The most significant comedian since Chaplin?

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.