Sir Les Patterson, Sandy Stone: Barry Humphries’ other great creations

Dame Edna Everage might have captured the world headlines but Barry Humphries was still deeply committed to his other alter egos.

Dame Edna Everage was Barry Humphries’ greatest creation, but “cultural attache” Sir Les Patterson and the “decent man from the suburbs” Sandy Stone often proved just as popular with audiences.

SIR LES PATTERSON

Dame Edna Everage is undoubtedly Barry Humphries’ best-known character – but she wasn’t the star’s favourite to play.

Humphries once revealed that none of his characters gave him quite as much pleasure as Australian “cultural attache” Sir Les Patterson, best known for his puce cheeks, foul mouth, huge appendage and formidable frothing, in spoofs of old-school Australian bigotry.

“I enjoy playing Les more than any other character because it releases my inner vulgarity. It liberates my repressed ribaldry,” Humphries told The Guardian in 2018.

This not-so charming man – Sir Les Patterson. Picture: Supplied

The uncouth slob and lecherous drunk held outlandish views often delivered in monologues laced with references to “spags”, “slopies”, “muff-munchers” and “shirt-lifters”.

In 1999, Sir Les appeared with Kylie Minogue at Nick Cave’s Meltdown, in a duet that concluded with him chasing her round the stage and whipping out his fake but famous “frightener”.

Like his creator, Sir Les was never one to play by the rules.

Sir Les Patterson in all his glory. Picture: Supplied

Humphries once joked it should have been left to Sir Les to sort out Johnny Depp’s dogs when the Hollywood actor infamously brought them to Australia illegally and was forced to deport them back to the US.

“A few dollars and Les would have turned a blind eye … bring in any dog, bring in your wife if you like, bring in a giraffe,” he said.

Comic genius, Barry Humphries. Picture: Supplied

Gallery: Barry Humphries’ iconic life in pictures

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SANDY STONE

Sandy Stone didn’t have the glitz of Dame Edna or the gravitas of Sir Les, but the “decent man from the suburbs” remained one of Barry Humphries’ most enduring characters.

The iconic digger, an amalgam of a childhood neighbour combined with the vocal intonations of an elderly man met in Bondi, was a window into a bygone era.

An “elderly, childless man” from the suburbs of Melbourne, Sandy Stone was once described as Australia’s most boring man. But his regular bloke persona, delivering monologues in a dressing gown, developed depth from daily life.

Barry Humphries as Sandy Stone, an “elderly, childless man from Melbourne”.

Humphries said in 2016 that the character slowly deepened over time, “so I began to understand and appreciate him, and finally feel myself turning into him”.

The Playbill for the 1990 tour of The Life and Death of Sandy Stone published an appreciation by Professor Manning Clark, describing the then-new comic genius of the tall, gaunt man dressed in pyjamas and striped dressing gown in the late 1950s.

“I was carried away. There was the voice, there was the face, the face of a bewildered man, and there was what he said. He was a funny man, and a sad man,” he wrote. “He was, I soon realised, Everyman in the suburbs in Melbourne in the years before the great change.”