“Poor old pinko conservative, half-arsed political puritan, cyrpto-fascist”: Barry Humpries and the politics of satire

Barry Humphries has twice written his life in autobiographies – with different takes on the same life. But neither account gives the whole story. Dr Anne Pender took years researching, interviewing and delving into the real Barry Humphries to produce a more comprehensive story. Her book, One Man Show, examines the life, and the aspirations of this enormously talented artist, from his youthful pranks on the streets of Melbourne, the phenomenon of Barry MacKenzie, the dark years of alcoholism, through to the successes on television and Broadway. On Tuesday 16 November 2010, Dr Anne Pender addressed The Sydney Institute on the life and contribution of Barry Humphries and the politics of satire.

“POOR OLD PINKO CONSERVATIVE, HALF-ARSED POLITICAL PURITAN, CYRPTO-FASCIST”: BARRY HUMPRIES AND THE POLITICS OF SATIRE

ANNE PENDER

Patrick White took an instant liking to Barry Humphries when they met in 1962. White wrote to his friend Frederick Glover, describing the young actor, saying: “He is a genuine fantastick.”

In researching the life of Barry Humphries, I came to the conclusion that there are two framing stories that might be told about this extraordinary man. The first account tells of a boy from a prosperous Melbourne family, his unhappy school days, deeply rebellious spirit and decades of struggle to achieve success as an actor. In this story the young Dadaist, banned from performing at Melbourne University, eventually receives a Tony Award for his Broadway show, counts Prince Charles as a friend, and lives in Switzerland for part of the year to minimise tax.

The second story reveals a divided personality. This story sees the young Humphries as a misfit and a genius. The masks he adopts through his characters are dimensions of the man that allow him to survive in the world. The artist Barry Humphries is an anarchist at heart. This story is the story of the development of a satirist driven by rage, self-loathing, anxiety and the impulse to succeed as a performer. This is the more interesting story.

This evening I would like to look at several episodes in Barry Humphries’ life that reveal something of the man and the power of his satire over half a century. In doing this, I want to demonstrate why I think that the second version of Humphries’ life is the one that is important, and that is the one we shall remember. And, in telling some of that story, I want to set out an argument that satirists cannot be ideologues, and that satire refuses partisanship. I would also suggest that Australians are on the whole uncomfortable with this.

Like one of our other great satirists, Christina Stead, Humphries satirises both sides of politics. Stead was a Communist, she was a member of the Communist Party of the USA, and suffered for it, but she vehemently satirised both the left and the right throughout her long writing career.

To understand Humphries’ background we need to go back to the Menzies years, a period we now associate with deep-rooted conservative thinking. Robert Gorton Menzies was prime minister from 1949 to 1966. He also served as PM from 1939 to 1941. In a photo of Menzies published in a book entitled Barry Humphries’ Flashbacks years later in 1999, Humphries’ caption looked back at Menzies’ legacy: “With the manners of a private school headmaster, the benevolent and nicely spoken Prime Minister Robert Menzies steered Australia comfortably through the fifties.”

One thing we associate with Menzies is that he stood for Anglophile loyalties. A devoted monarchist, he is often referred to as the “last of the Queen’s men”. Humphries’ comic theatre has captured ambivalence in Australia towards Great Britain over a fifty-year period. It is no surprise then that Humphries was steeped in the values of the Menzies years.

Menzies won his seat in the Australian parliament in 1934, the same year that Barry Humphries was born. Menzies became the member for the blue ribbon seat of Kooyong. Just to the south of Kooyong is another blue ribbon seat called Higgins. In the heart of that seat lies the suburb of Camberwell.

Barry Humphries grew up in this leafy part of Melbourne. Humphries’ parents had chosen the suburb for their home after making the leap into a new social sphere. Both of them had grown up on the other side of the tracks, in the working class suburb of Thornbury. They were Anglicans, hard working, conservative people. Eric Humphries ran a building company and enjoyed prosperity and wealth.

By the time Barry was five years old, the world was at war. In 1945 when Barry was eleven the world learned that six million Jews had been murdered in Europe. Barry’s immediate world, though, was safe and stable.

His family sent him to the school of the establishment, Melbourne Grammar. Humphries went on to the University of Melbourne in 1952. He rebelled against all his parents’ values. His taste for the bizarre and the strange was well developed – he was captivated by Dadaism. He was obsessed with grotesque parodies of art, and with forms that challenged the idea of art itself. He studied the demonstrations of the French and German dadaists of the 1920s, and he was particularly intrigued by Man Ray and Picabia. Later on when photographed, Humphries would stare straight at the camera and make “wild eyes”, just as Dali and Man Ray had done for Carl Van Vechten.

