If ANZAC Day is secular Australia’s one day of “religious observance,” Barry Humphries might have been one of our only secular patron saints, embodying the culture’s virtues, or at least what we thought were our virtues.
While throwing the Anzacs and Humphries together in one paragraph might seem as surreal as some of his skits, they both speak to powerful currents that shaped modern Australia and now appear to be running out on a strong ebbtide.
That Humphries could be out of favour with the in-crowd shows how Australia has changed, and not for the better.
The war shaped Humphries, and it shaped the absurdist drama movement of which he was a leading practitioner.
We think of Humphries as a popular entertainer, which, viewed through contemporary aesthetics, almost disqualifies you from being a serious artist. But he was a serious artist in a dramatic tradition stretching back to Chaucer and Shakespeare.
It encompasses burlesque and arises most directly out of the post-World War I existentialist movement and is in the mainstream of the absurdist movement, which arrived post-World War II.
Both those wars altered the flow of dramatic expression. WWI, with its killing on an industrial scale, eviscerated hope and purpose and the existentialists, like Jean-Paul Sartre, explored a world without hope and without purpose, whose only reality was power.
Absurdism is more forgiving of human nature and more optimistic. It subverts and disrupts reality to understand it better. The mood after WWII was qualitatively different to that after WWI, with a realistic optimism to rebuild a better world and to create new institutions, like the United Nations.
Absurdist theatre drew on this optimism and the coping mechanisms learned through constantly facing physical danger.
Australian Humour in a Nutshell
Humphries was born 16 years after WWI and five years before WWII. As a result, he inherited, or imbibed, some of the characteristics of those who were only a few years older than him.“Taking the piss” is a national pastime in Australia, and most have run rampant in the trenches.
It is also what Humphreys did. It is different from ridicule. Ridicule is a form of bullying, of verbal violence.
You want to demean your subject. It is a sign of affection reserved for your mates or a friendly overture to someone who might become a mate. You don’t waste your time “taking the piss” of someone you dislike.
The laugh you aim to elicit is a form of affection. It is not a cause for war, but a cause for thoughtful retaliation, all the time widening mutual understanding.
Humphries was all about “taking the piss,” and he did it because he loved his countrymen.
Dame Edna may have swollen to Gargantuan size (or maybe that should be Gigagantuan), but in a way that made you shake your head and smile at what a “ratbag” she was, the mirror image of the other ratbag she’d pass on her way in or out of the dressing room—Sir Les.
His humour was also insubordinate (a quality for which our troops had a reputation). It humanised the powerful and elevated the powerless. It refused to take things at face value or to honour the gravity that they might claim. Edna and Les were insubordinate to a T.
Cancelling Funny Comedy
How could Humphries fall foul of a comedy festival and the lords of cancel culture? Well, comedy isn’t comical anymore, it’s a progression of sneers.While comics like Humphries took risks, current comics are prosaic.
Humphries used humour to prise out the truth, but if you don’t believe in truth, only truths, then there is nothing to be revealed, except your own “truth,” your own minor exceptionalism.
When speech can be “violence,” then even comedy has to be tame. So his manner and his purpose are completely at odds with the current moment.
Humphries might have been our most famous drag queen, but the female garb served an imaginative purpose—we all knew he wasn’t a woman, and that was part of the fun. It also took the threat out of his jibes by adding an extra level of fantasy to the show.
“In 2018, he described being transgender as a ‘fashion,’ and in a 2016 interview, he declared that those who undergo gender reassignment surgery are ‘mutilated men,’ while also dubbing transgender former Olympian Caitlyn Jenner a ‘publicity-seeking ratbag.’”
This was the Humphries behind the bejewelled Edna glasses, briefly shorn of his jokes. Far be it for a comedian to speak the truth!
His cancellation underlines the differences between the generations he represents and the present.
His generation was strong, honest, playful, innovative, and generous, like their humour. The modern generation, in this instance, reveals itself to be timid, uninterested in real truth, puritanical, formulaic, mean and humourless.
This cannot be good for our prospects.
A society that finds every statement a potential slight is one which cannot progress. Without the ability to speak our minds, we will become strangers to each other, locked inside our own minds and the platitudes which are the only sentiments we will be allowed to express.
Humour reveals its true nature by disrupting—that was what Humphries was about.
It also cannot love because it cannot truly understand the other if the other can’t take the risk of saying what it really thinks.
Humphries had a third major character—the wistful Sandy Stone, “Australia’s most boring man.”
He was a WWII veteran, and his monologues evoked pathos, powerlessness, and loss.
Maybe Australia’s best days are behind it as a new generation turns its back on the ways and attitudes that made the past great.
Sandy’s pessimism will certainly be rewarded if the comedy festival set triumphs over the bequests of ANZAC Day and the generations who risked everything for the future.
We’ll miss Barry as a bulwark against it, as we will the few remaining veterans who still live.
