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      The Cathartic Value of Dame Edna’s Extravaganzas of Ego

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      Audiences were eager to humbly suffer the stinging quips tossed out by the towering figure that was Barry Humphries’s creation.Listen to This ArticleShe was, lest we forget, the original Real Housewife. Or Surreal Housewife, if you prefer. Possessed of few obvious talents and a bottomless sense of entitlement, this expensively upholstered figure was the archetype for the ordinary middle-class matron who blossomed into improbable, overwhelming, gasp-inducing fame.Her name was Edna Everage (just one vowel away from “average”), and her advent in the mid-20th century anticipated a brash new age of undeserved celebrity. “Oh, my prophetic soul,” she might have said, contemplating the constellation of self-anointed stars who occupy our attention these days. The line comes from “Hamlet.” But Edna was the kind of gal who could convince you that she had coined it all by herself.Dame Edna, as she became known from the early 1970s, was the inspired alter-ego of the sui generis performer Barry Humphries, who died on Saturday in Sydney, Australia. Humphries was 89. Dame Edna, of course, is immortal.To become Edna, Humphries would put on a mauve wig, an increasingly rococo pair of eyeglasses and a glittering gown that screeched conspicuous consumption. Yet it would be a mistake to describe Dame Edna primarily as a drag act.This unfiltered, towering figure — who looked down on the world, in all senses, from a six-foot-plus linebacker’s frame atop stiletto heels — wasn’t a comment on gender. No, Dame Edna was all about blinkered, arrogant class and especially a breed of self-crowned royalty that had become our default deities in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.That would be those who were defined by being famous, whether or not for any discernible reason beyond their willingness to become so. The genius of Humphries’s conceit was to translate the small-minded, unyielding smugness of the middle-class Australian suburbs in which he grew up into the even more invincible complacency of outrageous, drop-dead stardom.As for the rest of us — and that meant, in addition to us peons, her fellow celebrity chums, including the pope and Queen Elizabeth II — we existed to serve as her mirrors, reflecting her own fabulousness.During my tenure as a Times theater critic, there were few events I anticipated more avidly than Dame Edna’s extravaganzas of ego, where I would join the throngs of those she called “possums” and “paupers” to worship at her boat-size feet. Like so many of the greatest comics, she surgically tapped into the ruling obsession of her time.What Lenny Bruce was to the sexual hangups of the late ’50s and early ’60s and what Richard Pryor was to the racial anxieties of the ’70s and ’80s, Dame Edna was to the age of Olympian narcissism. As she said, graciously tossing her signature gladioli into the audience as she was magically lifted into the air at the end of a 1999 performance: “I have to rise above you. It’s the secret of my survival.”Dame Edna in her 2010 show “All About Me” at what is now the Stephen Sondheim Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMy years of reviewing Edna were years when the most commercially successful shows on Broadway were often those that featured faces found on the covers of People, Vanity Fair and supermarket tabloids. Audiences clamored to see Nicole Kidman in “The Blue Room” or Julia Roberts in “Three Days of Rain” not so much to watch a play as to participate in a sacred pilgrimage to the shrines of NICOLE and JULIA.Attending a Dame Edna show thus had its own special cathartic value, rooted in the openly sadomasochistic exchange of energy between her and her audience. She took it for granted that we were there because she was of an unapproachably higher order than we were, a holy order. In a riff that led to a reference to Jesus, she backtracked to say of course she wouldn’t compare herself to him, before pausing to add, “Although there are spooky similarities.”Naturally we humbly suffered the stinging quips she tossed in our direction, collectively and individually. (Pity — and envy — the chosen few she selected for audience participation.) Never mind that when she sang and danced, she sounded like a bullfrog on steroids and moved like a drunken stevedore.She was protected by her impregnable certainty that whatever she did was utterly beyond reproach. Reviewing her 2004 Broadway show “Dame Edna: Back With a Vengeance!,” I wrote, “Dame Edna, you see, knows better than anyone that fame means never having to say you’re sorry.”That attitude is less likely to fly in 2023, when being famous seems to mean you’re apologizing all the time. And in writings and interviews in their later years, both Edna and Humphries stumbled with comments that drew outcries from members of the Latino and trans communities and others.So allow me to return to an earlier moment in this century, when Edna was at the peak of her invulnerability, and I received a letter after raving about one of her shows. “I have to say,” the note read, “I almost deserved it.” It was signed Barry Humphries. Had the signature been Edna Everage there would have been no “almost” about it.Audio produced by More

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      Richard Lewis, Diagnosed With Parkinson’s, Will Retire From Stand-Up Comedy

