Rita Panahi: Melbourne International Comedy Festival organisers add insult to injury by failing to properly honour Barry Humphries

After their appalling treatment of the late, great Barry Humphries, the least the Melbourne International Comedy Festival organisers can do is apologise and reinstate The Barry.

Melbourne International Comedy Festival is trying to rewrite history after facing an almighty and well-deserved backlash for their appalling treatment of the late, great Barry Humphries.

After doing their utmost to cancel the greatest comic this country has produced, stripping his name from the event’s major prize, festival organisers added insult to injury by failing to properly honour Humphries after his passing.

A pitiful Instagram post, tellingly with comments closed, and another on their little-visited website was all they did to acknowledge the death of their co-founder.

King Charles went to more effort to pay tribute to Humphries than the recreants who oversee the comedy festival.

Barry Humphries as Dame Edna Everage has King Charles in stitches.

The disrespect was all the more egregious given the manner in which organisers allowed a bunch of chronically unfunny faux-comics to bully them into renaming ‘The Barry’ in 2019 after Humphries was accused of making supposedly transphobic comments.

At the time I wrote about the perils of comedians turning into hectoring hard-Left preachers telling us what to think rather than making us laugh.

Humphries’ disdain for this clique was evident in a comment he made to Sky News’s Rowan Dean in his final days: “Hannah Gadsby’s about as funny as an orphanage on fire,” referring to one of the comics who led the witch hunt against him.

On Sunday, instead of dimming the lights, holding a minute’s silence or doing something worthwhile in tribute to a comic genius on the final night of the festival, the organisers waited for the event to be wrapped up before posting this nonsense on social media.

Humphries is the greatest comic this country has produced. Picture: Claudio Raschella

“The news of Barry Humphries’ passing in the last 24 hours of the ’23 Fest was momentous. From today we regroup and start to plan a fitting tribute to his comic genius and leading role in creating a global platform for Australian comedy,” they said.

Talk about too little, much too late. The Twitter post was met with a torrent of criticism.

One would think Humphries would be amused by the cowardly cohort being held to account and desperately trying to claim they had not in fact cancelled him.

The least the comedy festival can do now is apologise and reinstate The Barry. And the next time a pack of unfunny crybullies demand a comic be cancelled in the name of “inclusion”, they should be ignored or mercilessly mocked.