The most significant comedian since Chaplin?

According to Barry Humphries' biographer, Anne Pender, he was not only "the most significant theatrical figure of our time … [but also] the most significant comedian to emerge since Charlie Chaplin".

If this is true, it is time to ask "Who was the real Barry Humphries and what made him so significant?"

If Anne Pender is right, through Humphries, Australia emerges as the producer of the greatest thespian and comedian in modernity.

This ratchets up Humphries' status to the forefront of international significance.

After the early decades which included uphill battles and rejections, by the end of his life Humphries was regarded as a living legend, not only in Australia but also at least in the UK and the USA.

But what made Humphries such a great thespian and comedian?

Clearly, to be fascinatingly outrageous was a principal goal for Humphries.

There can be no doubt he has thoroughly succeeded in fulfilling this ambition.

But beyond this I keep asking: 'Would the real Barry Humphries please stand up?'

Does anyone know who was the real Barry Humphries?

He was both an archconservative and a far-out radical.

Was he the guy who created his stage characters or did they create him?

He quoted Oscar Wilde saying that the mask tells more truth than the face.

Was he the shy, wide-eyed Melbourne boy who was an introvert; a sharp observer of the suffocating suburban trivia surrounding him?

One who was spoilt rotten and was brought up by his ever so unremarkable, lovely but (to him,) boring parents living in the even more boring affluent suburbia which he fictionally relocated to the daggy sounding Moonie Ponds in Melbourne, the epitome of utterly unimaginative, stifling suburban existence?

Was he a person feeling trapped in this oppressive world seeking relief from its tedium and looking for playfulness in drinking and drifting into a life of escapism from it all?

Was he looking for pain relief, forgetting and some fun through drinking himself to oblivion?

Did that macho, grog fuelled, 'sheila-whistler', gross pub-world, provide the experiential material for his Les Patterson character?

One who, like him as an alcoholic, liked to flirt with culture, but instead, degenerated into a pathetic caricature of himself?

And how did he manage to kick his addiction and instead, learn to kick the oppressive and pretentious world around him ever more sarcastically?

The shy, young Humphries dreaded the notion of ever becoming a member of the faceless, boring and average suburban establishment.

He could perhaps think of no greater sin than being bored and boring.

He observed the world of his mother; what happened to a potentially vibrant woman when she perhaps turned into just one of the many stultified housewives.

He said his mother was a frustrated artist and frustrated artists are very dangerous.

They either become interior designers or mass murderers.

Luckily his mother became the former.

He reinvented his own mother in Edna Everage, both the epitome of kitsch, but also of a woman who dared to speak out and send up her hapless husband and her suburban life.

So, Barry sets out to be noticeably different.

He would grow his hair long and toss it to one side to give himself a groovy look.

He would dress impeccably but always with a flamboyant flair.

The white or red handkerchief's up-pointing triangle was always carefully raised over the top pocket of his jacket.

And the trousers and the coat needed to be of different and preferably of unusual colours, lest anyone could accuse Barry of sporting an average, unremarkable look.

His colourful character had to be always matched by the colourfulness of his appearance.

In the London golden age of comedy of the 1960s, the boozing comic genius Peter Cook together with the brilliant Aussie Spike Milligan took him under their wings as he immersed himself in the surreal and anarchist satirical theatre of the Dadaist performers.

Some classic examples of the absurdist Dadaist humour was the Peter Cook-Dudley Moore sketch in which Moore has only one leg, on which he keeps hopping while auditioning for the role of Tarzan and Edna Everage having her long suffering NZ bridesmaid sitting silently on the stage during her performances.

While his friend, Peter Cook, was prematurely cut down by alcoholism in spite of Humphries' desperate efforts to wean him off alcohol, Humphries went on to become arguably the longest performing and most original artist in the history of the Dadaist movement.

And it was his pioneering irreverence that inspired the Monty Python phenomenon.

His Edna Everage character enduring for more than sixty years has been the longest surviving comic impersonation in the history of comedy.

