Good luck against a powerful and malign foe
My acquaintance with him was about as fleeting as it was possible to get and yet I feel all those qualities manifested in the single email I received from him. A couple of years ago, Stella O’Malley and I wrote a letter defending JK Rowling from the death and rape threats sent to her by trans rights activists. I thought it would be an easy and safe way for comedians to stand up against the rising authoritarianism of the hysterical, misogynist Left. But hardly a single comedian of my acquaintance signed it.
Barry signed it, though. And he sent me this.
And of course, as with Paul O’Grady, trans activists are proclaiming him a drag act and claiming him as one of their own.
Neither was a drag act, and O’Grady strenuously pointed this out on several occasions. Lilly Savage and Dame Edna were comic characters who happened to be women played by male comedians. They wouldn’t have worked as male characters but the humour was not derived from their being female; the humour was not directed at women.
Which isn’t to say, of course, that none of the humour came from the characters being men dressed as women, but they were never the gross caricatures of women we see in drag acts.
I preferred Humphries much better when he was interviewed as himself, especially as he got older and had fewer fucks to give. He came across as genuinely more interested in other people than in himself and seemed to bring the best out of the people he was with. That is also a rare and admirable talent. More than anything, he always seemed to be thoroughly enjoying himself.
Barry Humphries was a wildly talented performer, with the great comedian’s ear for speech and eyes for beahviour. He was also highly erudite.
There’s a good essay on him by another one of that particular Australian expatriate generation, Clive James.
https://archive.clivejames.com/books/barry-humphries.htm
Humphries was more than Dame Edna Everidge. He was also Sandy Stone and Sir Les Patterson. He gave us Barry McKenzie, the lost Oz abroad in London, overawed by the hand-drawn photographs in The National Museum and underwhelmed by the Possum Piss served as beer.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-04-22/barry-humphries-dame-edna-les-patterson-sandy-stone/102239018
We also know that he was all man, not a drag queen or tranny. After all, he was married 3 times and had numerous other lovers, not one of them male.
Here’s a classic piece of Sir Les.
https://twitter.com/JamesAHogg2/status/1650181922046332928
Well, he wasn’t a queen (or quean) but his performance was, literally, drag. The TRA inclusion police can’t allow that to be the case, just as they’ve retroactively defined the drag queens at Stonewall as ‘trans women’ despite what those men actually said.