As dame and knight, Humphries was our greatest performer
It’s a while now since someone said that people would remember Barry Humphries long after they had forgotten where the MCG stood. If that’s not true it should be because he was the greatest performer in Australian history, and what he performed was not just interpretative: he was the author of that extraordinary cavalcade of characters that embraced Edna Everage, the superstar from suburbia, Sir Les Patterson, that tooth-ridden gargoyle of Australian yobbishness and Sandy Stone, the quite little chap with his dressing gown and his vehicle.
It is characteristic of Humphries that the comedy should be so virtuoso and absolute and should involve such a theatre of typologies and nightmares that it should actually include a figure not only as mousy but as poignant as Sandy Stone.
A lifetime ago, when Humphries was still hitting the turps to a perilous extent, there were moments when the toughest, driest Australian audience delighted to shriek at the exhibition of the broader characters who would suddenly find themselves on the far-off cliff of tears with Sandy Stone and this weird tragicomic potential was always there with this strange wizard of wit and buffoonery.
After all, in the 1950s he had played Estragon in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and there was also a depth of ambivalence in the comedy that gave him his affinity with the great clowns down the ages.
It is typical of Dame Edna that she should have crashed the Royal Box to the boundless laughter of King Charles, who has been among those mourning Humphries since his death at Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital on Saturday night at the age of 89. But it was just an extension of the terror Edna could induce if she picked on someone in the audience to showcase and humiliate.
He was born in Melbourne’s Camberwell in 1934 and at one stage campaigned to save its railway station. He made his way to Melbourne Grammar but was always the guy who got away with not playing the game: whether it was cricket or cadets or academic work, he was a law unto himself.
The story goes that when he did Matric English (as year 12 was then known) he didn’t bother to answer any questions but wrote a short one-page piece, with perfect pitch, elegant, funny and abiding by nothing but his own rules.
As it happened, the examiner into whose hands the one-page exam fell was Bob Brissenden – later to be an academic literary critic of some note – and he gave it first-class honours anyway.
And that is part of the pattern of Humphries’ extraordinary pyrotechnical invention of himself as a world of characters.
It all began in 50s Melbourne. Edna was supposedly from Moonee Ponds but you knew she was as much the face of Camberwell and Humphries once admitted to Claudia Wright, the social gatekeeper of the old Melbourne Herald, there was a bit of Edna in many a Toorak bosom.
Edna, of course, begins as deliberately horrible but becomes a figure of incandescent glory with her talk shows and her endless august ability to bend the world to her will. It’s extraordinary that Humphries made the idiom of Australian conformism – or (if you like) Australian crassness – the very argot of hilarity that became one of the high watermarks of comedy anywhere in the world and with a massive international audience.
It took him longer to succeed in America, but I once drove towards Port Campbell as the very distinguished American poet John Ashbery sang in a reedy and fey voice about chundering in the old Pacific blue. Humphries’ own virtuoso excursus in the vomiting stakes (apart from that song) was when, on a plane, he made stomach-churning noises armed with nothing but a plastic bag full of fruit salad.
And all of this seemed such a far cry from the elegant Anglophile fellow who collected Charles Conder paintings and who said once with a measured ambiguity, “I’m not an Australian, I’m a Victorian”.
Nothing was more Melburnian about Humphries than the way he declared that the expectorating monster Sir Les was in fact based on that moving debonair Sydney figure, the art critic and author of The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes. But Les Patterson was a delectable monster and his nudge-nudge underlining of every rude joke was a monument to a side of Australian nationalism Humphries shied away from as anything but masquerade.
Once upon a time the world of Humphries teemed with characters – blond-haired be-shorted young chaps, unionists, a world of intimately identifiable characters. Then it narrowed, and enriched itself by narrowing. This also had the effect of turning the inner circle of calamities into figures of endless fun.
He was always aware of what he saw as his limits as an actor. He had done Twelfth Night in Victoria but thought he had no feeling for verse. He was in the original cast of Oliver! as Mr Sowerberry the undertaker, but then took over the role of Fagin in London and New York. Those who saw him play the role in the 1997 revival say he was unreachably grand.
As Edna he kisses Gough Whitlam in The Adventures of Barry McKenzie and he was also striking in that other Bruce Beresford film, The Getting of Wisdom, playing a clergyman with a cool magisterial authority.
The man reflected in Louise Hearman’s Archibald prize-winning portrait – the elegant, reserved figure you might see at a Bill Henson opening or the one who was on display in the Weimar Cabaret show with Meow Meow – was a world away from the great comedian who took a nation as his subject in some of the greatest dramatic caricature the world has seen projected.
But Sandy Stone, the ghost of a gentle fragile Australia, was a persistent reminder of the tears in things that made clear Humphries was a creator of worlds.
He is an extraordinary figure, at once mandarin and “self-educated”, who resisted all the trappings of an upper middle class establishment background. The idea of him as a silk or a professional mover and shaker is as impossible to conceive of as the image of him as a practised jobbing actor. What made him a bohemian original – the rare books, the treasured works of art, the wily but besotted air of the flâneur – gave him the detachment that made possible the great obsessional odyssey that made him not only the greatest satirist but the deepest humorist in our history.
We are lucky to have lived in the vicinity of a genius of this order. May the Earth lie light on him.
Peter Craven is a cultural critic.
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