Andrew Bolt: Why Australia deserved more of Barry Humphries’ contempt

Barry Humphries wasn’t just achingly funny but mocked Australians almost as a patriotic service, to save us from the humourless mediocrities now in plague proportions.

Let’s be honest.

Barry Humphries, Australia’s most brilliant comic, didn’t much like this country.

No wonder. By the end of his life Australia deserved even more of his contempt than it did at the start, having started to cancel even this genius.

Don’t be fooled by the typically Australian pseuds, blow-hards, barbarians and cancel culture cowards Humphries despised who today emote over his death.

Take former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who as Australian Republican Movement head pompously accused Humphries in 1998 of “caricaturing and denigrating his own country in a pretty gross and sickening way”.

Barry Humphries in character as Sir Les Patterson.

True, Humphries did take the piss out of Australia, particularly when dressed as Dame Edna, the Housewife Superstar from Moonee Ponds he based on his anxiously pretentious mother, or Sir Les Patterson, the drooling, food-stained and lecherous Minister for the Yartz.

Many Humphries’ characters also savaged our types: sleazy union boss Lance Boyle; Paddington socialist academic Neil Singleton; and Sandy Stone, the sometimes dead RSL member recalling acutely observed details of a suburban life lived in a near-catatonic state.

Yet Turnbull totally missed the point. Humphries wasn’t just achingly funny but mocked us almost as a patriotic service, to save us from the humourless mediocrities now in plague proportions.

But today Turnbull, who’d slimed Humphries as a cultural traitor, puts on the sad face and retweets a post from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese calling Humphries “gifted and a gift”.

Dame Edna was based on Humphries’ anxiously pretentious mother. Picture: Getty

Humphries would have smirked. Even funnier, here’s Turnbull sharing a tribute from a prime minister who in January unwittingly reprised Sir Les Patterson by announcing his own Yartz policy at The Esplanade Hotel, as a pretty popster gave the room a bit of a chunk.

Then there’s Phillip Adams, the former ad man who Labor imposed on arts funding bodies which have since promoted the groupthink that’s crippled our culture.

Five years ago Adams tweeted it was his “sad duty” to agree with Hannah Gadsby, the desperately unfunny but critic-proof autistic lesbian comedian, who’d denounced Humphries as “not a comedian” but “irrelevant, inhuman dick biscuit” who “hates vulnerable minorities”.

Yet today Adams inserts himself among more famous mourners, advertising that he’d made “three significant films” with Humphries, who was “the cleverest person I’ve ever met”, and from whom he’d parted just “because of political differences”.

The desperately unfunny but critic-proof autistic lesbian comedian Hannah Gadsby. Picture: Supplied

Actually, I suspect Humphries figured Adams for a fraud.

I had my own credentials tested before we bonded over books. Humphries had 30,000+ volumes, and grilled my wife to confirm I knew where every one was in my own library and I didn’t just have them for show.

After all, pricking people’s pomposities was his life’s work. And books – especially from the Decadent period and Edwardian years – were perhaps his greatest obsession and refuge. He’s the only person I’ve met who shared my admiration of Ronald Firbank, a comic British author now being quietly cancelled for improper language.

Speaking of cancel culture: of all the about-faces I’ve read in the past 24 hours the most shameless and telling is from the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, which Humphries co-launched in 1987.

Pricking people’s pomposities was Humphries’ life’s work. Picture: Claudio Raschella

I nearly cried to read the Festival’s tribute: “We are saddened … comic legend … developed a global platform for Australian comedy … legions of fans … wit … biting satire …”

Yes, I nearly cried with laughter at the sheer effrontery.

This same festival four years ago insulted and wounded Humphries by stripping his name from the “Barry” award for best comic, after he called gender reassignment surgery “self-mutilation”, and described transgenderism as “a fashion”.

By now Humphries, who’d staged a show celebrating music banned by the Nazis, was now in open revolt against the closing of the Australian mind.

For decades he’d hidden his attacks by speaking as Edna or Les or Sandy, so audiences never knew if they were laughing at or laughing with.

But he now spoke as Barry Humphries, so our cultural pygmies could no longer laugh off his barbs.

For instance, in 2017 he spoke at the funeral of cartoonist Bill Leak, who had been hounded to his grave by the Human Rights Commission over his biting cartoon about neglect of Aboriginal children – a cartoon many tried to cancel as racist.

Humphries let loose, calling Leak a victim of our “PC jackals” and “low-lifes”, and said the one funeral he’d like to attend “would be the funeral of the Human Rights Commission”.

But now he’ll star at his own. Pray we won’t be burying for good the larrikin laughter Australians once loved – and need.