Hurting Barry Humphries for anti-trans stance is unforgivable
Cancel culture really is a wretched ideology. To see how wretched, observe the unpersoning of Barry Humphries by the comedy elites of Australia.
Even following his death, these tin-pot totalitarians masquerading as comics are refusing to forgive him for his supposed wrongthink.
He will stay cancelled, they’ve effectively said. His name will remain dirt. He will continue to be branded with a fat red “H” for heretic.
It was in 2019 that the Melbourne International Comedy Festival pointed a bony finger of judgment at Humphries and denounced him as a modern witch possessed of sinful thoughts.
Humphries had, in their eyes, committed the gravest speechcrime – he questioned the ideology of transgenderism. Being trans is a “fashion”, he devilishly said. Gender-reassignment surgery is “self-mutilation”, he continued. And Caitlyn Jenner is a “publicity-seeking ratbag”. He even dared to offer solidarity to the woke mob’s most feared witch: his old mucker Germaine Greer.
Greer has long been blacklisted by the right-on for her stinging criticisms of the trans trend. “Just because you lop off your dick and then wear a dress doesn’t make you a f..king woman”, she once said. Such a fruity expression of scientific truth is blasphemy in the eyes of the woke. So when Humphries sided with Greer – “I agree with Germaine! You’re a mutilated man, that’s all”, he said – his days in comedy’s polite society were numbered.
He had been seen cavorting with Goody Greer and the devil, and thus he had to be cast out. The punishment for his sacrilegious utterances? His name was scrubbed from the Melbourne International Comedy Festival’s top award.
Henceforth the Barry Award, an annual prize given to the most outstanding comic at the festival, would be called the Melbourne International Comedy Festival Award. And thus was Australia’s greatest comic reduced to an unperson, treated as a creature so morally suspect that even his name could not be said out loud. The Melbourne festival – a festival he helped to set up – turned him into the Voldemort of comedy.
Just as the utterance of Voldemort’s name threatens to bring forth evil in the Harry Potter universe, so the name Barry was judged too dangerous to say in hyper-hip comedy circles.
The cancellation of Barry Humphries was shameful, sickening even. Here was a colossus of comedy brought down by politically correct faux-comics who were not fit to buckle Dame Edna Everage’s shoes.
One of the comedians who made the case for making the name “Barry” unutterable was Hannah Gadsby.
Be honest: has Gadsby ever made you laugh? Her stand-up is like a bad TED talk, a homily on woke. There’s an internet discussion forum titled, “Why is Hannah Gadsby considered a comedian?” Good question.
For Humphries to be brought down by the likes of her is akin to a lion being slain by a squirrel. It makes no sense, morally or comedically. Humphries himself once said Gadsby is “about as funny as an orphanage on fire”.
Whereas all that Gadsby could muster up about Humphries was to call him a “dick biscuit”. Imagine a comedy titan as erudite and fierce as Humphries being cancelled by someone who thinks saying “dick biscuit” is funny. Rarely has the unjustness of cancel culture been so graphically exposed. And here’s the worst part of it: the organisers of the Melbourne festival have made it clear that Humphries remains a pariah. Even in death his name will not be restored.
“I don’t think so”, said Susan Provan, the festival director, when asked if the Barry Award would make a comeback. “I think we have moved on.”
There’s a chilling nonchalance to that comment. It’s so breezy, so cavalier. Will you make amends for your cruel and ruthless erasure of a great comic during the twilight of his life? “I don’t think so.”
The unfunny bullies of the Melbourne festival might have “moved on” from the Barry scandal, but the rest of us shouldn’t. For that public shaming of a great Australian confirmed just how brutal the woke ideology can be; just how insatiable the modern lust to cancel wrongthink has become.
We now know how wounded Humphries was by his vile mistreatment. His friend, the actress Miriam Margolyes, said this week that Humphries was not “properly treated” in Australia, “particularly by the Melbourne festival”. They “cancelled him rather late in life”, she said, which was an outrage considering “he had more talent in his little finger than they had in their whole bodies”. Quite.
The Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan has revealed that Humphries expressed distress about his cancellation in an email. “I’ve been attacked and branded fascist and ‘transphobic’ by the ‘they’ brigade”, Humphries wrote. Linehan asked Humphries to sign a letter in defence of JK Rowling – who is mauled and threatened every day for her blasphemous belief in biological science – and Humphries said yes. “Good luck against a powerful and malign foe”, he said to Linehan.
Powerful and malign – that is exactly what cancel culture has become.
The writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has spoken of the “unconscionable barbarism” of cancel culture. Cancellation is a “vigilante action” that is designed not only to “silence the person who has spoken” but also to “create a vengeful atmosphere that deters others from speaking”, she says.
Exactly right. Cancel culture’s grimmest achievement is not its shaming and slaying of household names like Barry Humphries but the chilling effect it has across society. It signals to all that we’d better keep our opinions to ourselves or we too might be found guilty of sinful thinking by the woke witchfinder-generals.
After all, if even someone as brilliant and famous as Barry Humphries can witness his own erasure, what hope is there for mere mortals who wish to speak freely, to give voice to such outrageous beliefs as “sex is real” and “men are not women”?
What happened to Humphries at the hands of the comedy mob was indeed “unconscionable barbarism”.
That they still won’t reinstate his name adds insult to the injury. They’re essentially dancing on his grave. It is unforgivable.
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