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      Mr. Lewis, whose roles include a long-running appearance on the HBO hit “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” said that he was diagnosed two years ago, and that he would continue to write and act.The comedian Richard Lewis is retiring from stand-up after having privately dealt with Parkinson’s disease, which he was diagnosed with two years ago, he said in a video posted on Twitter.Mr. Lewis, 75, said that he was diagnosed after he noticed stiffness in his walking and that he was shuffling his feet. Parkinson’s disease is an incurable disorder that affects the part of the brain that controls movement.“The last three and a half years, I’ve had sort of a rocky time, and people say, ‘You know, I haven’t heard from you, are you still touring?’” he said in a video post Sunday night to his nearly 240,000 Twitter followers. He described his diagnosis and said: “I’m finished with stand-up. I’m just focused on writing and acting.”pic.twitter.com/ngqm6TmC3x— Richard Lewis (@TheRichardLewis) April 24, 2023
      Mr. Lewis, who recently finished filming Season 12 of the HBO hit show “Curb Your Enthusiasm” with the comedian Larry David, said that he was lucky he did not get Parkinson’s disease until late in life and that the disease had progressed slowly, if at all.In addition to the Parkinson’s diagnosis, he has had four surgeries on his shoulder, back and hip in the past few years. “It was bad luck, but it’s life,” he said.Born in Brooklyn in 1947, Mr. Lewis started performing his own stand-up routines in 1971 at New York’s Improvisation and Pips, according to IMDB, the entertainment website. After appearing on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” in 1974, he had a four-year run on the hit ABC series “Anything but Love,” co-starring Jamie Lee Curtis. Comedy Central included Mr. Lewis in the top 50 of its list of the top 100 comedians of all time.Mr. Lewis has also had a number of film roles, including as Prince John in the 1993 adventure comedy film “Robin Hood: Men in Tights.” In his memoir, “The Other Great Depression,” he described his recovery from addiction and finding spirituality.Mr. Lewis, who has performed on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” since its debut in 2000, has known Mr. David since they met at summer camp at age 12, Mr. Lewis said in a 2010 interview with Howard Stern.“Hated him, never saw him again until I became a comic, became best friends,” he said. “When I became a comic, he loved my work, and I loved his work.” More

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      ‘Baby J’ Review: John Mulaney Punctures His Persona

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      In his highly anticipated new Netflix special, the comic changes his pace to deliver bristlingly funny material about addiction, rehab and what it means to be likable.In his new special, “Baby J,” we hear John Mulaney before we see him.“In the past couple years, I’ve done a lot of work on myself,” says one of the most distinctive voices in comedy, as a black screen transitions into an empty backdrop of a stage. “And I’ve realized that I’ll be fine as long as I get constant attention.”Then in a glamorous, swirling shot orchestrated by the theater director Alex Timbers, the camera gives the comic what he needs. It retreats to reveal Mulaney, 40, in a maroon suit, before circling to give us a picture of the commanding power of stardom. Shot from behind, we see his perspective: a hazy mass of people underneath chandeliers in between an ominous series of statues inside the Symphony Hall in Boston.It’s a striking image setting up a series of bristling comic vignettes that dig into Mulaney’s drug addiction, intervention by friends and stint in rehab. One is tempted to say this is his most personal work, but that isn’t quite right. That first shot tips us off to a theme: You can be invisible in front of a crowd. Mulaney’s comedy, however, has become spikier, pricklier, sometimes slower while remaining as funny as ever, like he’s a pitcher who learned to mix up speeds. He has performed versions of this material throughout the last two years, and this special arrives on Netflix so meticulously honed that the polish doesn’t even show.At some point in the last decade, John Mulaney stopped being merely a very successful comedian and transformed into something larger in the culture: the boyish sweetheart in a scene full of creeps, the wife guy who doesn’t need children to be happy, the aspirational theater kid. I didn’t grasp this shift until, in a short period of time, he checked into rehab, got a very public divorce, and had a child with the actress Olivia Munn. Judging by the reaction online, not to mention the texts on my phone, people had feelings about this — lots of them. Mulaney made the word “parasocial” go mainstream.For comics, being in the news like this can be tricky terrain, both a problem and an opportunity. “Likability is a jail,” Mulaney says at one point in “Baby J,” and his self-deprecating punch lines about his own vanity could be viewed as a prison break. He recalls that when he was young, he would feel jealousy toward the kid who had suddenly become the focus of his classmates’ sympathies when his grandfather died. “Did you