Persons [ ] People Laughing with Relief, because the Truth has been Spoken | Barry Humphries, 1934-2023
Barry Humphries, Dadaist era, 1950s
“The truth is deafening, no matter how softly it is spoken.”
“I really feel sorry for kids who aren’t interested in history – recent history, either, because it is this that made us what we are.”
“I’ve decided the secret of parenting is benevolent neglect.”
“My parents were very pleased that I was in the army. The fact that I hated it somehow pleased them even more.”
“My mother used to say that there are no strangers, only friends you haven’t met yet.”
“Those women with collagen lips just look like frogs – ‘muffin mouths,’ I call them. There’s not a line on their brows, and all the emotion gone from their faces, like all those actresses in ‘Desperate Housewives.'”
“Glamour comes from within. My beauty regime begins with my personality.”
“Sport is a loathsome and dangerous pursuit.”
Barry Humphries as Dame Edna Everage
“Now the point of comedy is not just looking funny, it’s use of language. We have at our disposal a great language… and the imaginative, creative use of that language can be at the service of humour.”
“I hate it when theater people go on about professionalism – aren’t they boring? I try to be as unprofessional as possible. And I’m a little bit politically incorrect.”
“I think of myself as an actor. The duty of an actor is to be able to impersonate anything – a child, an old man, a tree, a chair, a woman.”
“One of the strangest experiences one can have is to sleep on stage, as I once did in Sydney when I’d lost the key to my flat. I had to stay at night in a bed, which conveniently was on stage because my character Sandy Stone did his monologue from a bed. To wake up looking at a shadowy auditorium is a very peculiar feeling.”
Barry Humphries as Sir Les Patterson
“I’ve played Beckett. I put on in the 1950s the first Australian production of ‘Waiting for Godot.’ I played Estragon. The most interesting conversation I’ve had about Beckett was with a Dublin taxi driver.”
“I am writing a book called ‘The History of Australia in Hundred Objects.’ It’s of things we have invented in Australia. And you know, some of them are amazing. We invented the clapper boards used in films. We invented those cranes – those big long cranes used on construction sites.”
“When people laugh at me, they are not laughing in the way that they normally would at a comedian. They are laughing with relief, because the truth has been spoken, and political correctness has not strangled this particular gigastar.”
“I suffer greatly from nerves. I have stage-fright badly, and it gets worse, but the stage is still my life.”
“I’m approaching 70. Unfortunately, from the wrong direction.”
Barry Humphries, 1934-2023
comedian, actor, author and satirist
Barry Humphries, c 1966
