"Poor Old Pinko Conservative, Half-arsed political puritan, Crypto-fascist": Barry Humphries and the Politics of Satire

Abstract

The lecture analyses the framing stories of Barry Humphries' life and his anarchic approach to satire, its genesis in his boyhood and the discomfort Australians exhibit towards his distinctively anarchic form of satire. Barry Humphries has published two autobiographies - with different takes on the same life. The research background to this lecture is the framing stories of Humphries' life and the way in which I as biographer evaluated them in order to write my biography of this actor and writer. The lecture examines several key episodes in Humphries' life that reveal his personality, the power of his satire and the way in which one drives the other. The lecture considers Humphries' association with the conservative magazine Quadrant, the Nobel Prize winner Patrick White, a performance of Humphries' enduring character Sandy Stone in 2007 and its ambivalent satire of the prime minister at the time, John Howard. This lecture also presents a defence of satire as a refusal of ideology.