ever, like me, hope …” he says, abruptly pausing his cadence to let the audience anticipate his embarrassing thoughts about the possible benefits of the death of grandparents.Mulaney has always spoken at a rapid if precise clip, heavily influenced by Spalding Gray, the pioneering confessional monologuist. (“If story rhythms were legally protected like song hooks, I would be in prison,” Mulaney once tweeted about Gray.) Mulaney’s rat-a-tat-tat delivery demanded you keep up with his thought process. It still does, but his cadence has become more intricate, and the biggest laughs in this new special come from making the audience think they are ahead of him, placing an idea in their head, then slowing down to a pause or stammer to let it percolate.This tactic requires patience and deft timing but can produce an intense response, the comedy equivalent of letting you hear the scratching under the bed while postponing the reveal of the monster long enough to let your imagination run amok.Some of Mulaney’s biggest laughs in “Baby J” come from making the audience think they are ahead of him, placing an idea in their head, then slowing down to a pause or stammer to let it percolate.Marcus Russell Price/NetflixThe stories he tells here present a desperate man, including one about a very sketchy doctor who gives him prescription drugs in exchange for some low-level deception and the removal of his shirt. Mulaney has such a chipper affect that he can put across grim material without weighing the show down, a superpower these days when ambitious comics are often expected to do more than tell jokes.His description of his intervention is a comic highlight, with act-outs of Nick Kroll and Fred Armisen. He’s hilariously flattered by the intervention’s star-studded attendance, “a ‘We Are the World’ of alternative comedians over the age of 40.” And when the woman running it says that she heard he was nice, he corrects her: “Don’t trust the persona.”The funniest part of the special, which at over an hour and 20 minutes is longer than most released by Netflix these days, is an elaborate description of a text he got in rehab from Pete Davidson that a nurse woke up him to read. “Some people suggested we did drugs together because he has tattoos and I am plain,” Mulaney says, a gentle poke at the shallowness of the media and public.This story takes off when we learn that Mulaney had put Davidson’s number in his phone under the name Al Pacino, which gives Mulaney a chance to perform the scene a second time from the nurse’s perspective, including an amazing impersonation of late-era Pacino. I can’t do this justice, except to say that the phrase “daddy khaki pants” made me laugh out loud.Silliness has long been central to Mulaney’s humor, and part of it comes from the incongruity of his seeming either younger than his age or much older (he favors archaic words like “nay” instead of “no”). The titles of his specials tell a Benjamin Button story: “New in Town,” followed by “The Comeback Kid” and “Kid Gorgeous,” followed by “Baby J.” The way it’s going, “Fetal Position” could be next.This is a highly anticipated special, and the modern stand-up event tends to be about something more messy than jokes. When Jerrod Carmichael came out of the closet, he ended his special abruptly, with loose ends; Chris Rock flashed raw emotion in his vengeful response to being slapped by Will Smith. Mulaney remains a tightly controlled performer. His special mostly avoids his divorce and new child, focusing instead on his drug addiction.That story has a happy ending, with him going to rehab and emerging not only sober, but also no longer needing the approval of others. It’s a dramatic, abrupt evolution. “What is someone going to do to me that’s worse than what I would do to myself?” he asks, hinting at his own self-destructive tendencies. “What, are you going to cancel John Mulaney? I’ll kill him.”That’s not the Mulaney his fans thought they knew. But it’s worth noting that if you revisit his first special from 2012, you’ll find a story about lying to a doctor to get drugs (Xanax in that case) as well as a confession that he had a drinking problem that started when he was 13 that he had since kicked.How much has changed with him is something we can never truly know. But we, the audience, can be naïve about our entertainers. We assume we understand them, and when they do something at odds with their persona, we feel betrayed, even angry. Yet no one ever asks us to take accountability for getting it wrong. You would think by now we would approach show business with a little more skepticism. But the truth is that we don’t want to, and great performers intuitively understand that. They’re gifted at creating intimacy with the viewer, at making us believe.John Mulaney appears to have become, as many veteran comics do, more cynical about this relationship, and speaks to it after relating an anecdote that makes him look bad. “As you process and digest how obnoxious, wasteful and unlikable that story is, just remember,” he says, eyes glassy, “that’s one I’m willing to tell you.”This suggests he has done even more unlikable things, but also that whatever you might think, you don’t really know him. An artist who respects his audience less would state this directly. John Mulaney lets the mind wander. More

