Since the nineteen-seventies, I’ve followed Dame Edna Everage, Barry Humphries’s magnificent comic termagant, as she progressed from housewife superstar to megastar. I have lost consciousness laughing at Edna’s “caring and sharing”; I have stood in the wings to watch infantilized audiences rock back and forth in their seats like seaweed in a swell. I have sat beside her in dressing rooms as she put on “lippie,” and have seen her pacing backstage while warming up her falsetto. I have even traipsed the British Isles to chronicle her act. Now, at the London Palladium, where, in her fifty-ninth year as a comic character, she can still pack the two-thousand-two-hundred-and-eighty-nine-seat auditorium, I have paid top dollar to sit in the sixth row and feel for the last time the full force of Dame Edna’s uninhibited antic wallop. Humphries, who is seventy-nine and who hasn’t played London in fifteen years, is hanging up Edna’s diamante glasses and her size-9 high heels after this farewell tour, and we paying customers must call it quits with joy.
In this final edition of her vindictive legend, “Eat, Pray, Laugh!,” Dame Edna claims to have found wisdom in India and forsworn “the cult of celebrity.” “I followed a false god, possums,” Edna confides, nonetheless arriving like Shiva on the back of a mock elephant; then, coming upstage in her glittering pale-blue gown, she proceeds to mock us. “Let me look at you,” Edna says in her bright, piercing voice, pausing to take the audience in. “You’ve aged!” she says. Dame Edna, of course, is evergreen; so is her material, much of which is not new but still feels fresh thanks to her ravishing delivery. Take, for instance, “the paupers,” those misbegotten souls up in the three-tiered balcony who couldn’t afford the eye-watering orchestra prices, and in whose direction she promises to glance “in exact proportion to what you have paid.” Dame Edna evinces great concern for the safety of her “paups.” She warns them not to lean too far forward in their seats. “It’s steep, paupers. It’s like a wall of death up there. I don’t want a downpour of the disadvantaged, a Niagara of nonentities.” An equal-opportunity abuser—“I don’t pick on people; I empower them,” she explains—Dame Edna then turns her attention to working the high-paying customers in the front rows. There’s Sara from Oxford who stops laughing long enough to tell Edna that she lives in a detached Victorian house. “It costs money to keep up those houses, but you’ve saved on clothes, haven’t you, Sara,” Dame Edna says. Then she points two rows behind her at a senior citizen. “You! Yes, you, senior!” “Me?” I say. Dame Edna’s lips wrinkle in disdain. “He’s in a world of his own. He thinks I’m Shrek,” she says. The house roars. Far from being humiliated by Dame Edna’s withering asides, it feels wonderful to be the straight man for her hilarious scorn.
Humphries, a dandy and a Dadaist, first launched Dame Edna at the somnolent suburban burgers of Melbourne in the mid-fifties. He was one of a group of Australian expats—Clive James, Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes—who arrived in London in the early sixties and proceeded to renovate British life with their brand of brilliance, but with this difference: Humphries triumphed with frivolity. He created comic characters so fully realized that a few of them live as folk characters in a large part of the English-speaking world. (In the nineties, when Dame Edna published her memoir, “My Gorgeous Life,” it was listed in the nonfiction section of the best-seller list.) Edna began as a rebuke to Aussie parochialism and ended up as a sensational satire on fame and the monstrousness of ego. If Edna decoys Humphries’s disgust at philistinism, another character, the drooling, priapic Sir Les Patterson, the prodigiously grotesque former Australian cultural attaché, is a gleeful, full-frontal assault on bourgeois notions of propriety. “Permit me, permit me if I may,” Sir Les says while opening the show and showering spittle over the squealing front-row patrons. To be effectively outrageous onstage takes bravery; but to be effectively grotesque takes a kind of genius that pushes the antics beyond mayhem to meaning. The sense of pollution in Sir Les vies with the poetry of his performance to make him a specimen of the bizarre. At once repulsive and irresistible, he is a splendid exercise in theatrical contradiction, a Dionysian figure who inspires panic and elation in equal measure.
In his last scatological outing, Sir Les is a lurid vision of yellow-and-orange beachwear; his Bermuda shorts draw sensational attention to his “frequently felt tip.” “I’m the man who put the dick in dictation,” he says of his “enormous incumbency.” In fact, speaking of his sexual prowess, he explains, “I just slip it in and say, ‘Walk slowly toward me.’ ” Here, Sir Les proclaims himself “the world’s No. 1 celebrity chef.” He gives the word “cuisine” a meaning all its own. Sir Les and the Condiments, his buff, hard-working backup group, launch into “Cuisine,” a lubricious hymn to his culinary itch:
You get the idea. The saucy song is a setup for an onstage barbecue, for which Sir Les, who loudly suffers from diarrhea—“the Aztec two-step,” as he calls it—coaxes two sous-chefs from the audience. At his kitchen table, Sir Les massages the meat with his dirty digits, and then, burping and farting, makes the patties. At some point, Les bolts for the onstage john, leaving his helpers alone with two thousand people out front. They butter the bread and turn over the meat and look nervously around for their absent host. They have paid to see Humphries make a spectacle of himself, only to discover, for the moment anyway, that they are the spectacle. The stage picture of these stranded citizens is both theatrically dangerous and sublimely goofy, a combination of discomfort and delight which is Humphries’s mother lode.
For this farewell tour, Humphries also reprises the well-named Sandy Stone, a ghost, whose well-written monologue invokes the deadly minutiae of suburban Australian life. Stone dares to be spectacularly unmemorable; in a way, however, his emptiness holds the secret to the high-voltage of Humphries’s other characters. The excruciating banality of place and of imagination is at the core of Humphries’s prodigious comic subversion, his lifetime’s dedication to stirring things up.
Edna always ends her show in a flurry of phallic fun by throwing gladioli into the audience. “Up, up, stand and tremble,” she exhorts the audience, who do as she commands. In this final edition, however, after the last gladdy has been backhanded up into the boxes, Edna disappears from the stage to make way for film montage of Humphries’s characters, about a dozen in all, each of whom takes a cinematic bow. Then, with a fanfare, in a double-breasted blue velvet smoking jacket and fedora hat, which he wears at a raffish angle—an echo of Oscar Wilde’s suave portrait of perfect poise—Humphries appears center stage in the spotlight. He comes downstage to speak to us in his own urbane tones, a remnant of Edna’s nail polish the only vestige of his vulgar imaginary life. After a few well-chosen memories about his show-biz beginnings, he dons his hat and ambles off into the cavernous Palladium wings, a puckish Prospero bidding adieu to the stage and to his legacy of magic.
“The art of the comedian is perishable,” Humphries once said. “Not only is it gone by the time you get home and pay the babysitter, but you’re thinking, ‘What was it we were laughing at? What did Edna say? Did you get a gladdy?…’ That’s all we’ve got to remember.” But, on this occasion, there’s something more than the memory of a good time that’s being lost. Humphries’s retirement marks the end of the vaudeville tradition, whose singing, dancing, and low-comic folderol he almost single-handedly carried into the twenty-first century. Humphries’s endeavor is some kind of heroism, which over the decades has taken audiences to the frontiers of the marvellous. To those of us lucky enough to have made that giddy journey with him, the exhilarating encounter is one of the unforgettable markers of how we measure our time on earth. I salute him.
Photograph by Karwai Tang/WireImage.
