The death of Barry Humphries is a watershed moment for Australian comedy. On one side is Humphries’ comic genius, on the other, a laughter-free zone, a sort of wasteland of political correctness devoid of humour and humanity. Comedy in the West has degenerated into a woke club – the Melbourne International Comedy Festival should be renamed the ‘Leonid Brezhnev Appreciation Society’. They certainly go to the same tailor as Brezhnev.

The former premier of the Soviet Union perfected the art of killing artistic freedom during his eighteen years as leader at the height of the Cold War. Indeed, the suppression of comedy in the West is straight out of the Brezhnev playbook. If Humphries’goal was to entertain, his detractors aim only to lecture, to deliver dreary homilies in the guise of ‘humour’.

Lucille Ball famously said, ‘I’m not funny. What I am is brave.’ Ball said this way back in the good old days of the 1950s, when free speech was not doled out so frugally in the West. As the saying goes, dying is easy, comedy is hard; no one knows this more than comedians in 2023. Ball was a regular on the Dean Martin televised celebrity roasts, a celebration of the most non-PC insults and sprays that could be directed at acting peers without getting punched. Goodness knows what Ball would say about being a comedian today.

Unlike Ball’s generation, today’s comedians don’t just face the dreaded audience silence when a joke bombs on stage, they dread a career-ending cancellation. It takes bravery to run the PC gauntlet and connect to real people. Humphries made us laugh, the first responsibility of any comedian, and for that was subjected to a Soviet-style de-personalisation by the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, the very comedy festival he created. His success made him dangerous. The lack of gratitude from the festival towards Humphries rivals that of J.K. Rowling’s treatment by those who benefitted from her artistic genius.

There is nothing new under the sun, and one wonders whether this generation of woke culture warriors understands how directly they play from the Soviets’ playbook, when it comes to controlling our culture. To control a culture is to suffocate it and drain it of life. Stalin knew this better than anyone – he was the original woke cancel culture warrior. Back then, they just called cancel culture what it is, artistic death.

Like the old Soviets, the new repression of comedy is based on fear. Fear that comedy will expose the truth, shine a light. ‘It is not with wrath we kill, but by laughter,’ Nietzsche famously said. Humphries possessed the power to make the public laugh at pomposity and the new thought police. As the man who had put Dame Edna on the international map, his accurate, even tepid criticism of the worst excesses of the woke movement had to be stopped. Humphries was powerful enough criticising gender ideology as himself, imagine if he had dared to criticise it in the guise of Edna?

The difference between the old and new oppressions is that the Soviets were at least honest about what they were doing. They didn’t dress up their oppression in social justice gibberish. The great Soviet-era satirists Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky were sent to a gulag in 1965 for ‘anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda carried on for the purpose of subverting or weakening of the Soviet regime…’ and ‘slanderous fabrications which defame the Soviet state’. Powerful language used to crush the power of laughter, and right to the point

To be a conservative in 2023 is not what it was back in the 1990s.Today small-c and big-C conservatives are the only ones standing up for free speech and the right to offend, the only group that is willing to fight both cultural and actual Marxism

I was surrounded by Dame Ednas growing up. Perhaps the difference between Barry and modern comedy is that the latter is all pursed lips and nothing funny. Humphries battled the cultural cringe factor of being an Aussie, something I was acutely aware of as a teenage girl. Back then, it seemed the rest of the world was, well, a world away. Crossing the equator in my teenage mind felt a bit like ‘going over’ the rainbow to a world of culture, art and politics. Much like the Hills hoist, Edna changed that, taking the suburban land of Oz internationally, all the way to the Queen. So good was Humphries at doing this, that when Edna did meet the Queen, it felt like Edna was in fact the royalty.

You can’t be a lucky country until you embrace who you truly are. Humphries didn’t treat suburbia with contempt, but with a loving emphasis on its Aussie ordinariness. Humphries celebrated a sort of ‘Aussie-hygge’ – or ‘comfortable conviviality’ – that we recognised and cherished. ‘Loving’ is the word one most associates with Edna, she was a tribute, not a mockery to women the world over. This wasn’t a sexist and demeaning satire of the likes Dave Chappelle has deemed ‘woman face’. Nor was it the overt objectification and ridicule of women Dylan Mulvaney has gotten down to a fine art in the recent Nike and Olay advertising campaigns. This was a celebration of the real, everyday women, the ones who were ‘run ragged’ in Aussie backyards; there was a bit of a feminist stance to Humphries in his refusal to let these women be left invisible. As a woman, I’m grateful to Humphries for elevating the ordinary to superstar status.

Humphries’s family of characters has gone, never to return, just when they are needed most. Humphries and his wonderful art will be sorely missed as the world descends into a Dark Age of comedy. All over the Western world comedians are afraid to lampoon pretension, pomposity and humbug in the face of a dangerous new puritanism of thought and expression, that loathes dissent, and is devoid of self-awareness.

When assessing what is left of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, we are best to take the advice of Groucho Marx when he famously said, ‘I sent the club a wire stating, PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON’T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT ME AS A MEMBER.’

Barry Humphries was a club of his own.