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      Barry Humphries, a.k.a. Dame Edna, Is Dead at 89

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      Bewigged, bejeweled and bejowled, Mr. Humphries’s creation was one of the longest-lived characters ever channeled by a single performer.Oh, Possums, Dame Edna is no more.To be unflinchingly precise, Barry Humphries, the Australian-born actor and comic who for almost seven decades brought that divine doyenne of divadom, Dame Edna Everage, to delirious, dotty, disdainful Dadaist life, died on Saturday in Sydney. He was 89.His death was confirmed by the hospital where he had spent several days after undergoing hip surgery. In a tribute message posted on Twitter, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia praised Mr. Humphries as “a great wit, satirist, writer and an absolute one-of-kind.”A stiletto-heeled, stiletto-tongued persona who might well have been the spawn of a ménage à quatre involving Oscar Wilde, Salvador Dalí, Auntie Mame and Miss Piggy, Dame Edna was not so much a character as a cultural phenomenon, a force of nature trafficking in wicked, sequined commentary on the nature of fame.For generations after the day she first sprang to life on the Melbourne stage, Dame Edna reigned, bewigged, bejeweled and bejowled, one of the longest-lived characters to be channeled by a single performer. She toured worldwide in a series of solo stage shows and was ubiquitous on television in the United States, Britain, Australia and elsewhere.A master improviser (many of Dame Edna’s most stinging barbs were ad-libbed) with a face like taffy, Mr. Humphries was widely esteemed as one of the world’s foremost theatrical clowns.“I’ve only seen one man have power over an audience like that,” the theater critic John Lahr told him, after watching Dame Edna night after night in London. “My father.” Mr. Lahr’s father was the great stage and cinematic clown Bert Lahr.Mr. Humphries conceived Edna in 1955 as Mrs. Norm Everage, typical Australian housewife. “Everage,” after all, is Australian for “average.”Housewife, Superstar, National TreasureBut Edna soon became a case study in exorbitant amour propre, lampooning suburban pretensions, political correctness and the cult of celebrity, and acquiring a damehood along the way. A “housewife-superstar,” she called herself, upgrading the title in later years to “megastar” and, still later, to “gigastar.”Mr. Humphries, wearing a hat in the shape of the Sydney Opera House, in 1976.Wesley/Getty ImagesIn Britain, where Mr. Humphries had long made his home, Dame Edna was considered a national treasure, a paragon of performance art long before the term was coined.In the United States, she starred in a three-episode series, “Dame Edna’s Hollywood,” a mock celebrity talk show broadcast on NBC in the early 1990s, and was a frequent guest on actual talk shows.She performed several times on Broadway, winning Mr. Humphries a special Tony Award, as well as Drama Desk and Theater World Awards, for “Dame Edna: The Royal Tour,” his 1999 one-person show.In her stage and TV shows, written largely by Mr. Humphries, Dame Edna typically made her entrance tottering down a grand staircase (Mr. Humphries was more than six feet tall) in a tsunami of sequins, her hair a bouffant violet cloud (she was “a natural wisteria,” she liked to say), her evening gown slit to the thigh to reveal Mr. Humphries’s surprisingly good legs, her body awash in jewels, her eyes agape behind sprawling rhinestone glasses (“face furniture,” she called them).Addressing the audience, she delivered her signature greeting, “Hellooooo, Possums!”By turns tender and astringent, Dame Edna called audience members “possums” often. She also called them other things, as when, leaning across the footlights, she would address a woman in the front row in a confiding, carrying voice: “I know, dear. I used to make my own clothes, too.”Mr. Humphries with the English actress Joan Plowright at the Lyric Theater in London.Evening Standard/Getty ImagesPerformances concluded with Dame Edna flinging hundreds of gladioli into the crowd, no mean feat aerodynamically. “Wave your gladdies, Possums!” she exhorted audience members who caught them, and the evening would end, to music, with a mass valedictory swaying.Between the “Hellooooo” and the gladdies, Dame Edna’s audiences were treated to a confessional monologue deliciously akin to finding oneself stranded in a hall of vanity mirrors.There was commentary on her husband and children (“I made a decision: I put my family last”); her beauty regimen (“Good self-esteem is very important. I look in the mirror and say, ‘Edna, you are gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous’”); and the constellation of luminaries who routinely sought her counsel, among them Queen Elizabeth II and her family. (“I’ve had to change my telephone number several times to stop them ringing me.”)Dame Edna’s TV shows were often graced by actual celebrity guests, including Zsa Zsa Gabor, Charlton Heston, Sean Connery, Robin Williams and Lauren Bacall.They came in for no less of a drubbing than the audience did, starting with the inaugural affront, the affixing of immense name tags to their lapels — for eclipsed by the light of gigastardom so close at hand, who among us would not be reduced to anonymity?“Chuck,” Mr. Heston’s name tag read. Ms. Gabor received two: a “Zsa” for the right shoulder and a “Zsa” for the left.A few pleasantries were exchanged before Dame Edna moved in for the kill.Mr. Humphries as Dame Edna in 1978. She referred to him as “my manager” and accused him of embezzling her fortune.John Minihan/Evening Standard, via Getty ImagesMr. Humphries as himself in 1978. He always spoke of Dame Edna in the third person.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“You’ve had nine hits this year,” she purred fawningly at the singer-songwriter Michael Bolton on one of her British TV shows. “On your website.”Turning to the audience after delivering a particularly poisonous insult, she would ooze, “I mean that in the most caring way.”Those guests who emerged relatively unscathed had the savvy to take Dame Edna at face value and interact with her as though she were real. The moment he donned those rhinestone glasses, Mr. Humphries often said, Dame Edna became real to him too, an entirely separate law unto herself.‘I Wish I’d Thought of That’“I’m, as it were, in the wings, and she’s onstage,” he explained in a 2015 interview with Australian television. “And every now and then she says something extremely funny, and I stand there and think, ‘I wish I’d thought of that.’”But the truly funny thing, Possums, is that when Mr. Humphries first brought Dame Edna to life, he intended her to last only a week or so. What was more, she was meant to have been played by the distinguished actress Zoe Caldwell.Mr. Humphries created a string of other characters over the years, notably the boorish, bibulous Australian cultural attaché Sir Les Patterson. But it was Dame Edna, the outlandish aunt who engenders adoration and mortification in equal measure, who captivated the public utterly — despite the fact that in later years, her mortification-inducing lines sometimes landed her, and her creator, in trouble.So fully did Mr. Humphries animate Edna that he was at continued pains to point out that he was neither a female impersonator in the conventional sense nor a cross-dresser in any sense.“Mr. Humphries, do you ever have to take your children aside and explain to them why you like to wear women’s clothes?,” an American interviewer once asked him.