Barry Humphries AO, CBE
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© National Library of Australia.
Readers note: This is an excerpt from the 200 Treasures exhibition catalogue, developed in 2017. This content was written as a brief biography on why this person was included in the exhibition.
1934 - 2023
No Australian has made us laugh like Barry Humphries. For more than 60 years, Humphries has poked fun at Australians, and the country has laughed, with gusto, along with him. Nothing has been too sacred to escape his searing satirical wit.
There is no more terrible fate for a comedian than to be taken seriously.
Born in Melbourne, Humphries rebelled against the stifling conformity of postwar Melbourne as its suburbs sprawled ever outwards. He turned to provocative artistic expression as the antidote to the cultural aridity he saw around him.
As a university student, Humphries participated in an exhibition of Dadaism, producing such memorably distasteful works as the gumboots oozing yellow custard, entitled ‘Pus in Boots’. His enduring vehicle to subvert the tedium of ‘niceness’ in postwar Australia came in the form of a diamante-bespeckled, colourless housewife armed with her floral emblem, the gladiola. And so, in the 1950s, Mrs Norm Everage entered the national consciousness.
Humphries took Mrs Everage with him when he joined the cultural powerhouse of 1960s London. There, he honed his craft as an artist of many talents. Mrs Everage, the cheerful, mousy and small-minded wife of Norm from Moonee Ponds, transformed into the purple-rinsed, blindingly gaudy, crude, lovable and iconic Edna Everage who, thanks to Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, became a ‘dame’ in the 1970s.
Dame Edna was Humphries’s ticket to international fame and his stage performances became legendary, particularly for their audience participation. Edna and other alter egos such as Sir Les Patterson, the ribald and repulsive Australian ‘cultural attaché’, took white Australian suburbia to the world. Television was another medium Humphries conquered with the help of Edna.
Humphries’s extraordinary career has included numerous acting roles on stage and screen, and he has authored many books and screenplays and produced films. He is also an accomplished landscape painter.
