Barry Humphries: misunderstood anarchist of culture

For all his exploits, Humphries was also considered too much for the organisers of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in 2019. (As a measure of cravenness, the organisers have refused to officially mark the passing of a figure that singularly did so much to establish and sustain the event.) The festival's most prestigious offering, since 2000 named the Barry Award, was scrubbed of the illustrious name. It became, instead, the far more anodyne Melbourne International Comedy Festival Award.

The reason? Remarks made about the transgender movement. "How many different kinds of lavatory can you have?" Humphries rhetorically asked The Spectator in a 2018 interview. "And it's pretty evil when it's preached to children by crazy teachers."

Having stated that transgenderism was "a fashion", his detractors proceeded to accuse him of not going along with it. That Australian comedian of sorts, Hannah Gadsby, who won the Barry Award in 2017, suggested he loved "those who hold power, hates vulnerable minorities and has completely lost the ability to read the room. That's not a comedian, that's an irrelevant, inhumane dick biscuit of the highest order."

Thankfully, the persistently courageous Miriam Margolyes took issue with the Festival organisers' decision to cancel the protean dick biscuit, accurately pointing out that he was not "properly appreciated by Australia", let alone the crony-cringing set at the MICF. "He'd had more talent in his little finger than they did in their whole bodies, all of them."

The weak response from festival director, Susan Provan, was a model answer from managerial followers of the cancel-culture credo. "Some years ago, the award for most outstanding show was re-named to reinforce the equality and diversity that our Festival community has always championed." The prerogative of the inclusive is always to exclude.

Ironically enough, the various characters of Humphries are meant to read the room in precisely the way that Gadsby misunderstands. It was a reading that came with an acid bath, the just having to suffer with the unjust. It should never be forgotten that Humphries, in departing, left the landscape a glorious, often misunderstood anarchist of culture.