“If I were an actor playing Hamlet,” he replied, “would I have to take my children aside and say I wasn’t really Danish?’”By all accounts far more erudite than Dame Edna — he was an accomplished painter, bibliophile and art collector — Mr. Humphries, in a sustained act of self-protection, always spoke of her in the third person.She did likewise. “My manager,” she disdainfully called him. (She also called Mr. Humphries “a money-grubbing little slug” and accused him of embezzling her fortune. He did, it must be said, cash a great many of her checks.)But as dismissive of her creator as Dame Edna was, she rallied to his aid when he very likely needed her most: after years of alcoholism culminated in stays in psychiatric hospitals and at least one brush with the law.Mr. Humphries at the Booth Theater on Broadway in 1999 in “Dame Edna: The Royal Tour,” for which he won a special Tony Award, as well as Drama Desk and Theater World Awards.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘I Hated Her’John Barry Humphries was born in Kew, a Melbourne suburb, on Feb. 17, 1934. His father, Eric, was a prosperous builder; his mother, Louisa, was a homemaker.From his earliest childhood in Camberwell, a more exclusive suburb, he felt oppressed by the bourgeois conformism that enveloped his parents and their circle, and depressed by his mother’s cold suburban propriety.Dame Edna was a response to those forces.“I invented Edna because I hated her,” Mr. Humphries was quoted as saying in Mr. Lahr’s book “Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western Civilization: Backstage With Barry Humphries” (1992). “I poured out my hatred of the standards of the little people of their generation.”Dame Edna emerged when the young Mr. Humphries, under the sway of Dadaism, was performing with a repertory company based at the University of Melbourne; he had dropped out of the university two years before.On long bus tours, he entertained his colleagues with the character of Mrs. Norm Everage — born Edna May Beazley in Wagga Wagga, Australia, sometime in the 1930s — an ordinary housewife who had found sudden acclaim after winning a nationwide competition, the Lovely Mother Quest.Unthinkable as it seems, Edna was dowdy then, given to mousy brown hair and pillbox hats. But she was already in full command of the arsenal of bourgeois bigotries that would be a hallmark of her later self.For a revue by the company in December 1955, Mr. Humphries wrote a part for Edna, earmarked for Ms. Caldwell, an Australian contemporary. But when she proved too busy to oblige, he donned a dress and played it himself. After Edna proved a hit with Melbourne audiences, he performed the character elsewhere in the country.By the end of the 1950s, hoping to make a career as a serious actor, Mr. Humphries had moved to London, where Edna met with little enthusiasm and was largely shelved. (She blamed Mr. Humphries ever after for her lack of early success there.)Mr. Humphries played Mr. Sowerberry, the undertaker, in the original West End production of the musical “Oliver!” in 1960, and reprised the role when the show came to Broadway in 1963.But though he worked steadily during the ’60s, he was also in the fierce grip of alcoholism. Stays in psychiatric hospitals, he later said, were of no avail.His nadir came in 1970, when he awoke in a Melbourne gutter to find himself under arrest.With a doctor’s help, Mr. Humphries became sober soon afterward; he did not take a drink for the rest of his life. He dusted off Dame Edna and, little by little, de-dowdified her. By the late ’70s, with celebrity culture in full throttle, she had given him international renown and unremitting employment.Edna did not seduce every critic. Reviewing her first New York stage show, the Off Broadway production “Housewife! Superstar!!,” in The New York Times in 1977, Richard Eder called it “abysmal.”Nor did Edna’s resolute lack of political correctness always stand her, or Mr. Humphries, in good stead. In February 2003, writing an advice column as Dame Edna in Vanity Fair, he replied to a reader’s query about whether to learn Spanish.“Who speaks it that you are really desperate to talk to?” Dame Edna’s characteristically caustic response read. “The help? Your leaf blower? Study French or German, where there are at least a few books worth reading, or, if you’re American, try English.”A public furor ensued, led by the Mexican-born actress Salma Hayek, who appeared on the magazine’s cover that month. Vanity Fair discontinued Dame Edna’s column not long afterward.In an interview with The Times in 2004, Mr. Humphries was unrepentant.“The people I offended were minorities with no sense of humor, I fear,” he said. “When you have to explain the nature of satire to somebody, you’re fighting a losing battle.”Mr. Humphries drew further ire after a 2016 interview with the British newspaper The Telegraph in which he denounced political correctness as a “new puritanism.” In the same interview, he described males who transition to female as “mutilated” men, and Caitlyn Jenner in particular as “a publicity-seeking ratbag.”Sailing Above the FrayDame Edna, for her part, appeared to sail imperviously through. She returned to Broadway in 2004 for the well-received show “Dame Edna: Back With a Vengeance” and in 2010 with “All About Me,” a revue that also starred the singer and pianist Michael Feinstein.Mr. Humphries was back on Broadway as Dame Edna in 2010 with “All About Me,” a revue that also starred the singer and pianist Michael Feinstein.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs herself — it was she, and not Mr. Humphries, who was credited — Dame Edna played the recurring character Claire Otoms (the name is an anagram for “a sitcom role”), an outré lawyer, on the Fox TV series “Ally McBeal.”Under his own name, Mr. Humphries appeared as the Great Goblin in “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” (2012); as the voice of Bruce, the great white shark, in “Finding Nemo” (2003); and in other pictures.Mr. Humphries’s books include the memoirs “More Please” (1992) and “My Life as Me” (2002) and the novel “Women in the Background” (1995). He was named a Commander of the British Empire in 2007.Dame Edna also wrote several books, among them “Dame Edna’s Bedside Companion” (1983) and the memoir “My Gorgeous Life” (1989).Mr. Humphries’s first marriage, to Brenda Wright, ended in divorce, as did his second, to Rosalind Tong, and his third, to Diane Millstead. He had two daughters, Tessa and Emily, from his marriage to Ms. Tong, and two sons, Oscar and Rupert, from his marriage to Ms. Millstead.The Sydney Morning Herald reported that his survivors include his wife of 30 years, Lizzie Spender, the daughter of the British poet Stephen Spender, as well as his children and 10 grandchildren.Mr. Humphries had returned to Australia late last year for Christmas.Dame Edna’s husband, Norm, a chronic invalid “whose prostate,” she often lamented, “has been hanging over me for years,” died long ago. Her survivors include an adored son, Kenny, who designed all her gowns; a less adored son, Bruce; and a despised daughter, the wayward Valmai. (“She steals things. Puts them in her pantyhose. Particularly frozen chickens when she’s in a supermarket.”)Another daughter, Lois, was abducted as an infant by a “rogue koala,” a subject Dame Edna could bring herself to discuss with interviewers only rarely.Though the child was never seen again, to the end of her life Dame Edna never gave up hope she would be found.“I’m looking,” she told NPR in 2015. “Every time I pass a eucalyptus tree I look up.”Constant Meheut contributed reporting. More

