Then there’s the actual target of the comments – trans people who have struggled for however many years with their very sense of identity. But I’d wager that if we took a snap poll, the vast majority who agree would be over a certain age, and the vast majority who are offended by or disagree with those views would be from a younger generation.

In the absence of any clarifications, the public were left to assume that he either sincerely held these views or was being purposefully provocative. In the lead up to the 2019 Comedy Festival awards, many comedians expressed discomfort over Humphries’ comments that transgender people were performing acts of “self mutilation”, also dismissing their transition journeys as “a fashion”. This was driven home to me when I posted a tribute to him online, with the comments split between those thanking me for acknowledging his legacy and those saying I was a bad ally for even mentioning his name.įirst, some context. What am I, some kind of woke PC reactive snowflake?Īllow me now to attempt the impossible by defending both Humphries and the festival in 800 words or less without being cancelled myself.Īs a mid-career comedian I occupy a strange middle ground, with an older audience who idolise Humphries, and younger peers who either don’t care for him or have never heard of him. It may surprise you, then, that I was one of the artists on the board of the Comedy Festival when the decision was made to rename the Barry Award following his comments about trans people. I’ll treasure the memory of chatting to him backstage, grilling him about the time he met Noel Coward, and sharing a connection to another era.

And I was thrilled to meet the man himself in 2016 when he helped celebrate the festival’s 30th anniversary, after having done so much to raise its profile in the early years. I’m also a proud recipient of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival’s Barry Award for Best Show. It will be a long time before anyone matches his output or his legacy.

As a young comedian, he looked at the “relaxed and comfortable” Australia of the 1950s and railed against it – then continued to create and perform for nearly 70 years. He blazed a trail that allowed Australians to laugh at themselves, then exported his comedic genius to the world. Like so many artists, I owe a huge debt to Barry Humphries.

Early Sunday Morning by Barry Denenberg