The Barry Humphries Show

Barry Humphries (1934-2023) built his personas out of the ear before the eye. He listened to how Australians talked, collected the suburban idiom, the brand names, the genteel pretensions, and gave it all back heightened. The costumes came second. Each major character is a voice first.
Take Dame Edna Everage. The voice climbs through a single act. She opens warm, almost humble, the housewife from Moonee Ponds greeting her “possums,” and within minutes she ascends to the imperial. She addresses a paying crowd as adoring inferiors she pretends to cherish. The famous move is the insult folded inside the endearment. She tells a woman in the front row that her outfit is brave, asks about her marriage, her mortgage, her children’s failures, then assures her she means it all in a caring way. The diction borrows from royalty and celebrity, the vocabulary of a woman who has arrived, but the vowels keep the flat suburban sound of where she started. She never winks at the audience. The horror and the comedy both come from her sincerity. She believes she is gracious while she humiliates. The gladioli ritual at the close turns the room into her congregation, waving stalks on command.
Sir Les Patterson runs the opposite register. The voice is wet. He slurs through grog and phlegm, sprays the front rows, belches mid-sentence. His diction piles up innuendo, malapropism, the false bonhomie of a corrupt official who thinks himself a charmer. The food stains, the sweat, the bulging trousers, all of it serves a man sunk into appetite. Where Edna rises toward grandeur, Les drops into the body and the bottle. He plays the boorish male Australia once exported and later tried to live down, the cultural attaché who shames the culture he represents.
Sandy Stone slows everything. The voice flattens into reminiscence, soft and unhurried. He talks of Beryl, the hot water bottle, the routines of a home in Glen Iris, the small liturgy of a suburban life lived without event. The brand names and street names anchor him. Humphries often gave Sandy the position of a ghost, speaking from beyond his own death about the house he can no longer enter. Here the comedy gives way to tenderness and grief. Many think Humphries loved Sandy most of his creations, and the writing carries that affection.
Barry McKenzie, mostly a comic-strip and film figure, gave the crude colonial abroad. The diction there ran on rhyming slang and elaborate euphemism for drinking and vomiting and the toilet, the language of a young man loose in London with no manners and no shame.
Set them side by side and you see one man covering the full range of a national voice. The aspiring matron, the drunken hack, the gentle suburban ghost, the lout abroad. Humphries heard the way his countrymen spoke and turned it into four sharp portraits, each true to the ear, each a little crueler or kinder than life.