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      ‘Saturday Night Live’: Ana de Armas and the First Warm Day of the Year

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      The “Blonde” star was the host and Karol G was the musical guest on an episode that was light on topical moments.Well, you can’t open “Saturday Night Live” every time with a sketch about the indictment of former President Donald Trump. Following a week with few significant news developments in that case, and rather than pivoting to, say, President Biden’s trip to Ireland, “S.N.L.” took a break from topical satire to instead seek comedy in the weather.This installment of “S.N.L.,” hosted by Ana de Armas (“Blonde”) and featuring the musical guest Karol G, kicked off with a would-be red-carpet segment called “The First Warm Day of the Year Arrivals Show.” As a co-host played by Heidi Gardner explained, high temperatures hit New York several weeks ahead of schedule. “And while that may be terrifying on a climate level,” she said, “the warm weather can only mean one thing: all the freaks, crazies and weirdos are headed to Central Park.”Enter a progression of cast members playing single-serving characters, including Mikey Day as Older Man Doing an Aggressive Power Walk, Michael Longfellow and James Austin Johnson as Two Perverts Who Came to the Park to Pleasure Themselves, and Devon Walker and Punkie Johnson as a pair of Park Employees Who Do Not Care About Their Jobs. Asked how she would handle people who aren’t obeying the rules, Johnson bestowed the park with an unofficial motto: “You do you,” she said.Opening Monologue of the WeekDe Armas, who was born and raised in Cuba, became the latest “S.N.L.” host to perform a portion of her monologue in Spanish. After stepping onto the stage of Studio 8H, she told the audience, in Spanish, that she’d had an incredible year and was happy to be on the show, adding: “Just kidding. I speak English.” (She also explained that she’d learned English “the way everyone who comes to this country does, by watching ‘Friends.’”)De Armas follows other recent “S.N.L.” hosts whose monologues included brief bilingual portions, including Anya Taylor-Joy (who concluded her opening remarks and welcomed her musical guest, Lil Nas X, in Spanish) and Pedro Pascal (who offered love to his family members in Chile and asked them to stop giving out his phone number). Later on Weekend Update, Sarah Sherman referenced de Armas’s remarks, playing a meditation guru who joked that the anchor Colin Jost would end up in his dressing room after the show, “still fuming about the bilingual monologue.”De Armas’s linguistic skills were also put to use in a sketch where she, Marcello Hernández and Karol G ran rings around a mediocre high-school Spanish teacher, played by Day. (If you’re unclear why Karol G wore a T-shirt opposing Photoshop, it was probably a reference to the singer’s dispute with GQ magazine, whose Mexican edition published a cover photo of her that she said had been heavily edited and did not represent her.)Fake Movie Trailer of the WeekIf a brightly colored “Barbie” movie, co-written and directed by Greta Gerwig and stocked with an all-star cast, can become one of the summer’s hottest box-office prospects and an endless source of internet memes, well, why not a film that brings the world of American Girl dolls to life? This segment quickly makes clear why: it would be depressing as hell. While cheerful pop music plays in the background, we meet eerily chipper dolls like Samantha (Chloe Fineman), an orphan whose parents died in a boating accident, and Addy (Ego Nwodim), a runaway slave. Don’t get too attached to Kirsten (Gardner), who says she wants to end cholera and then coughs blood into a handkerchief.Weekend Update Jokes of the WeekOver at the Weekend Update desk, the anchors Jost and Michael Che riffed on the leak of American intelligence documents by a 21-year-old National Guard airman.Jost began:The person who allegedly leaked classified Pentagon documents on social media has been identified as Jack Teixeira, who is a Massachusetts Air National Guardsman, I assume in a school play. Teixeira shared the document in a private social media group that members say started as a place where young men could play war-themed video games, bond over their love of guns and post racist memes. And now it’s ruined. It was revealed that just before his arrest, Teixeira contacted the members of his group and said, “Guys, it’s been good — I love you all.” And of course, his friends all replied, “Gay.”Che continued:The online group Teixeira started was named Thug Shaker Central. Thug Shaker Central is also what Colin calls Atlanta. President Biden is trying to downplay the recent leak of classified U.S. documents that were posted on social media. Because when you’re over 80, a couple of leaks is nothing to be embarrassed about.Weekend Update Desk Segment of the WeekMolly Kearney, the first openly nonbinary cast member on “S.N.L.,” used a desk appearance on Weekend Update to comment on a recent wave of anti-transgender bills — as well as the harness that uncomfortably delivered Kearney to the stage, providing a useful metaphor throughout this commentary. “I tried to call down but no one could hear me,” Kearney said. “At one point I heard a crew guy say, ‘Is she going to die up there?’ And then another guy was like, ‘You mean, are they going to die up there?’ And then they walked away and didn’t help — which feels a lot like how trans people are being treated right now.” More

