Barry Humphries passed away tonight in St Vincents Hospital, Sydney following a short illness related to recent hip surgery. He and his alter egos will be sadly missed.

I went to one of his shows years ago "Isn't it Pathetic at His Age" where he did all of his characters. Brilliant.

There was a mention of him being filmed as Sir Les interviewing Dame Edna. I once did a skit like that where I played two characters and all I had to go on was a clunky old domestic VCR and a home movie camera. To get everything to align (bear in mind that there were no time codes to work with) I had to record the soundtrack on the tape first, then cut the wires to both the erase head and audio head and just let the video heads do their work.

Not quite broadcast standard but it all did come out okay. I imagine that Barry had access to some better gear.

When I was a kid I had this cassette with Barry doing a commercial for a drink called Belch orange juice and as he was extolling the virtues of this juice he was burping loudly and I can imagine the state of his clothing once the ad was finished. Sir Les didn't seem to mind getting wet.

Many years ago went to "An evenings intercourse with Barry Humphries" in Melbourne.
We were fairly close to the front but fortunately not too Close.
The front row got showered with spit from Sir Les Patterson.
At interval some of the people at the front row moved to seats up the back.
After interval Les identified them and had them ushered back to the front row!
Vey very funny.

The front row got showered with spit from Sir Les Patterson.

... and usually showered with tossed gladiolas when Dame Edna appeared.

In the show that I went to (which I find was way back in 1978), he was projecting funny slides in the form of newspaper headlines ahead of the curtain. One I remember well was "Beach sewage crisis. Wran steps in".

God, that takes me back. I remember the days when the weather portion of the morning radio news bulletins would have a poo report for the beaches before the ocean outfalls were built.

What a vocab he had, possessing a sponge-like upload of Aust, Brit & US culture, from which the comedic-generative-engine part of his brain could draw on (rapidly.)

He was also very good at dealing with hecklers.
He'd absolutely shred them.
A sign of a good comedian.

He was 'cancelled' by the nobodies who run the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, not least because of alleged comedian Hannah Gadsby (who apparently has multiple simultaneous personalities and thus needs to be described with plural pronouns) and whom Bazza aptly assessed as being 'about as funny as an orphanage on fire'.

The good old laneway cafe establishment...

Bazza Humphries liked working British audiences the best as they are culturally broad-spectrum, able to get his occasional descriptive American metaphors like (being from) "the wrong side of the tracks" and Sir Les being a "troubleshooter" (lol) - all because of his incredible memory-upload of Anglo-American culture.

Generative AI Chat-bots also create Comedy using known comedic algorithms, and drawing on an unlimited database.