Humphries started to practise Dadaist pranks around the campus of Melbourne University and the city. He would offer lifts to strangers on the streets. Humphries sat in the front passenger seat playing a crazed psychopath, shouting at his friend Robert Nathan, and imploring him to gun the accelerator, harder and harder. After a few minutes in the speeding vehicle with a screaming lunatic in the front, the terrified victims would plead for release, or would leap from the car at the first red light. It was pure pleasure for Humphries.

One day Humphries stood in front of a portrait of the Queen, on the wall in the women’s lounge on campus, and gravely announced his intention to execute a painting. He pulled out an axe and chopped up the portrait of the monarch.

But Humphries’ most shocking and notorious Dadaist event was called Call Me Madman! It was a chaotic, crazed and anarchic student revue, modeled on the early Dada shows of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich several decades earlier.

The title parodied a popular musical by Irving Berlin called Call Me Madam starring Ethel Merman. Call Me Madman! opened with  a single musical phrase played on a violin over and over again, then a pianist sitting out of view of the audience sounded the same chords and notes in repetition. Nothing happened on stage, just the sound of these same notes over and over again, infuriating the audience.

A provocative skit incensed some of the loyalists in the audience. It included the lines: “Why are you kicking that rotten old football about like that?” “Because it reminds me of Her Royal Maggoty Queen Lizard,” came the daring answer.

By far the most provocative sketch in the show featured Dada Australian-style. It was called “The Indian Famine”. In this sketch Humphries played the wife of a missionary, dressed in a wig and a floor-length evening gown, hastily put on over his suit. Humphries’ friend Graeme Hughes, played the missionary who was dressed in a grey suit and grey silk tie and tiepin, and looked and sounded like the then external affairs minister Richard Casey, who had recently given a speech about the tragic Indian famine.

When the sketch began, the two actors were sitting at a table. The missionary stood up and announced “We Australians are a most fortunate country, we have enough to eat; those poor little yellow people have not got enough to eat’.” In front of the two actors lay a pile of food:  a pyramid of raw meat, vegetables and cakes. There were blood-oozing rump steaks and lamb chops, cauliflower heads, slimy fish and creamy pastries.

The missionary continued with a series of shocking statistics of the Indian famine, as his wife (Barry) shrieked in falsetto: “I don’t care … don’t be boring, I’ve got plenty of food … lots of food … and they’ve got nothing …wogs, nigs, yids”, as she bit into a chop, immediately discarding it as she chewed. Enraged by her husband’s endless litany, she proceeded to pelt him with half eaten cakes and rotting vegetables. Her husband retaliated. A few seconds later she started throwing whole plate loads of food at members of the audience, shouting, “You little yellow person, have a chop.”

Incensed audience members began to fling food back at the actors and all around the theatre while the voice of the missionary continued with the grim statistics over the amplifiers. Humphries had trapped his audience into an ugly food fight.

Appalled at the scene in front of them, some Indian students started to rush at the stage as Humphries appeared again, this time dressed as a nun singing jauntily, “I wish I could shimmy like my sister Kate…” Then the “nun” flung off a grubby black bra and a pair of black stockings into the audience. Various members of the Newman Society were horrified and loud protests filled the thronging 500-seat theatre. The mass of students then stormed the stage as “God Save the Queen” blared out over a gramophone at various speeds over and over again, daring the students to stand still in their places as was the custom. As the strains of the anthem rang out however, food was flung around the theatre and students ran in every direction. Humphries took refuge in a cupboard in the dressing room.

As a result of the damage caused by the flying food and the complaints of many members of the audience, the Australian Labor Party club who had put on the show, was banned from the Union Theatre for the next three years. The other result was that Barry Humphries was offered a position as an actor in a theatre company.

Humphries’ attempts to entertain British audiences on stage during the 1960s were not successful. But he did manage to publish a weekly cartoon strip in the controversial Private Eye magazine. The strip was called The Adventures of Barry McKenzie. It was created by Humphries and the New Zealand-born cartoonist Nicholas Garland. Humphries and Garland originally intended the cartoon to satirise English pomposity, but it took off in a different direction. The character Barry or Bazza himself took over and the English found themselves “relegated to supporting roles”.

The picaresque tales of Bazza in London poked fun at England as an impoverished country of would-be migrants to Australia. It was not popular at first but picked up a following as Humphries persisted in initiating English readers into the mysterious world of Australian slang.  The real target of the strip became the crude parochialism of Australians in London.

By this time Humphries was a recovering alcoholic. To his surprise, the federal government under Prime Minister John Gorton, one of Menzies’ successors, agreed to pay the full costs of a film version of the comic strip – a full feature film. Humphries played Mrs Everage, Auntie Edna to the strange hero, Bazza, who was played by Barry Crocker. The film, taking the title from the comic strip The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, was a box office hit, but a failure with film critics. In fact it was mauled by the critics, and caused uproar in Australia, with many Australians outraged by the crude portrayal of themselves.

