Barry Humphries

John Barry Humphries, AC, CBE (17 February 1934 – 22 April 2023) was an Australian comedian, actor, satirist, artist and author.

Quotes

There is no more terrible fate for a comedian than to be taken seriously.
- My Life as Me: A Memoir (2002)
Although there were many who did the dirty on him in the envious world of letters, Stephen^* never let any of them live rent-free in his brain.
- My Life as Me: A Memoir
And so I set these things down before the onset of the first of a thousand small physical degradations as, in a still-distant suburb, Death strides whistling towards me.
- My Life as Me: A Memoir (closing line)

I was addicted to alcohol for about fifteen years. I think alcoholism is a disorder of the memory. You wake up groaning, saying, "Never again!" And by lunchtime you're on to your second Beaujolais or whisky... at the end of the sixties, I realised there was no future in it for me. I had done everything I could with alcohol except die. And after that, things took off in a wonderful way. It was like I'd been driving in a car with the handbrake on for years.
- Desert Island Discs interview, May 2009

He would have been a handful in any society. He is a misfit and fully conscious of it. The punctilio of his old-world manners, the dandified scrupulosity of his Savile Row suits, are compelled by an unsleeping awareness that he has no more business among ordinary human beings than a Venusian.
- Clive James "Approximately in the Vicinity of Barry Humphries", London Review of Books, 5:18 (6 October 1983).
- Reprinted in Reliable Essays: The Best of Clive James (London: Pan Macmillan/Picador, 2001/2002)