2000, when Humphries took Dame Edna: The Royal Tour to New York: it won a Tony award and two National Broadway Theatre awards; five years later, Back With a Vengeance on Broadway was nominated for a Tony. Dame Edna was given a recurring role in the American television series Ally McBeal as Claire Otoms, a client and later secretary of the show’s law firm. Humphries was also the voice of Bruce the shark in the animated film Finding Nemo (2003).
Humphries’s career showed exceptional staying power and in Britain he became part of the cultural furniture. The one-man stage shows regularly broke box office records: they included Isn’t It Pathetic at His Age (1978); A Night with Dame Edna (1979), for which he won an Olivier Award; An Evening’s Intercourse with Dame Edna (1982); Back with a Vengeance (1987–1988, 2005–2007); Look at Me When I’m Talking to You (1996); Edna, The Spectacle (1998), which held the record as the only solo act to fill the Theatre Royal Haymarket; Remember You’re Out (Australia, 1999) and Dame Edna Live: The First Last Tour, which toured the US in 2009.
He published Handling Edna, a “biography” of his alter ego, in 2010. In March 2012 Humphries announced that “he was beginning to feel a bit senior” and would retire from show business. A valedictory show – Eat, Pray, Laugh – toured Australia that year and opened at the London Palladium in November 2013, featuring his suburbanite character Sandy Stone and Sir Les as well as Dame Edna.
Humphries, who was appointed CBE in 2007, carried on working because he did not like too much leisure time. In 2018 he returned to the stage as emcee in Barry Humphries’s Weimar Cabaret and was planning a one-man show for later this year.
His chief recreation was sketching or painting (although in Who’s Who he listed “drawing attention to himself”), and he was an obsessive collector of art. Aged 79 he told Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph that he did not consider himself to be either a comedian or a drag artist: “You know, I still secretly think of myself as a Dada-ist.”
He married, first, Brenda Wright; secondly, Rosalind Tong; thirdly, Diane Millstead; and, fourthly, Lizzie Spender, the daughter of Sir Stephen Spender, who survives him with two daughters from his second marriage and two sons from his third.
Barry Humphries, born February 17 1934, died April 22 2023
Dame Edna Everage writes: Barry Humphries was an unknown aspiring actor and would-be comedian when I first met him in the early 1950s. It is true that he put me on stage for the first time in December 1955, but it was in order to belittle me and get cheap laughs at my expense and ridicule the great Australian way of life.
How the tables were turned! I became the star and he merely a footnote to my spectacular career. His tragedy was his desire to be an artist and we know what happens to failed artists – Hitler, for example – they either become interior decorators or mass murderers. Barry was spared this fate. He became rich due to my efforts and signed me up to a contract that bound me for life.
He had a lovely family and my heart goes out to them as well as to his unfortunate wives and numerous stage-struck research assistants.
If these words seem uncharitable in the context of an obituary, I am fortunate that The Daily Telegraph, unsurprisingly, was eager to publish them.
Goodbye, possums: Barry Humphries’ obituary in his own words
How would you like to be remembered after you have gone from the world? Back in 1981, Age editors asked Barry Humphries, then a columnist for the paper, to write his own obituary. Forced into exile because he refused to take the infamous title of Melbourne’s ‘King of Moomba’, Humphries died in a Portuguese resort town of Estoril. At least that’s how he imagined his own death ... more than two decades before he really died. Read the full obituary here.
By Barry Humphries
The recent passing of Sir Barry Humphries at the Portuguese resort of Estoril, though it received no more than a small paragraph tucked away with the international news on page nine of this newspaper, must have revived many memories among our older readers.
Although Sir Barry last appeared on the Melbourne stage more than 30 years ago in a less than successful entertainment of his own devising entitled Tears Before Bedtime, there are still elderly theatregoers both here and abroad who can remember him in his heyday.
Our quondam critic Ms Bronwyn Praxitiles was perhaps less than generous when she referred to Sir Barry’s final offering as “arguably, the sad, incoherent, and more often than not inaudible ramblings of a self-indulgent has-been”. It is true that Sir Barry, at that late stage in his career, and though still in robust mental health, was unable to mount the stage unassisted, and that his once popular turn “Dame Edna” had become a repulsive hag which filled his dwindling audiences with awe and revulsion rather than mirth.
Perhaps Sir Barry’s refusal to produce work of social relevance and his quaint old-fashioned belief that his first duty was to inspire laughter, accounted for the decline in this artiste’s popularity in the last decade of the 20th century, though he still enjoyed a loyal following among the die-hard reactionaries who attended his clandestine performances.
By then his public appearances were banned by the Builders Labourers’ Leisure Party, and for many years the Australian Democratic Republic Arts Squad imposed severe penalties upon his sentimental and revisionist supporters.
Barry McKenzie, Sir Les Patterson, and his other scabrous attacks on the integrity of the Australian working class ethic, however, earned him the ultimate disfavour of the authorities, and his continued reluctance to accept the title “King of Moomba” finally forced him into permanent exile abroad.
He has since resided in the tarnished splendour of a Lusitanian Spa haunted by the obloquy of the Australian working class he so long ago betrayed for a mess of pottage.
One wonders what he would make of the cultural renaissance which is sweeping Australia at the moment, or our internationally acclaimed award-winning computerised puppet theatre which is currently putting Australia unequivocally on the map, in terms of sheer bloody, global, creative input across-the-board per se currently.
When one thinks of the giant strides Australian entertainment has taken since Humphries’ day, viz the Sir Norman Gallagher Omega site strikers relief massage-parlour and casino complex, it is hard to imagine what relevance old entertainers like Humphries and his ilk would have to 21st century audiences.
Sir Barry was knighted by King Charles III for his services to the British Gladiolus Society and is survived by innumerable wives, great-grandchildren and creditors.
Entertainment king Harvey Lister has remembered the late Barry Humphries as a “wonderful, wonderful comedian” with a quick wit and a love of Brisbane.