The Melbourne Comedy Festival’s continuing refusal to apologise for not closing this year’s festival with a tribute to its co-founder shows that whatever else it is guilty of, the organisation’s current management suffers from the same chronic insensitivity to public opinion to which Humphries was allegedly a martyr. Such, at least, was the opinion of Hannah Gadsby, one of the MCF’s most successful exports and a recipient of its top award – an honour she subsequently acknowledged with a tweet describing the man it was named after as ‘an irrelevant dick biscuit who has completely lost the ability to read the room’.  At time of writing, I don’t know whether the MCF’s board will read the room well enough to accede to demands to reinstate the Barry award, or to admit they were wrong to publicly distance themselves from Humphries four years ago after he made unsympathetic comments about transition surgery. But if the MCF is as left-leaning as every other Australian arts institution it will have the turning circle of the Manly ferry and the chances of it ever making any meaningful act of contrition are about the same as the odds of the Victorian government admitting it was wrong about lockdowns, or of James Cook University offering Peter Ridd his job back.

It would be unreasonable, though, to expect a retraction of any kind from Hannah Gadsby, whose contribution to the world of comedy, let’s not forget, is at least as great as Humphries’. When Australian surgeons were still struggling to meet the demand for abdominal sutures caused by the likes of Roy and H.G., Kath and Kim and, yes, Dame Edna and Sir Les, it was the meteoric success of Gadsby as much as anything which prompted us to question what we now know was a hopelessly binary definition of the word comedian as being someone who makes other people laugh. It is thanks to Gadsby and the generation of young performers she inspired, not to mention those elements of the media too frightened not to applaud, that we now know that funniness, like sexuality, is actually – and presumably has always been – a matter of spectrum. And that even though some people certainly are born funnier than others, and that some people are born not funny at all, the failure of the latter to say or do anything amusing for the first 15 or 20 years of their life should not disqualify them, in the absence of the skills or qualifications required to take up any other kind of work, from identifying as a comedian. It is incumbent on the less binary, more inclusive society we have become to acknowledge them as such, and it was Barry Humphries’s refusal to get with that program, and his quixotic dedication to the anachronistic business of simply making people laugh that made him ‘irrelevant’, a failing which was never more conspicuous than when he referred to the Gadsby oeuvre as being ‘as funny as an orphanage on fire’. The immediate and well documented fallout from that comment – the threat of industrial action by the United Firefighters Union of Australia and the boycotting of Humphries’ stage shows by millions of orphans around the world – shows just how out of touch the man really was. There will always be some Australians, of course, who persist in valuing the kind of comedy Barry Humphries gave us, and who will insist on his being memorialised in some way other than a few blue plaques in Moonee Ponds and Kensington. It cannot be a statue; we know what he felt about statues from the relief he expressed when a life-size replica of Dame Edna which had been installed without his permission in South Melbourne was removed some years ago. But I’m sure Ms Gadsby would have no objection if her extraordinary tweet inspires another great national institution to pay homage in a way which will keep his memory alive in his beloved Australian suburbia for many years to come: how long will it be, in other words, before your local supermarket takes its first delivery of Arnott’s Dick Biscuits? There is no urgency. The truth is that Barry Humphries left a body of work so enormous, so original and so achingly funny that there will never be any doubt about his greatness. The great Gadsby, on the other hand, will always look like a misprint.