'The rude rudiments of satire': Barry Humphries' humour

Abstract

Barry Humphries' extraordinary career in theatre began in the early 1950s. In this decade Humphries experimented with straight acting roles, intimate revue, pantomime, radio, film and television, performance art and street theatre. Humphries' early career as an actor was a series of stops and starts, in which the characters that now define his humour were almost incidental to his developing repertoire. Between 1952 and 1959 Humphries devised strange street theatre spectacles and Dadaist 'events'. He appeared in 'Hamlet, Love's labour's lost' and 'Twelfth night' and acted in plays by Moliere, Shaw, Saroyan and Beckett; he moved to Sydney in order to perform in intimate revue and he did one performance at an RSL club. Moreover, it was in this period that he invented two of his enduring characters, Edna Everage and Sandy Stone.