By the time Edna became a 'Gigastar', her glasses and her wardrobe could not have become any more over the top.

In Edna, Humphries did not play a typical drag queen- a man pretending to be a woman.

In her, Humphries succeeded in so thoroughly transforming into a woman that neither she nor her audience saw her as the man-Barry Humphries in disguise.

His creation, Edna, was the woman Humphries; almost totally different from Humphries as her man alter ego.

Critics will no doubt argue whether or not in Edna, Humphries actually contributed a lot to women's liberation in putting forward a female persona which could outwit any man or that he was actually a liability to the women's cause by making likable and popular the disgustingly lecherous and inebriated Les Patterson.

The Patterson persona reminds me of this pathetic yet very popular Hungarian folk song in which the alcoholic boasts:

'(I am so drunk that) I can barely stand on my feet, yet the girls still love me.'

Just watch how the inebriated Les Patterson nearly falls all over the lovely Jackie Weaver in an early Parkinson interview and the hapless Jackie laughing this off together with Les' faked enormous implied penis under his trousers being ever so close to her as Les was sitting beside her for the interview.

Clive James observed that Humphries was a supersensitive artist from a country that did not value sensitivity highly.

If so, through Les Patterson Humphries had the last laugh at the less than sensitive Aussie slob.

And interestingly, Humphries described Les Patterson as his favourite character.

Well then, sweet was his revenge.

But Humphries had no time for Royal pretentions either.

Who else could have got away with Edna's ultimate irreverence when, sitting with the Royals in a gala performance, Edna gets up and informs the then future King Charles and Camilla, that he is going to leave them because "a better seat" was found for her?

So, will Barry Humphries be remembered by us all as the most hilariously original and irreverent Aussie larrikin; a peerless knocker?

Now lets try to answer the question:

'Who was the real Barry Humphries?'

I think he was a person who achieved what so many of us wish we could have but have not: he succeeded in doing his own thing and stay playful throughout his life.

As a young kid, having been bored to tears by what the best of his wealthy parents' suburbia could offer him, he turned to playacting, which he never stopped.

He put on different clothes, men's and women's, and he played fictional characters to be noticed and to draw laughter from his several visiting aunts.

His mother warned them: 'Look away from Barry, he is an attention seeker.'

Yet the more his Mum did this, the more attention seeking Barry became.

One day, at the age of ten, Barry came home and all his books were gone – his mother gave them away to the Sallies saying 'he read them all'.

The heartbroken and furious Barry spent the rest of his life trying to find and re-buy his precious books and became a prodigious reader and book collector.

Everything to defy mother.

And Edna Everage, come Dame Edna and the disgusting Les Peterson were his ultimate revenge on Mum and on all that was 'so nice', hypocritical, repulsive, and commonplace in Australia and later in the UK and Hollywood.

Comedy gave him the licence to continue playing throughout his life, satirising pretentions ever more fearlessly.

Interviewers tried to nail him down as to what made him tick.

But he made a sport out of keeping his cards close to his chest.

He wanted to stay unfathomably mysterious to the end of his life.

But in one of the last documentaries about his life, he gave himself away more than ever before.

He agreed with the view that what motivated him to have his lifelong stage career was adrenalin.

He said, he was an adrenalin addict; 'a performance junkie'.

When the curtain rose and all the lights shone on him on the stage, while the audience of thousands fell under his spell, they gave him what he could never get from his mother: the deep belly laughter of wholehearted appreciation.

He could not have enough of it; perhaps that is why he called his award winning first autobiography "More, Please"

Beside having been a brilliant entertainer, Humphries was also an incredibly deep, wise and broadly educated person who made people cry with laughter because the Dr Humphries in him knew well that laughter is indeed the best medicine.

He would sometimes wake up during the night laughing his head off at his own jokes.

He found those funnier than anyone else's.

And so did many other people.

Humphries saw life as a joke, which if you get, you laugh.

He spent a lifetime on helping us to get the joke.

He knew that life was tragicomic.

And he did everything in his power to bring out the comic from the tragic.