Barry Humphries: The entertainer whose outrageous caricatures took the one-man show to new heights

Australian comedian and creator of Dame Edna Everage, dies aged 89. Humphries was a master of provocation and glorious grotesquerie

Barry Humphries as Dame Edna Everage performing at the Last Night of the BBC Poms at the Royal Albert Hall.

In a spoof obituary written while he was still in his 40s, Barry Humphries, who has died aged 89, described himself as “an ancient comic” who had long since become “a self-indulgent and inaudible has-been” with no sense of progressive social relevance.

The Republic of Australia’s Art Squad had, he said, banned Humphries’ work in his native land. He had endured his last years of “exile and obloquy” in the tarnished splendour of “a Lusitanian spa”, where he occasionally gave clandestine performances to his dwindling, reactionary and hard-of-hearing followers. He was survived, the obituary concluded, “by innumerable wives, great-grandchildren and creditors”. It was a generally appropriate death notice of a satirist who delighted in guying both himself and his critics.