NOT PLAYING POSSUM
The drag dominos keep falling, with the death of Barry Humphries aged 89 in short order after Paul O’Grady. Someone best be checking up on Stanley Baxter (not to mention Bugs Bunny). Aussie-born Humphries grew up with a pointed interest in Dadaism, which developed into a knack for absurd sketches and songs. It was in these earliest phases of his career that he developed his most enduring creation, the outrageously vulgar housewife Dame Edna Everage.
Dame Edna was unmistakably hilarious with her extragavant “Hello, Possums!”, lavender locks, and studded cat-eye glasses. Her ordinary housewife persona carried backwards views that satired Humphries’s upbringing in conservative Melbourne (and would end up life imitating art later on). Dame Edna exploded from dull to diva over time, and on the back of her massive popularity appeared in everything from talk shows and stage to Saturday Night Live to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to Ally McBeal.
Humphries donned other popular alter egos for his one-man shows, including alkie raconteur Sir Les Patterson and geriatric Sandy Stone. Beyond his alter egos, his stage career included Oliver! and Maggie May, and his film career included Bedazzled. He was one of numerous Australian personalities to lend his talents to Finding Nemo, voicing unlikely fish ally Bruce the Shark, and staged a farewell tour in the early 2010s but never truly retired.
Ultimately obituaries are a sum of the whole life. Harry Belafonte was wholly admirable, Carolyn Bryant Donham was unambiguously a meritless cunt. No one disputes Humphries’s hearty legacy in comedy, but the mainline obits are also keen on sweeping aside his late-life bigotry to a wee sidenote buried deep, if that. He found himself in hot water in recent years for his transphobia, labeling gender identity as a “fashion” and gender-affirmation surgery as “self-mutilation”. He made these comments as himself, not under the guise of any of his alter-egos (as he later claimed), and never reneged. The man who had dazzled for years with envelope-pushing biting wit, had depressingly hollowed to exactly the type of individual his acts had skewered.
If we are to take him at his word, and label life-saving surgeries as “self-mutilation”, Humphries died after a self-mutilation on his hip did not go as planned. A pack of possums pick the points, including joker points for Comedy Creations.
Barry Humphries
17 February 1934 – 22 April 2023, aged 89
13 TEAMS (💀💀💀💀💀💀 6 POINTS, 🃏 (x1) 12 POINTS)