The one and only Barry Humphries

But beyond being a brilliant comedian, Humphries was also a superb writer, raconteur painter and a serious documenter of changes in Australian suburbia as exemplified by his Sandy Stone monologues.

Humphries astute satires about suburbia were no less hard hitting than the Nobel Prize winner Patrick White's was in his acclaimed play - The Season at Sarsaparilla.

Humphries was a true larrikin, an incorrigible stirrer, never afraid of being politically incorrect.

Of the several comic characters Barry created apart from Edna, Les Patterson was perhaps the funniest and most deliberately disgusting.

Barry was able to get people roll with laughter at his most vulgarly sexist send-up portrayal of 'cultural ambassador' Patterson, consistently parading an enormous fake erect penis protruding from his thigh under his trousers.

Of course, in our present zero-tolerance anti-misogynistic culture, much of Les Patterson's jokes would be regarded as passé and cheap, but Barry with his old fashioned charm tended to get away with it, in spite of the fact that an increasing number of young comedians started to object to his not dropping sexism as a means of making his audiences laugh.

Humphries was never a subject of the numerous interviews they conducted with him. He was always the object, taking over the interview from the interviewer who mostly kept laughing so hard, that he did not mind what Humphries was talking about as long as he kept him amused.

Similarly, when Humphries conducted interviews with famous stars, he always injected himself into the interviews with his sarcastic humour to the point that the main star of every interview he conducted with anyone, no matter how famous his interviewee, was always Humphries himself.

As he could not help himself but command the centre stage, Humphries would not have been an easy person to live with, as implied by his three divorces before his lasting fourth marriage.

He made no secret of the fact that he used to be an alcoholic and he praised the work of Alcoholics Anonymous, as it was through their program that he managed to overcome his addiction.

Though Australia has largely moved on from its epoch of history that Humphries so brilliantly sent up for us, his enduring fame is assured not only as one of Australia's most brilliant comedians but also as a very astute cultural commentator.

And not everything in the Aussie culture that he had sent up so wittily has become history by now.

There are still men who prefer women to be seen not heard, the kind of 'housewives', whom Humphrey eternalised in his early Edna Everage portrayals and several tabloids targeting women still specialise in kitsch and trivial gossip.

If Paul Hogan helped to acquaint the world with the Aussie bloke and with Crocodile Dundee, then Humphries succeeded in giving the world an irreverent Aussie housewife extraordinaire.