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      in Television

      Sherri Shepherd Skates Through Life

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      The talk-show host gives shout-outs to her favorite comfort food in Harlem, New York’s tough comedy crowds and the actor she believes “got greater later.”Sherri Shepherd has a knack for making her dreams come true.The one about being a stand-up comic? Check. (Her “Two Funny Mamas” tour with Kym Whitley kicks off in May.) An actor? Check. (Remember the “Queen of Jordan” episodes on “30 Rock”?)How about her fantasy, starting when she was a kid interviewing her teddy bears, to be a talk-show host? That’s a big check with “Sherri,” her syndicated daytime hit. It premiered in September and by January had been renewed for two more seasons.“I love coming out, sitting in that chair, because I got to do it when I was on ‘The View,’” said Shepherd, 55, who co-hosted that long-running talk show from 2007 to 2014. “And I love my family on ‘The View,’ but you have to share audio space with four other women at the table. So this one I get to come out and be as silly as I want to.”In a video interview from Harlem, where she lives with her teenage son Jeffrey, Shepherd chatted about a few other things that excite her, like a loud game of spades, Sylvester Stallone in “Tulsa King” and roller-skating wherever she can. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Katz’s DelicatessenIt’s unorganized chaos, but everything gets done. They have the best pastrami sandwiches. The sucker is about 10 feet tall so you get your money’s worth because it’s $200, practically. You will walk in and there is a crowd of people and if you’ve never been to Katz’s Deli, you’re freaking out, going, “Where am I supposed to stand?” But once they see you’re lost and have no clue about life, somebody from Staten Island will go, “What are you doing? Come on over here.”2Melba’s RestaurantMelba’s is the go-to place for comfort food — like a warm, fuzzy blanket. Ninety-nine percent of the time Melba’s there, and she’s got these big chocolate eyes and she hugs you and she comes to your table. During the summertime, you sit outside and eat, and inside you’ll have a really great R&B or jazz band. So I don’t even leave Harlem when people come to New York. I go, “Meet me uptown.”3‘Tulsa King’It is the perfect role for Sylvester Stallone. He plays this old Mafioso who’s done 25 years in prison and he gets out and the world has completely changed on him. And instead of getting this really great position because he didn’t snitch on any of the family, they send him to Tulsa, Okla. He just plays it so beautifully. I feel like it got greater later for Sly.4SpadesEven if you don’t know how to play the game, you’ve got to talk like you know. You have to be loud. You have to slap cards on the table. And you have to be a real sore loser. It’s all about betting how many wins you will get. If you don’t get close to those wins, you’ve got to literally go off on your partner. At the end of the day, you’re all friends. While you’re playing? Mmm-mmm.5New York Comedy ClubsAt Gotham’s or the Cellar, it’s people who want to hear you be funny and be truthful and be transparent. When you try to do the Hollywood stuff, it just doesn’t work. I had to follow Gina Yashere from “Bob Hearts Abishola.” She’s an amazing comic, and she was very New York-style. And I thought, “Oh please, I go up in L.A. at the Comedy Store all the time.” Well, I tell you, I bombed like crazy. I had to go back, sit down, reassess and go, “Sherri, you’ve got to get more honest.” Went up there the next night — killed it. I think New York crowds can see through all of the bull.6Roller SkatingI’m not one of those roller skaters that do all of the tricks and turning. But there’s something about going around in a rink, or if I’m at a great beach where I can roller skate, with the air hitting my face. I love that feeling of coasting. It’s very cathartic for me. Before I leave my studio, I skate around because they push everything out of the way. I’ll sneak my skates and hope they don’t have me on camera.7Gregory PorterHe’s a jazz artist, and he wears a black hat with a black scarf around his face. He used to be a football player. He is a big, hulking, over-six-foot-tall Black man, and the most beautiful gentle music comes from him. I was dating somebody who was like a thug gangster, and this was a person who you would think all he listened to is rap. But he introduced me to jazz, and it was Gregory Porter.8The Blue NoteLalah Hathaway invited me to the Blue Note, and a gentleman by the name of Robert Glasper, who just won a Grammy, was playing. And he packed it. It was just amazing to see all of these people who had an appreciation for really great music. The jazz crowd is like a comedy-club crowd. They sit back and they listen.9Oprah DailyI love that she has used her platform to continue beyond her show and still gives you tips on how to live your best life. I used to journal, and I don’t too much anymore. And Oprah said on Oprah Daily, “You really should be journaling.” So I pulled out and dusted off my journal, and I started writing some more.10Dunlevy Milbank Community CenterThis is a center in Harlem, and they are really into kids that come from a lower income and teaching them life, especially the young men. They have basketball coaches there, they have swim teachers, they have teachers for after-school tutoring. This center is very close to my heart because Jeffrey goes after school at 3 p.m. and I don’t see him till 7:30. They have a leadership class for young men that he goes to. I was a little skeptical, but they said, “We guarantee you: Let Jeffrey go here for two weeks, and he is not going to want to come home.” And that is so true. Literally at 7:30, I’m texting him, going, “Get your butt in that Uber and spend some time with your mother.” More

