All Time Great: Barry Humphreys By Yui Mok
“I never considered myself a comedian, I don’t care what they call me,” Barry Humphreys told me 10 years ago, before a farewell tour that said goodbye to his decades of performing as Dame Edna Everage, the character that made him was the most famous and loved and who will go down in the annals of show business as one of the greatest comic creations of all time. He leaned forward and whispered confidentially, «You know, I still secretly consider myself a Dadaist.» The warm Australian housewife has turned into a megastar. He never seemed to find words, it would be difficult for him to define his famous act of changing clothes.
He provided me and others with the opportunity to work out differences and assessments. “It's very pretentious to talk about your work,” he said. Indeed, entire books have been written about the phenomenon he unleashed, which reached its insane climax in the 1980s, making this adopted Brit a national institution.
The fact that the American critic John Lahr, who has written about Noël Coward, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller, dedicates a 200-page volume solely to Edna's actions, tells us how seriously we should take Humphreys' artistic achievements.
How to restore the justice of Everage? It was a self-originating «personality» that satirized celebrity and status in all their enormity, but was also a triumphant expression of the tinsel appeal of «star power», glamorous, witty, charming. It was the emblem of suburban femininity that subverted conformist society while remaining accessible enough to conquer the mainstream; a fugitive from the Lower Dungeon who turned the world upside down. As Lahr put it succinctly: “Dame Edna makes you believe. The public wants it to be real. And like Tinker Bell, she is, if you believe in her. Life turns into a theater; and theater to life.
Naughty Delight: Barry Humphreys as Dame Edna's alter ego Credit & Copyright: Lisa Marie Williams
Compared to Humphreys, most comedies with characters looked boring. Your jaw dropped when Edna showed up (at the final show on the back of a clumsy fake elephant) and was left slack. And while she was a stage creature like no other, theatrical to the core, I would argue that Edna's mischievous enjoyment in full splendor on her celebrity-adorned television talk show changed British comedy.
Would we have Alan Partridge, Mrs. Merton or the Kumars at number 42 without her mocking example? I doubt it. And the talk shows themselves have become more active. It's not far from «Give me a badge, Madge» (referring to Edna's taciturn and sour ex-bridemaid Madge Alsop) and all the on-camera eilad that turned her famous guests into Graham Norton's brash, innuendo-filled antics.
Humphreys blew himself up during his first walk with Edna at the Sixties' Establishment — Bamber Gascoigne called him «soporific» — but he had the last laugh. Although he was always attentive to topical references, his humor transcended the quickly forgotten political moment by bringing up a funny feature of human behavior. Because he placed satire in the «personal,» with gender ambiguity at the heart of his work, he anticipated our own time enslaved by identity. It was neither a pantomime nor a drag act, but something in between. In comedic terms, we are all Edna's children, although no one can directly follow her path.
Barry Humphreys receives the Order of the British empire from Elizabeth II in 2007. Photo: PA Wire
However, the fact that we need Edna now more than ever is one of the saddest reflections on Humphries' passing. Fearlessness was in Edna's DNA. To quote Oscar Wilde: “Man is least of all in himself. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.» The Humphries mask—like some formidable antipodean version of Lady Bracknell Wilde—was an unrivaled means of blabbing, speaking frankly, and getting people to open up in ways that are crucial to the foundations of a free society: to say the inexpressible. /p>
“I say what other people would like to say,” he told me. «I don't pick on people, I give them strength.» Would he start now, would his jokes about handicapped toilets, say, be approved, or his cruel barbs at the audience in the front row (“The last time I saw a face like that, it had a hook on it”)? This is how it should be.
The miracle of Everage in full flow was that you could never see the connection between scripted wit and improvisation — witness, to give one simple example, Ronald Reagan's son, Ron, is quick as lightning to dig because of his looks: “You're Ron's boy, you're definitely not Nancy's boy. Where did all this come from? «I'm talking to some other person, I can only express it to you in such an irrational way,» Humphreys told me as we sat down to have this conversation.
Theatrical to the core: Barry Humphries as Dame Edna at the London Palladium in 2013. Photo: Tim Good/PA
An audience with Humphreys was treated with trepidation and apprehension — an experienced interviewer himself, how could he make me writhe? Yet at home, in a Covent Garden hotel room, he was the epitome of a genius mind, speaking in complex, complete sentences, proving the fact that it was Humphreys' mind, encyclopedic and boundlessly curious, in alliance with his bravura showmanship, that made him one per million.
Beady eyes, smart hat and scarf, he was outspoken in many ways. “I suffer a lot from nerves. My stage fright is on the rise,” he said. He shuddered from his proverbial drunken days. “I’m glad I got through it and stopped drinking before I was 40. I do not ascribe to myself great strength of character.”
And he thought about death even then. “I always thought that anything is possible. Now I know I'm not going to read all of George Meredith's novels, swim the English Channel or anything like that… get the Booker Prize.» Twilight: «Though it's still possible.»
He didn't win the Booker Prize, but he did something more important, he tore up the rule book about how comedy is done here — he's always risk-averse, but there was nothing experimental about it; he showed that comedy can be dangerous, yet all-encompassing. Like fellow invaders Germaine Greer and Clive James with the same high IQ, he had a colossal cultural impact, like a torpedo hitting a huge old ship. His constant provocations against possums around the world were never meant to be boring. We should mourn him, but rejoice that we have witnessed the great man of all time.
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