Irish Examiner view: Goodnight Dame Edna, housewife superstar

Barry Humphries 1934-2023

Barry Humphries as Dame Edna Everage performing at the Last Night of the BBC Poms at the Royal Albert Hall. Picture: Johnny Green/PA Wire

It takes a unique form of genius to turn a gladioli, a pair of winged glasses, and a vomit-stained tie into icons of comedy. And genius was precisely the definition that we can apply to Barry Humphries, the Australian comedian and actor, who died this weekend at the age of 89.

Humphries came from Melbourne but lived in London for over 40 years and would tease fellow citizens of his country by telling them: “To live in Australia permanently is rather like going to a party and dancing all night with one’s mother.” 

He was best known for his stage creation Dame Edna Everage whose stand-up performances and chat shows were famous for their waspish wit. 

Woe betide any latecomer who would try to arrive inconspicuously in their seats after the show had started. Humphries would quiz them mercilessly, making his audience the stars of his show.

In a career spanning seven decades Humphries experienced success in theatre, TV, film, literature, and art. 

Apart from his creation of Dame Edna, the suburban housewife with an unerring eye for the hypocrisies of life, other comic characters included Sir Les Patterson, the lager-swilling Australian cultural attaché to London, and Barry “Bazza” McKenzie, the epitome of Oz blokeishness.

Unlike the personae of his imagination Humphries eschewed alcohol having given it up nearly 50 years ago after developing a damaging dependency.

His taste for the absurd was exhibited early in his career when he staged, and appeared as Estragon, in Australia’s first performance of Waiting for Godot. He would later say that the most interesting conversation he ever had about Beckett was with a Dublin taxi driver.

Humphries was archly critical of modern sensibilities and had stopped touring before social media-driven cancel culture got into its stride.

“It’s so much easier to shock people these days,” he said. “I find it extremely provocative and therefore inspiring to find myself in a society that is so prudish when it thinks it’s being liberal. It’s ridiculous.” 

On one of his overseas tours Humphries would leave the stage to the old Gracie Fields number ‘Wish Me Luck As You Wave Me Goodbye’. 

He chose it as one of his Desert Island Discs and it is a farewell the master raconteur would have liked: “With a cheer, not a tear, make it gay.”