Humphries did not care who he offended in Australia or in the UK either. During filming, Joan Bakewell interviewed Barry for a television program called Film ’72. Dressed as Edna, Humphries slipped easily into the interview. Bakewell asked him, “Why is the film set in England?” Without blinking, Barry, referring to the constant strikes and blackouts then bedevilling England, replied, “The film is set in Calcutta but London looks like Calcutta and is cheaper.” John Clarke, later a noted satirist himself, overheard Humphries’ remark and gasped at its audacity. It was “marketing Dada”, he thought to himself.

In the sequel film called Barry McKenzie Holds His Own, yet another Prime Minister, this time a Labor leader, Edward Gough Whitlam, became involved with the Barry McKenzie carnival. But this prime minister lent a different and kind of support.

At the end of the film, a slightly uncomfortable looking Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, playing himself, conferred a damehood on Auntie Edna Everage, once again played by Barry Humphries. It was all ad-libbed.  In reality Gough and Margaret Whitlam had been waiting at the airport for four hours. Prime Minister Whitlam and his wife, Margaret, stepped forward to greet them. The voice over at the beginning is Humphries himself remembering the triumphant elevation of Edna.

Whitlam’s decision to appear in the film alongside Humphries, marked a potent moment in Australia’s post-imperial history. In this moment the politics of Australian theatre and the theatre of Australian politics directly coincided. So receptive were Australians to new expressions of Australian identity, that a prime minister could participate in a strident attack on British foibles and the cultural cringe.

Humphries continued to lampoon and to celebrate new symbols of nationhood. In 1976 he appeared as Dame Edna Everage at Royal Ascot wearing a spectacular hat. This hat launched Dame Edna’s image around the world.  It featured a massive model of the Sydney Opera House.] The upper side of the brim was made of blue and purple satin with turquoise netting. White lace wave caps simulated the waters of Sydney Harbour, complete with six canvas yachts and a shark’s head baring diamante-studded teeth. The hat measured 120 centimetres in width and 41 cm in height.

In the past, Edna had often failed to attract attention, once throwing herself into the path of Sir Robert Menzies outside the Savoy Hotel in London, only to be ignored. But Edna’s appearance in her new hat was a triumph. She received more coverage than the Queen and her entourage on that auspicious day. The Opera House hat appearance was Humphries’ first grand gesture in a life-long campaign to bring Australian humour to the world.

Perhaps it was a reaction to the controversy and the critical drubbing of the two Barry McKenzie films that encouraged Humphries to join the board of the right-wing magazine Quadrant in June 1975. Soon after appearing in a film with the Labor prime minister, he confounded critics with this action.

Patrick White, who was then identifying strongly with left-wing elements, was horrified. Barry took refuge in the safe harbour of the conservative magazine, and remained on its board until 1987, contributing various sketches and articles to its pages. He regarded himself as apolitical. He told me on two separate occasions that he held a genuine respect for the liberal voices of some of the regular contributors to the magazine. His association with Quadrant offered him a vehicle for keeping his name in the public domain under yet another mask: rat bag right-wing establishment figure.

In the 1980s Barry Humphries became a television celebrity in the UK, and Edna Everage gradually became a household name. Edna transformed herself from a matronly housewife to a glittering superstar. Humphries, the outsider, became an insider in Britain in many ways. For one thing he married Lizzie Spender, daughter of the poet Sir Stephen.

Dame Edna’s rise in popularity on British television occurred as Margaret Thatcher transformed British politics after the landslide re-election of the Tories in 1983.  Humphries was hooked from the moment he read about Mrs Thatcher’s embarrassment at a public ceremony, when she arrived to find that the Queen was wearing an almost identical outfit to her own.

He was tickled to find out that Mrs Thatcher had sent a memo to the Palace to find out whether she could be informed beforehand of what the Queen would be wearing. The reply came back: “Do not worry. The Queen does not notice what other people are wearing.” The incident was a touchstone for the rising tension between the monarch and her prime minister, which was no secret in a nation undergoing rapid social and economic change.

In fact, by 1987 Edna Everage had become a potent satirical symbol of the new blend of conservatism and excess that characterised the 1980s in Britain. The disjunction between the mantras of the PM and the harshness of her policies, shocked even hardened conservatives. Margaret Thatcher, with her constant talk about “honest money” and platitudes of caring, and her simultaneous dismantling of the welfare state, found their echo in the barbs of the housewife turned megastar, Dame Edna Everage.

