Do we like Barry Humphries?
Our score: 2 out of 10. A long run of his own anti-trans remarks, never retracted, with only a little good found in the sources we read to set against it.
Barry Humphries was born in 1934 to a prosperous builder's family in suburban Melbourne. In the mid-1950s he invented Dame Edna to send up municipal hostesses, then moved to London in 1959 and spent years as a nobody. The breakthrough came in 1976 with Housewife-Superstar at the Apollo, and Edna and the boozy diplomat Sir Les Patterson became household names.
He loved a stunt. In 1979 he hijacked a live Adelaide TV show as Sir Les, swearing and playing drunk, and legend has it that earned him a ten-year ban from live telly in South Australia. He later picked up a special Tony in 2000, an Order of Australia honour in 1982 and a CBE in 2007. He said he had “always been a provocateur”, which is the bit he leaned on later.
He didn't walk it back. In 2019 he said nothing had been “more grotesquely interpreted”, blamed Edna's wording, and said his stance hadn't changed in three years. At a London Q&A that April he shrugged off complaints about LGBTI jokes: “We’re not obliged to be nice, we’re generally pretty unsavoury.” We found no apology anywhere.
It cost him. In April 2019 the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, which he helped launch, dropped his name from its top prize, the Barry Award. Trans actor Rebecca Root called his comments “retrograde”, and Hannah Gadsby called him “irrelevant” and “inhumane” in a 2018 tweet. After he died, the festival's director insisted “We did not cancel him”, while admitting some of his views didn't fit contemporary industry values.
There's real affection in the other column. Gay audiences adored Edna, and he called her “a very reluctant gay icon”, adding that gay theatregoers were among the most enthusiastic and appreciative. He did get things wrong elsewhere too: a 2012 joke about Chinese-Australians' eyes drew criticism, and his spokesperson said he never meant to offend. Honestly, we didn't find charity work or a record of him standing up for others at a cost to himself.
So it's two tests, two answers. On harm he fails, because the words are his own, they're on the record, and he doubled down. On being a decent person the record we found is thin and mostly about his public jokes, so it's a pass with an asterisk. Enjoy the Edna reruns if you must, but this isn't a bloke to hold up as one of ours.