The Death of Satire: Remembering Barry Humphries

A personal anecdote, to begin. In a letter to the press in late 2014, Barry Humphries asked:

Has Australia gone slightly mad? I read in the London press of some poor professor in Sydney who has been persecuted and suspended for sending emails to a friend in which he employs outrageous vernacular epithets for race which would be offensive if they were not so clearly jocular. 

His reported response to the storm in a teacup which followed this revelation is, unsurprisingly, bewilderment. How could anyone take such deliberate touretting seriously? The answer, I fear, is that there are a lot of Australians these days who are totally bereft of a sense of humour. The new puritanism is alive, well and powerful.

Not long ago some poor guy was actually prosecuted for saying that the Aboriginal welfare services were sometimes exploited by faux Aborigines, even though we knew it was true.

Recently, I announced that when I curate next year’s Adelaide cabaret festival I will ban the F-word, and there was a howl of protest, indeed outrage, particularly from comedians. What kind of comedians were they, do you suppose? Why, comedians with no sense of humour of course! Or comedians whose stand-ups would be meaningless if deprived of one over-used word.

We really ought to be aware of this malignant brand of cultural fascism, and restore our reputation as a funny country before it’s too late. — Barry Humphries, London, UK

I was that “poor professor”. The Guardian (amongst the numerous organs that were engaging in a global excoriation of me, along with the vomitorium of anti-social media, on the basis of a few criminally-hacked private emails between friends that broke no law and harmed nobody) took a breather from denouncing me, to turn on Barry Humphries for so publicly and disgracefully coming to my support. Needless to say, he remained unrepentant, and, reportedly still “steamed-up” about my matter, described by former Labor Higher Education Minister, Peter Baldwin, as “the most disgraceful thing to happen in the history of Australian higher education”, he returned to my case a year later, in an interview with the Australian, in September 2015, in the course of rebuking “finger-wagging puritanism”: “We think we live in a liberated age but we don’t … I’m really the sworn enemy of all forms of political correctness. You can’t call something what it really is.”

Amongst several of his famous characters, Sir Les Patterson—the unforget­table caricature of the archetypical Australian politician, diplomat and cultural attaché, and “one of the greatest comic creations of all time” (John Cleese)—says what every­one is thinking, Humphries observed, “but too terrified to say”. This comment goes straight to the heart of the issue of the death of satire in our society, worm-eaten with wokery—the contemporary form of political correctness, and the most rabid to date.

One of the defining hallmarks of a free and healthy society is the robust condition of its satirical culture. From classical times, satire has been the literary genre specifically dedicated to the rigorous exposure of vice and folly in individuals and society, but through the use of wit and humour. In other words, it is a very serious business, but comedic in its modes of expression.

It was instructive, in the days immediately following Barry Humphries’s death, that the numerous media references to it and accounts of his extraordinary career, referred to him by every conceivable complimentary term—comedian, humourist, showman, and so on—except the very kind of artist that he not only specifically was, but of which he was conspicuously one of the most brilliant exponents the world has known: a satirist. Perhaps today’s journalists, who read next to no literature of substance (as the characteristics of their prose plainly, daily indicate) are unfamiliar with the term and the marvellous exemplars of the genre, in prose and poetry, in the annals of English literature.

Humphries himself knew exactly what he was, as these concluding stanzas, from a thank-you poem written after Quadrant gave him a fiftieth-birthday dinner in 1984, indicate. He had a long association with our magazine, which I detail below, serving on the Editorial Board for some sixteen years. Here, he refers to his vocation and its impact on his audiences:

Later amidst the Camembert and mirth,
The dreaded hour arrived to make a speech;
Chill memories of an audience in Perth who wondered if
I’d meant to jest or preach.

A few sought bons mots sage and mystical,
Another canvassed Edna on “the trousseau”.
To speak about oneself seemed egotistical—
Irrelevant, however, not to do so.

Accepting all those warm congratulations for having
Fifty years ago been born,
I thought about the manifold frustrations of those who
Make a livelihood of scorn,

Drag howling Caliban to his reflection
Remembering as you show the fool his folly
Your Chimera could win the next election
In this the land of Bob and Bert and Molly.

If you pursue the satirist’s vocation
Force-feeding fibbers from the candid cup
All you’ll succeed in doing for the nation
Is cheer the bastards up.

Barry long ago discerned, as this poem indicates, that among those laughing with him would be some who failed to realise he was laughing at them. Others would get it. This is one of the signature achievements of the most accomplished satirists (Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift and so on): you are enjoying what they are saying or writing, but you come to realise that, as often as not, you are the joke.

