When 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. Dame Edna was among the most enduring personas comedy has ever seen, and undoubtedly one of the greatest. With her, and Sir Les Patterson, and with his contributions to Britain’s 60s satire boom, Humphries added to the gaiety of cultures (and subtracted from their dignity) across half a century and the span of the globe.
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. But that’s what Humphries gave them, first with “Mrs Norm Everage”, the surprisingly demure first incarnation of his greatest creation, then with his Barry McKenzie comic strip (and later, films) about a dimwit Aussie expat, which led to the book of the comic strip being banned in his home country.
