In his long, brilliant and Technicolor career, the late great Barry Humphries sometimes had a bit of a funny time in New Zealand. In the first of his two memoirs, More Please, the Australian polymath wrote about one tour that had to cancel its Christchurch season. A local paper didn’t like the sound of his show, “An Evening’s Intercourse with Barry Humphries”. It refused any ad with the word “intercourse”. Without the Garden City dates, the tour suffered financially.
He also had a bit of a funny time with some New Zealanders. Humphries was inspirational in creative lives from this side of the Tasman, including those of CK Stead and John Clarke, and he collaborated with many other Kiwis along the way.
Humphries came here early in a theatre career which he’d begun as a dandy Dadaist provocateur in his student days at the University of Melbourne. Edna Everage first appeared on an Auckland stage in 1962 when she was still the shrill, dowdy housewife from Moonee Ponds and a work in progress.
Humphries brought Edna and other characters like doleful widower Sandy Stone and permanently soused cultural attaché Sir Les Patterson here for the last time 50 years later.
NZ had been a Humphries early adopter, even before Edna’s television mega-stardom.
“We’re on the same laughter fault line,” he told the Listener in 1984 as Edna prepared to present that year’s Feltex Television Awards.
Edna made fun of us. As Max Cryer wrote in this magazine in 1988: “Her comments about New Zealand are fairly frequent with a kind of acidic affection – though often leaning more heavily on the acid than the affection.”
And, of course, there was Edna’s glum, silent sidekick Madge Allsop, who was first mentioned in her early monologues before being made flesh on stage and television. Originally from Palmerston North, she was Edna’s bridesmaid. Edna had taken Madge under her wing after her own husband, Doug, died on their honeymoon. He had fallen into a Rotorua mud pool, and, wrote Humphries, “his tandoori’d remains were found weeks later”.
During Edna’s television stardom era of the 1980s and 90s, poor mute Madge was there as a figure of fun, played mostly by the unprovokable English actor Emily Perry. She made a very dull little brown Kiwi alongside the boisterous flaming galah. A little slice of kiwifruit atop the giant Edna colonial-cringe pavlova.
When this writer talked to Humphries ahead of his final NZ tour, he suggested in all seriousness a statue to the then dearly departed Madge should be erected in Palmerston North. After all, Hamilton had erected one to Rocky Horror Show creator Richard O’Brien. “Madge is no better-looking than Richard O’Brien. But she is rather famous and a much-loved Kiwi.” Humphries’ appeal fell on deaf ears, possibly due to Madge being neither an actual Kiwi nor a citizen of the real world.
In that interview, he also rued the demolition of Auckland’s His Majesty’s Theatre, feigned surprise that we hadn’t also torn down the Civic, and reminded that some of his early comedy albums sold in higher numbers here than in Australia. He also hoped his touring career wind-down would give him more time to paint – Humphries had long been a well-regarded landscape painter and art had been his other calling.
“It’s my favourite non-profit-making occupation. I have always painted. I am rather good at it. I have even sold some paintings. So if I wasn’t an actor I would be a painter, but I would be a little poorer. The theatre has been very generous to me. I didn’t go into the theatre to make money. Who would, in their right mind?”
He also reminisced about his early visits to Auckland in the late 1950s and early 60s. First, it was on a trip from Melbourne to meet his future in-laws before his marriage to his Kiwi second wife, Rosalind Tong, a former dancer with the New Zealand Ballet Company. She was the mother of his two daughters, Tessa and Emily. On that first visit, he ended up having to get root canal surgery and giving all his savings to an Auckland dentist.
The second occasion in 1962 was less painful. The couple arrived by ship from London, the voyage giving Humphries time to write his first one-man show, which included an early Edna monologue and which he trialled in lunch-time performances at the Auckland University Hall before taking home to Melbourne.
On those visits, he met much of the Auckland academic, literary and arts scene, becoming life-long friends with Karl and Kay Stead. In More Please, CK Stead would contribute an appreciation of his friend. He wrote about a night when both couples went out on the town, ending up in a music club of younger people. The long-haired, tie-less Humphries stood out, even more so when the band kicked in and he launched himself onto the dance floor.
“His dance was extraordinary, jerky, almost spastic, yet perfectly rhythmical, with something of that physicality with which Dame Edna still reminds her audience that she’s really a big energetic male. Someone shouted angrily at Barry, calling him ‘Jesus’; there was a precarious moment in which the mood might have turned hostile; and then by some magic of facial expression he swung it entirely in his favour. The crowd pressed around him clapping rhythmically and cheering him on, while Barry, still leaning backward in his dance and with the bewildered expression of someone not quite sane, but benign, danced with prodigious vigour. When he sat down I felt as if I’d watched someone go over Niagara Falls in a barrel and survive.”
