A Portrait of the Artist as Australian: L'Oeuvre bizarre de Barry Humphries

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

In this comprehensive study of Australian author, musician, painter, and
performer Barry Humphries, Paul Matthew St. Pierre, an associate
professor of English at Simon Fraser University, focuses on his
subject’s well-known stage persona, the cross-dressing Dame Edna
Everage. St. Pierre sets out to present Humphries “as a writer of
literature” by examining the impersonator’s music hall performances
and their reliance on Dadaism, by analyzing his literary contributions
to the bizarre, and by assessing his oeuvre and place in Australian
literature and literary history.

St. Pierre discusses Humphries as both an entertainer (in such roles as
Dame Edna, the Critic, the Snowy, the Surfie, Lionel Hunter, Rex Lear,
and Blind Wally) and the author of some 40 books. His incisive textual
examinations of scripts, songs, and passages are augmented with several
pages of notes and citations. The book’s 12 appendixes include an
essay titled “Barry Humphries: Clothes and the Man” and a lengthy
list of Humphries’s stage performances, sound recordings, film
appearances, television productions, art exhibitions, and a radio
interview. An extensive bibliography is also included.

St. Pierre’s revealing and meticulously researched book is
recommended for scholars, cultural historians, and serious analysts of
popular entertainment and literature.