The prime minister projected an image of herself as super human. Immediately after an operation on her eye, she set out on a tour of Europe. Journalists asked her if a tour might not be a little premature, given that it was only a few days since her surgery. “It may be too much for a normal person who has had an operation,” replied Mrs Thatcher without flinching “but, after all, it is me we are talking about.”

Edna Everage also began to terrify.  Her energy and the savagery of her lamentations, always bracketed with “I mean that in a caring way, I do”, clearly satirised the prime minister who would frequently purr, “Of course I care about the unemployed.” Dame Edna boldly projected a curious affinity with the PM: “She phones me at all hours of the day and night,” Edna reported on national television.

Between 1980 and 1989, the ascendancy of the lower middle class housewife from Moonee Ponds to megastar status stood as a comic corollary of the upwardly mobile fervour of the PM. Like the renaissance fool to the court, answering and parroting the monarch, Edna played host to Thatcher’s one-time nemesis Edward Heath, Labour’s hard right wit Denis Healey and Glenys Kinnock, the astute wife of the effusive young Labour leader from Wales.

Like Thatcher, who came from a lower middle class background, and shredded the world of High Tory politics, Humphries knew what it was like to be treated in the world of entertainment as an arriviste. He too had grown up in a household intent on upward social striving. He understood aspiration and its Protestant maxims. After all, he had built his career on satirising the almost Victorian social morality of his own class. In February 1989, the Spectator published a cover featuring a caricature of Margaret Thatcher as Dame Edna with a menacing grin. The PM, resplendent in blazer and pearls, smiled out from a television set, pointing to her star-spangled spectacles. Emblazoned on her lapel are the words “Housewife Superstar”. In the cover story Noel Malcolm attacked what he perceived to be the “contradictory populism” of the Tories. He spoke of the “ideological schizophrenia at the heart of Mrs Thatcher’s public performance”.  Malcolm continued:

On the one hand we have Mrs T. of Finchley, Housewife; on the other the Right Hon. Margaret Thatcher, Superstar. The Housewife is the embodiment of sturdy market-town moral values, in favour of individual responsibility and hostile to all forms of government control. The Superstar, by contrast, is hostile to government (her Government) only when it fails to control things or get things done….

Malcolm concluded his article with the following admonishing statement: “Housewife Superstar may be the formula for success in show business – but it is no way to run a government.” Dame Edna had not only succeeded in satirising the prime minister. She had clearly become shorthand for popular entertainment, and had entered the British psyche.

In his most recent stage show to play in Australia, in January 2007, Humphries’ Sandy Stone sketch was for me the highlight. Stone, a ghost, appeared on stage as though looking down at Beryl’s old people’s home. His Parkinsons’ shake and his repeated phrases perfectly captured an old man. He discussed Beryl’s old people’s home at length.

The scene opened with a couple of young actors performing in mime. They wheeled in plaster models of an old man and an old woman stuffed into wheelchairs, set up a television set, snuck a cigarette at the back of the gloomy TV room and began to kiss in full view of their elderly charges.

Sandy began: “Beryl got a call from a lady in India called Rhonda offering her a time- share in Dubai,’ Beryl thought that Dubai was probably on the Sunshine Coast … Rhonda didn’t know that Beryl did not have much time to share …”

In his digressive and languid manner, Sandy continued: “Dubai is like Dubbo … that’s an Abo word for meeting of the waters’ … all Abo words mean ‘meeting of the waters’ … except Woy Woy, it means ‘deep water’. … Which Woy means ‘deep’? I think the Abos have been pulling our leg for a long time … perhaps it’s time for them to say ‘Sorry’.”

The sketch was one of the cleverest Humphries had performed as the old man in the fifty-year career of the character. The prime minister, at the time, John Howard, had refused to make a formal apology to the indigenous people of Australia for past wrongs. It was a burning issue, and Humphries allowed everyone to laugh at the “Sorry” debate.

When I last met Barry Humphries, in June 2010, at his home in London, the newspapers were full of the news of Julia Gillard becoming PM after the demise of Kevin Rudd. A headline on the front page of the London Daily Telegraph and a double page spread inside crowed:  “Ten pound pom’s daughter becomes Aussie PM”. Humphries looked at me and said rather wistfully, “It’s not often we Australians make the news here.”

Barry Humphries in the guise of Dame Edna and other characters, has parodied Australian ambivalence towards the mother country for the last 55 years. It is not just ambivalence towards Britain that Humphries has lampooned. He has brought Australian humour and Australian English to the world. Humphries is one of the great comedians of our time. He has been called a half-arsed political puritan by one of his friends, and a crypto-fascist. But these labels do not explain the art or the genius of this strange and extraordinary man. Anarchist, satirist, humourist are closer to the mark. But I go back to Patrick White to find the right description. Humphries is a “genuine fantastick”.