This satirist’s hilarious get-ups and bizarre stage-presences could foster the delusion that this was mere, if consummate, amusement and entertainment. There was Dame Edna Everage (the originally dowdy Moonee Ponds housewife, who gradually but relentlessly transformed herself into a global megastar, outfits designed by son Kenny who had “walked out of his wardrobe” with his fellow “homeopath”, Clifford Smail, while Lord Everage languished at home after prostatectomy); the aforementioned Sir Les, of contrastingly hyper-active and unprecedented priapic proportions and with the foulest mouth to match, and—the most subtly brilliant of all his satirical creations—the monologist Sandy Stone, “the most boring man on earth”, as Germaine Greer correctly observed, but also, one of the funniest—a “returned man”, with his dressing-gown, hot-water bottle and endless capacity to say in a hundred sibilant words what anybody else would say in ten. These characters were not only very funny. It was humour with a serious purpose—satire.

When James Joyce wrote Dubliners, his series of short stories about the citizens of his detested home town, he declared that his intention was that they, and the Irish people at large, should have “one good look at themselves in my nicely-polished looking-glass”. This, too, with regard to Australians, particularly, but, eventually to a worldwide audience was Barry Humphries’s intention, realised in pitch-perfect, endlessly entertaining and inventive performance: he could think on his feet, too, and ad lib with the best of them.

Mind you, it is perfect understandable that this level of verbal nuance and complexity flies decidedly above the debased radar of what remains of any wit or subtlety in our ludicrously trashed popular culture, where such comedians who do tread the boards customarily canvass the entire alphabetical gamut of humour from flatulence to “fuck”. But how can they be anything but severely limited when the list of topics that are now unmentionable in comedy, and utterly forbidden from satire, grows longer every day? There are only so many jokes you can tell about the one remaining acceptable constituency for laughter and ridicule: white heterosexual men. Satire, when it is alive and well, casts its eagle eye for hypocrisy, folly and stupidity across all domains. No one is spared, because of class, race or gender—no sacrosanctity is conferred on any group, rendering them immune from lampoon, nor should it be.

Humphries himself experienced a bitter taste of the phenomenon of the constriction of comedy and satire in a back-handed way in 2019 when—of all organisations—the Melbourne so-called Comedy Festival declared it had renamed the Barry Award (which had been established in his honour twenty years before), “following comments Humphries made about transgender people, which were deemed as ‘not helpful’ by festival organisers”. “Not helpful”! What fun Humphries would have had with that weasel-word phrase.

The Festival Director, Susan Provan, explained that she celebrated “Barry’s genius while not much liking some of his views”. Let us get this crookedness straight. I don’t “like” someone’s views, so, instead of engaging with him or her in reasoned and respectful debate and discussion, or, if I think that might not prove ultimately profitable for us, opt for the position customarily attributed to Voltaire: “I disagree with what you say, but I defend to the death your right to say it”. But, no—neither of these will do, today, in the woke social justice dystopia the metropolitan elites are in the process of imposing on all of us. Instead, I will denounce you for your thought-crime of disagreeing with me (because, of course, I am right about everything) and, further, I will punish you for your transgression by silencing you and cancelling you, in one form or another. In this case, by removing Barry’s name from an award.

And what were the grossly offensive comments that Humphries had made about transgenderism, that brought all this about? He called it “a fashion” and asked, “How many different kinds of lavatory can you have? And it’s pretty evil when it’s preached to children by crazy teachers.” In other words, he was expressing opinions and concerns that countless people, today, agree with, but are “too terrified” to voice. Reflecting on the worldwide laughing-stock that the Melbourne Comedy Festival became as a result of this, Miriam Margolyes not only hit the nail squarely on the head, but discerned what was really behind this miserable episode: “He had more talent in his little finger than they did in their whole bodies, all of them.”

The essential component of Humphries’s satirical gift was the way in which he could make just a single word resonate enormously for his satirical purposes. Demonstrating this phenomenon himself, he would tell a story from his childhood about an afternoon’s outing with his mother to a lady’s home in an upscale suburb in Melbourne, for tea. On the way home, the usually loquacious Mrs Humphries was conspicuously silent. In an attempt to break the ice, little Barry made the remark that he had enjoyed the outing. No response, just a further pursing of the lips. “Well, I did like the cake,” he added, somewhat desperately. Mother turned to him and uttered the devastating monosyllable: “Bought”. In just that simple word, an entire world of social commentary is summoned and an even larger insight into human nature is conveyed, and, importantly, amusingly (including, of course, hypocrisy—a favourite butt of the satirists through the ages—as Mother had no doubt earlier made a great show of appreciation for the hospitality to the woman she was now deriding).

