After watching The Man Inside Dame Edna1 last night, a documentary about Australian comedian, satirist and actor Barry Humphries—which originally went to air in Australia more than four years ago—I could not resist writing a short think-piece. I often call such a piece of writing a prose-poem. In this case it is about this international icon who has been part of my life since moving to Australia in the early 1970s
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“Entertaining people gave me a great feeling of release;” Humphries said, “making people laugh was a very good way of befriending them.”2 I also found this to be the case in my teaching career in Australia, a career which ended after three decades in the classroom in 2003.
Biographer Anne Pender described Barry Humphries in 2010 as not only the most significant theatrical figure of our time, but the most significant comedian to emerge since Charlie Chaplin.3 -Ron Price with thanks to 1 ABC1, 11:30-12:30 a.m., 1 & 2 April 2012, 2 Wikipedia, and 3 “Absurd moments: in the frocks of the dame,” by Steve Meacham, Brisbane Times, 15 September 2010.
I’ll have to read your award-winning
autobiography, More Please (1992),
when time permits, Barry, published
the year I got going with my poetry
with my eye on an early retirement.
You moved to London from Australia in
1959, the year I joined the Baha’i Faith.
I never heard of you until in ’71 I moved
Downunder. You nearly died in 1962, the
year I started my travelling and pioneering
for the Canadian Baha’i Community.1 When
I arrived in Australia in ’71-2 you teamed-up
with Phillip Adams and writer-director Bruce
Beresford to create a film version of the Barry
McKenzie cartoons. I could go on-&-on drawing
parallels between my life and yours, Barry, but…..
I am not in your league. I may have become, though,
like you, addicted to applause, due to all those years
in classrooms where I was a big-hit, where I had that
entertaining role, a role which saved my skin and my
psyche, as tutor and teacher which took off at the same
time as yours, Barry, in the ‘70s. What a role it has been
and now I do it in the world of writing, but I’ll never be
famous or rich like you, Barry….Perhaps, though, I have
some of your insouciance. I like to think so, Barry, yes sir.
1 Humphries fell off a cliff breaking many bones.
Ron Price
2 April 2012