That scene would be repeated in Stead’s story A Fitting Tribute, with Humphries inspiring the story’s Icarus-like hero, Julian Harp, an Aucklander who devises engine-less flight and flaps away into history. The tale would prove an early international success for Stead.
In his own 2020 second memoir, You Have a Lot to Lose, Stead wrote about the whirlwind presence in their lives. “Beneath the comedian and the clown Barry was an exceptional literary intelligence and sensibility, a serious reader, a natural critic, a collector of rare books, a connoisseur of fine art expert on the fin de siècle period. He was an intellectual, politically conservative, brilliant in conversation, and in those days heading for alcoholism. We became friends for then, and for life.
“Sometimes in Barry’s company I felt like Dame Edna’s Kiwi suburban bridesmaid, Madge Allsop, and yet we always got on well.”
One of Humphries’ early creative partnerships with New Zealanders was with cartoonist Nicholas Garland. At the behest of English satirist and Private Eye owner Peter Cook, Humphries and Garland created the Barry McKenzie comic strip about an uncouth, boozy Australian navigating the attractions of swinging London for the magazine. It ran throughout the 60s – missing the occasional deadline due to Humphries’ own alcohol-induced unreliability – before it became the inspiration for two movies written by Humphries in which he played McKenzie’s Aunt Edna.
These days, both The Adventures of Barry McKenzie and Barry McKenzie Holds his Own feel like crude souvenirs of the 70s. They were dumped on by critics but performed wonders at the Australian box office. And without boozy Bazza, there might not have been a Fred Dagg.
A recent arrival in London, a pre-Dagg John Clarke got a small role as one of McKenzie’s drinking mates. In one scene, the one-time son of Palmerston North made a small gesture farewelling Bazza with his index finger and raised eyebrows while draining a beer. It caught the eye of director Bruce Beresford, wrote Professor Anne Pender, the author of One Man Show: The Stages of Barry Humphries and Seven Big Australians: Adventures with Comic Actors in which Clarke and Humphries’ were among the careers profiled.
The well-read Clarke spent hours talking to Humphries about books, especially by Samuel Beckett who had influenced the Sandy Stone character.
“The audacity of this gangly, long-haired, young Australian and his vivid humour struck Clarke immediately, and was to have a huge influence on Clarke’s evolution as a performer,” wrote Pender.
“Being permitted to play himself was the key to Clarke’s performance style and his future as a satirist … it provided the perfect satirical weapon and a mode of directly addressing the audience.
“The experience of working with Humphries and Beresford emboldened Clarke in the long run and he returned to New Zealand to start work as a performer. By the end of the year, Clarke had made his first television appearance as Fred Dagg.”
Clarke remembered: “I was just a young drunk in London, and here they were taking an interest in me. To encourage somebody, especially if they’re a bit confused and don’t know what they’re doing, is a wonderful thing. In their case, it was not only a great kindness, it was kind of a secret I held in my head. I didn’t tell anybody, but I can’t tell you how good it was sometimes when I’d be thinking, ‘I’m never going to be able to do this.’ Instead, I’d think, ‘Just relax, sooner or later something might go my way’.”
Humphries and Clarke remained friends, and Humphries would later write a foreword to one of Clarke’s collected works.
“John Clarke sees the skeletons in our closets, and I am amazed he has not grown very rich on offshore hush money.
“If he told us what he sees and what he knows about Australian society in any other way but his Jester’s guise he would, long ago, have met with a very nasty accident.”
The two also had something else in common. Edna first appeared on television in Australia in a sketch about opening her suburban home to visitors to the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. Clarke starred as Games organiser John in The Games, his classic mockumentary leading up to the Sydney Olympics in 2000.
Other Kiwis to feature in Humphries’ career included Iris Mason, his stage pianist and something of a second, ivory-tickling Madge throughout the 1970s. Her career began playing the organ in Wellington cinemas in the 1930s. As a 1977 New York Times review of Humphries Off Broadway show Housewife! Superstar!! reported: “For no good reason, somebody identified as Iris Mason, dressed in a velvet gown, a white wig and ostrich plumes, sits down at a piano, plays briefly and remains for the rest of the evening displaying a fixed grin.”
And as Humphries’ stage career drew to a close, his extravagant and seemingly endless farewell tours were directed by New Zealander Simon Phillips, one of Australia’s top theatre directors.
In 2012, Wellywood provided Humphries with the biggest movie of his career – Peter Jackson’s first film in his second Tolkien trilogy, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.
There, Humphries brought his history of grotesque characters to the Goblin King, a wobbly warty evil creature who resembled a giant unhealthy testicle – or Middle-earth’s answer to Sir Les. Humphries voiced the creature and his face underwent motion-capture to catch his expressions.
“I’ve been able to bring a healthy Australian vulgarity to my role,” Humphries said as the film opened. “I always thought motion capture was something you did when you were taking a specimen to the doctor. But Jackson has given a new dimension to this concept.”
