However, it is true that those whose education started once the school and university curricula had been cleansed and made politically-correct show an historically unprecedented ignorance of and insenstivity to irony!

Indeed. Exhibit A.

I suspect a lot of people under 40 don’t understand the humour.

That is taking it too far. However, it is true that those whose education started once the school and university curricula had been cleansed and made politically-correct show an historically unprecedented ignorance of and insenstivity to irony!

Humphries is a brilliant performer who reads his audiences with great accuracy. He probably knows how much effort it would take to acquaint an LA audience with the shabby gentility and parochial pieties of a moribund eastern-suburban Melburnian.

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore faced and evaded the same problem with their Pete and Dud.

Sometimes the cultural gap is too wide to make the trip worthwhile in the course of an evening’s entertainment.

As to Edna. Humphries’ genius is to convince us that her journey from Moonee Ponds housewife to monstrous international celebrityhood is possible, indeed natural.

Long ago Edna stopped representing anything about Moonee Pond, Melbourne, Australia, or even the normal world.

Instead, Edna pays visits to that world from a mythical world of celebrity. She is utterly convinced that she visits from a real place.

The deeply ironic element of the performance is that the audience have no way of disproving her claims, and don’t want to anyway.

And isn’t this the essence of being a celebrity?

When Barry last performed here, I sent him a letter complaining that he never did his other characters for us, especially Sandy Stone, noting how when I played tapes of Sandy for my friends, they were captivated by this amazing, moving yet funny creation, with it’s rage expressed through resigned sweetness. I asked him to trust America to get Sandy.

Barry sent me a lovely email back, saying he appreciated my interest in Sandy, and how he himself was very fond of the character. (He was engaged in writing the monolgue you reviewed at the time, as he mentioned in his email.)

Let us hope we get many more opportunities to debate whether Barry is still a relevant artist or not. I think he is.

And here’s something odd to contemplate: As Barry presents his version of Australia to the world, a vision often severely criticized as “Letting the side down” in his home country, he has raised both my awareness and my opinion of Australia. If Australia can turn out such a versitile genius, what a great place it must be.

I haven’t seen that much of Humphries’ broader career (heck, I wasn’t born for the first 20 years of it). However, completely absent any outside consideration, the Sandy Stone routine was one of the best pieces of theatre I’ve seen. Full stop.