Watching a bunch of Dame Edna Everage stuff - a doc, chat show appearances, those An Audience With Dame Edna specials done in front of an invited congregation of her peers, people in entertainment and media and arts, where the guests get to ask sycophantic questions.... it struck me what a clever, penetrating parody of the hierarchism of showbiz had been wrought and sustained for decade after decade.
In the doc, John Lahr notes the way that Dame Edna constantly reminds her audience of the distance between her and them. They are nobodies, grotesque with gratitude (her phrase I think - I scribbled it down on hearing) for the privilege of admission into her presence.
Or they are nearer to being nobodies, in the case of the celebs invited to An Audience With Dame Edna or appearing on her own various chatshows. She similarly constantly reminds the guests of their lower rank in the pecking order (the humiliation of having a name tag stuck on their breast, should Edna mentally misplace the name of Gina Lollabrigida or Julio Iglesias). Their starpower wattage is so much dimmer than the supernova of the housewife-turned-superstar (in later declensions, gigastar).
Stardom as noblesse oblige is wittily, wickedly lampooned in her theme song "My Public"
Talking of obsequiousness - hierarchy - fame as a form of non-hereditary royalty - and indeed Australians... or even dead Australians....
..... how remiss of me not to mention the most embarrassing piece of writing I have ever read in my entire life!
I refer of course to Clive James, expatiating in The New Yorker upon the subject of his "love" for - and his close personal relationship with - Princess Diana.
The cultural cringe is harrowing to witness.
Such suppurating humility and humble-braggery... but worse still is the way James tries to balance Diana-adoration with staying on the right side of then-Prince Charles - there's a lot of forelock-tugging about the virtues and admirable qualities of the monarch-to-be.
Back to Barry Humphries.... you can talk about Bowie and Blackstar and the elegance of the way he stage managed his exit from public life... but maybe this surpasses: the dying entertainer arranges for his comedic creation to compose the "eulogy" for one of the quality newspapers...
Oh and here's another self-written obituary, for an Australian paper
Clive James is actually in the audience for this sequel to An Audience With Dame Edna and asks her a "probing" question.
Yet another audience (this time 1988)
The Aussie version
An early documentary
I think this effort below is the doc I watched - good contributions from Germaine Greer and others, with stuff about the bohemian demimonde of 1950s Melbourne, Humphries as the dandy aesthete flaneur provocateur.
I have actually sat through the whole of this Barry McKenzie movie, I'm not sure if I could say this was an hour-plus well spent...
Humphries had a great passion for Dada and Surrealism and the whole épater le bourgeois bit. As a teen I was impressed when I read about his pranks e.g. going on an airplane flight and secretly filling the air sickness bag with Heinz Sandwich Spread, then later - during turbulence ideally - pretending to puke copiously into the bag, making so much noise that everyone in the vicinity noticed ... only to immediately, with a flourish, produce a spoon from his pocket and commence to eat his own regurgitate. This exploit had a similar admiration-stirring and aspirational effect on me as reading about Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell's defilement of library books.
Ah here's the story, as kept in an old scrapbook of mine circa the age of 15. A different Heinz product, but otherwise exactly as I remembered - shows the impression it made on teenage me!
One expression of Humphries's antagonism to the conventional was his interest in abject arcana and human peculiarity, which resulted in the compendium Bizarre.
Which I picked up surprisingly cheap a few years ago. But I confess to being somewhat underwhelmed - the contents are not nearly as grotesque and disturbing as e.g. Apocalypse Culture or even things that my old pal Paul Oldfield would assemble out of pages photocopied from Victorian era encyclopedias full of strange antiquities and anthropological curiosities from all around the world, the freakshow appeal masked by a fig-leaf of edification.
Still, in 1965 when it came out - well before Humphries became anything like a household name - Bizarre would probably have been mind-bending stuff.
^^^^^^^^^^^
Looking at that 15-16 years of age scrapbook, I was surprised to see no less than two Dame Edna features cut out and glued in there. Music was creeping in as an interest, but the bulk of the stuff in there is either science fiction / futurology / alternate history, or it's comedy related (the post-Python diaspora). Don't laugh, but at one point, I thought my future would be in comedy...
