According to Barry Humphries, the worst insult ever printed about him appeared in the Financial Times. I was the author. It was a Lunch with the FT from 2011 in which I mentioned the Australian comedian’s “dyed dark hair”. In an otherwise kindly phrased email afterwards, the creator of Dame Edna Everage revealed that “amazingly”, at the age of 77, his hair wasn’t dyed. “So,” he concluded, “you have managed to write the most offensive thing that I have ever read about myself.”
Coming from the maestro of offence, this was perhaps a backhanded compliment. Humphries, who has died in Sydney aged 89, was an unmatched comic provocateur. Dame Edna was his most famous invention, the Melbourne suburban housewife whose snobbery, hypocrisy and ebulliently monstrous ego carried her, improbably, to the highest rungs of the showbiz ladder.
Humphries played her in drag, his dark hair hidden by a swirly mauve wig, eyes peering like a raptor through elaborately chintzy spectacles, vermilion red lips twitching into a grotesque leer. “Hello possums,” was her signature greeting, an apex predator of Australian bonhomie.
Like his irrepressible creation, Humphries was formed in the mock-Tudor villas and exquisitely calibrated social distinctions of Melbourne suburbia. Born in 1934, he grew up in a garden suburb constructed by his father Eric, a successful master builder.
His mother Louisa was a housewife with an Edna-esque antenna for class difference. The less well-off lived in “houses” while the better-off had “homes”; those luckless souls who lived above shops were said to inhabit “dwellings”. The Humphries’ family abode was, of course, a home.
Humphries’ mother claimed she could read her son like a book. In relating this in later life, he would waspishly point out that she never read any books. The eldest of four siblings, a cosseted child, he inherited his parents’ sense of superiority, yet also turned it upon them.
Rebellion against the bourgeois “niceness” of his upbringing took the form of intellectualism. A bibliomane who would one day amass a library of 50,000 books, he adopted the dandified persona of the highly cultivated aesthete, a more rarefied variety of snob.
He took up acting, appearing in the first Australian production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in 1957. He also attracted notice as a dadaist prankster, concocting disgusting stunts involving aeroplane sickbags and Russian salad.
Like other talented Australians of his generation, suffocated by the provincialism of their vast country, he moved to London in 1959, where he acted in the West End and joined an insurgent satirical comedy scene centred around Soho club The Establishment.
Edna made her stage debut in Melbourne in 1955 as plain Mrs Everage from Moonee Ponds. Humphries honed the character in one-man shows in the 1960s and 1970s. She was joined by other inventions, notably Sir Les Patterson, the lecherous, drunken Australian cultural attaché. Humphries enjoyed playing this Falstaffian gargoyle most among his stable of caricatures.
But it was as Dame Edna (the fictitious honour was awarded in 1974) that his comic genius reached its apotheosis.
Television made Edna a household name in the 1980s. Treating celebrities on chat shows as a spider does flies, the housewife superstar vampirically acquired her own aura of celebrity.
Her outfits grew more garish and her repartee got sharper, while Humphries seemed to take increasingly impish pleasure in expounding her bigoted worldview. Controversy duly followed. In 2003, Dame Edna’s stint as Vanity Fair’s agony aunt, a bold appointment, ended in furore after a jibe about Spanish speakers in the US.
“A lot of comedy is a sort of effrontery, you have to have nerves of steel,” he told the FT in 2011. His own were hawser-like, although he was driven to fortify himself with alcohol in the 1960s. (The comedian Peter Cook, similarly afflicted, once claimed to have seen a soused Humphries falling upstairs at a party.) Teetotal from 1971, he blamed alcoholism for contributing to the failure of his first two marriages. He is survived by his fourth wife, Elizabeth Spender, and four children.
As with his idol Oscar Wilde, jokes were a serious undertaking for Humphries. In laughter lay truth, and in truth lay beauty. His memoir More Please contains a vivid description of the sound of an audience erupting in merriment, “a great ecstatic whoosh like a fire going up a chimney or the word ‘yes’ chanted by a heavenly host.” I like to imagine him experiencing a similar sensation as death’s final curtain fell. Surely the last laugh was his.
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