The technique of exactly the right word in the right place is age-old amongst the great practitioners of the satirical art. In his exquisite masterpiece, The Rape of the Lock, Alexander Pope similarly writes of the occasion of tea, with a satirical dig at Queen Anne and her court at Hampton:

Here thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey,
Dost sometimes counsel take—and sometimes tea.

Everything depends, for that effect, on that simplest word, after the caesura, in the device known as bathos (to which the rhyming couplet is perfectly suited), as we plummet from the sublime, in the first line, to the ridiculous, in the second (and with the arch pronunciation, “tay”, to cap it off). “Bought”. “Tea”. That’s how it’s done, if you have the brilliance to do it.

We at Quadrant are proud of Barry’s long association with the magazine, dating from his first appearance in 1970. It was an interview by the editor, Peter Coleman, recorded with Barry and the English comedian Dick Bentley, in London in 1970 and published in the April edition of Quadrant that year. Humphries had become a popular performer in Britain through a television series on the BBC. English media critics loved the way his principal character, Edna Everage, represented versions of Australian crudity, but were baffled to learn that Australian audiences, themselves, had for at least a decade relished his satire too.

In June 1975, Barry became a regular contributor to the magazine, with his column, “Pseuds Corner”, which was also the name of a regular feature in the contemporary British satirical magazine Private Eye. The 1970s had pseuds aplenty, just as we are bedevilled by the woke today. Barry’s column consisted of a paste-up of extracts from writings by journalists, celebrities, politicians and other public figures, exposing, in their own words, their most embarrassing pretensions. It ran in most editions for two and a half years, finishing in December 1977.

At the same time as “Pseuds Corner” became a regular feature of Quadrant, editors Peter Coleman and James McAuley roped Barry in to become a member of their newly-formed Editorial Advisory Committee, which soon afterwards changed its name to the Editorial Board. Other members at the time included the cream of Sydney academic intelligentsia (not, then, an oxymoron): David Armstrong, Owen Harries, Leonie Kramer, Martin Krygier, Elwyn Lynn and Vivian Smith, most of whom matched Barry in the longevity of their time of service on our Board.

One significant way Barry used his editorial position was to make test runs of some of the gruesome characters he created for his stage and tele­vision performances. The first of these to make it into Quadrant pages was Craig Steppenwolf—a high school teacher whose political radicalism was obnoxious. The front cover of the November 1975 edition bore a picture of Barry dressed as the deranged Craig. The piece inside was a transcript of stage directions and dialogue for a music-hall performance of the character, written by Barry and his co-satirist Ross Fitzgerald.

Unfortunately, Craig’s character did not make it much further on stage. It was probably too early for such a type to be widely recognised (Craig’s classroom ratbaggery would certainly strike a resounding chord today), and he was dropped from the line-up. However, the next character Barry introduced to Quadrant’s pages was much more successful. In April 1977, readers were given a script of Mr Les Patterson presenting his “Historic Address to the British”. The front cover of the issue carried an especially nauseating picture of the later-to-be-ennobled Les.

Yet another character who was also tested on Quadrant’s front cover was a film producer named Phil Philby, in July 1981. Inside was a script for “A Fillup for Phil Philby Films”, which records the ostentatiously self-effacing Philby receiving a Gold Goanna award for the best Australian film of the year. This one didn’t go much further either, but like Craig Steppenwolf it had much potential. Notice, incidentally, the abundance of alliteration in these verbal concoctions, another component of Barry’s satirical method.

He scored his fourth front cover in May 1984. This time, the central character was Barry himself. Quadrant devoted this edition to celebrating his fiftieth birthday, with tributes from Leonie Kramer and David Armstrong, and verse from Geoffrey Lehmann and Geoffrey Dutton. 

Barry Humphries was a revered and beloved member of the Quadrant family of regular contributors and Board members. We will best honour him and his legacy in our continuing spirited and informed opposition to the woke cultural fascists and fake-news peddlers, the censors and cancellers, the Thought Police and all the other sour-faced, neo-puritan enemies of a free society, so that satire may flourish, again, through brilliant wit and humour.

Barry Spurr was Australia’s first Professor of Poetry and is Literary Editor of Quadrant. Grateful acknowledgement is made to Keith Windschuttle, Editor-in-Chief of Quadrant, for the material and timeline detailing Barry Humphries’s long association with the magazine.