Barry Humphries was a comedy’s artistic disrupter before the term was even invented. His comic creations – Dame Edna Everage, Sir Les Patterson and Sandy Stone – were all experiments in how far he could push a larger-than-life character comedically, each one as finely drawn as one of Barry's own prized artworks. Dame Edna, the Melbourne suburban housewife superstar with a garish taste in fashion began as a joke but soon morphed into a real-life megastar, rubbing shoulder pads with the world’s richest and most famous. Sir Les was the Australian Cultural Attaché (and Chairman of the Australian Cheese Board), a grotesque whose boozy indiscreet stories both appalled and delighted in equal measure. And Sandy Stone, “Australia’s most boring man”, tested his audience’s capacity for melancholic tedium to its limit.

Humphries was a comic genius whose talent was simply too big be confined to his native Australia. Though perhaps few would recognise him out of costume, his characters became world famous and his colossal, inventive talent marked him out as a genuine one-off.

In this special edition of Funny But Dead devoted solely to Barry Humphries, John Marley and Mark Wells assess the extraordinary work and career of Australia' greatest comedy star of all time.

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