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      in Theater

      Alex Edelman, ‘Just for Us’ Comedian, Will Bring Show to Broadway

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      The solo performance will open on June 26 at the Hudson Theater.Alex Edelman, a comedian who grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home and turned the antisemitism of his online critics into material for his monologues, will bring his much-admired memoiristic show, “Just for Us,” to Broadway this summer.For the past five years, Edelman, 34, has been developing “Just for Us” and, with breaks forced by the pandemic, has performed it in Australia, England, Scotland and Canada, as well as in New York, Washington and, beginning next week, Boston, near where he grew up. The show’s sold-out Off Broadway runs, which started at the Cherry Lane Theater in 2021 and moved last year to the SoHo Playhouse and then the Greenwich House Theater, won a special citation this year at the Obie Awards.The one-man show covers a lot of thematic territory, but it is built around Edelman’s seemingly unlikely (and perhaps unwise) decision to drop in on a meeting of white nationalists gathered in Queens.“The show is about the costs of sublimating parts of ourselves to fit in,” Edelman said in an interview.The Broadway run, scheduled to last for eight weeks, will begin performances on June 22 and open on June 26 at Hudson Theater. The lead producer, Jenny Gersten, is the interim artistic director of the Williamstown Theater Festival, in Massachusetts, which presented Edelman’s show last summer in the Berkshires. This will be Gersten’s first Broadway outing as a lead producer; she will produce it along with Rachel Sussman (“Suffs”) and Seaview, the theater company established by Greg Nobile and Jana Shea. (Seaview is also producing this season’s “Parade” and “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.”)Edelman said he had repeatedly reworked the show, primarily at the advice of the comedian Mike Birbiglia, who has had two of his one-man shows on Broadway; Birbiglia produced the Off Broadway runs of Edelman’s show and will help produce the Broadway run as well. The show is directed by Adam Brace, who is an associate director at Soho Theater in London.Edelman splits his time between New York and Los Angeles, where he has done some screenwriting — he worked on an adaptation of the novel “My Name Is Asher Lev” that has stalled — and said he continues to tweak “Just for Us.” A variety of prominent comedians have come to see the show, including Jerry Seinfeld and Billy Crystal, and each time, Edelman has made a point of asking for advice.“Part of the reason you can live with a show for a long time is if you’re meticulous, little changes feel like big changes — one word can change a whole joke,” Edelman said.He is obviously jubilant about the Broadway transfer — he visited the Hudson, where Jessica Chastain and Arian Moayed, who are now starring there in a revival of “A Doll’s House,” showed him around.“I never thought I’d get to do a show on Broadway, and I genuinely can’t believe that I have this chance,” he said. “It feels a bit like fantasy camp.” More

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      in Theater

      ‘Thanksgiving Play’ by Larissa FastHorse Comes to Broadway

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      As Larissa FastHorse worked with the Broadway cast of “The Thanksgiving Play,” which centers on four white people trying to put on a “culturally sensitive” holiday production, one of the actors, Katie Finneran, spoke up in a rehearsal with a suggestion: Perhaps she could drop a swear word during one of her more exasperated lines?“I’m the drama teacher!” Finneran’s character exclaims as her plan to make a socially progressive elementary school play begins to fall apart.FastHorse politely declined. From the work’s conception in 2015, she had intended it to be curse-free, in the hopes of finally having a widely produced play. Her other work — including the play “What Would Crazy Horse Do?” — involved Native American characters, leading producers to call them “uncastable.”So, FastHorse wrote one with white characters, while still focusing on contemporary Indigenous issues. If the play were littered with profanity, FastHorse decided, some theater producers or audiences might reject it.Larissa FastHorse instructs children dressed as turkeys on their choreography for the films, which were made at a school in Brooklyn. In the play, the films are shown between scenes.Justin J Wee for The New York Times“Being from the Midwest, there are people who won’t go to a play with swearing,” said FastHorse, who grew up in South Dakota. “And those are some of the people I want to reach.”Her gambit worked. After “The Thanksgiving Play” had its Off Broadway debut in 2018, it became one of the most produced plays in America, as it found homes at universities, community theaters and regional groups. In 2021, a streamed version starred Keanu Reeves, Bobby Cannavale, Alia Shawkat and Heidi Schreck as the quartet of bumbling thespians. FastHorse has even heard from people who have read the play aloud on Thanksgiving with their families, turning the activity into a yearly tradition.Now, “The Thanksgiving Play” has made it to Broadway, where it is in previews and is set to open on April 20 at the Helen Hayes Theater. This production, directed by Rachel Chavkin, includes a multimedia element not seen in the Off Broadway version: a series of filmed scenes, featuring children who act out cutesy Thanksgiving pageantry — think feathers and pilgrim attire — while also giving voice to some of the casual brutality with which white American culture has long portrayed Native Americans.In one of the films, older children dressed as pilgrims pretend to shoot down younger children dressed as turkeys. (Lux Haac designed the costumes.) The adults instructed the turkeys to “take a nap” when it was their turn to fall.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesFastHorse, a member of the Sicangu Lakota Nation, will be among the first Native American artists to have their work on Broadway. It’s the kind of achievement that the theater world likes to applaud, while perhaps also cringing at the fact that it has taken this long.The play’s skewering of the performative progressivism of the white theater world adds another layer. Its central characters tie themselves in knots trying to stage a play for Native American Heritage Month without actually including any Native Americans. They fret over fulfilling the requirements of a grant, sweat over gender stereotypes, debate the merits of colorblind casting and employ terminology like “white allies” and “emotional space.” To make this production even more of the moment, FastHorse added an exchange about pronoun sharing and references to the “post-B.L.M.” world.“Even though it does openly poke fun at a lot of the folks that I work with who are more on the liberal side,” FastHorse said, “I was really trying to make it so everybody can kind of see each other.”The play’s avatar for the more conservative audience members is a newcomer named Alicia (played by D’Arcy Carden), a hired actress who is unfamiliar with the language of social progressivism.What distinguishes Alicia is a complete lack of concern about so-called political correctness. The others are eager to prove themselves as “enlightened white allies,” including the loudly vegan drama teacher (Finneran), her yoga-loving boyfriend (Scott Foley) and a know-it-all history teacher (Chris Sullivan) who likes to preface his insights with, “Actually …”Rachel Chavkin, the director of the Broadway production, with some of her young actors ahead of filming. Chavkin envisioned this video as embodying the “colonialist narrative” that many American students are taught.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesOn Broadway, as in many industries, the anxiety around screwing up was magnified three years ago, after the murder of George Floyd prompted a wider reflection on racism and inequity in myriad industries and fields. In the theater world, that re-evaluation led to the publication of “We See You, White American Theater,” a document calling for an elevation of works by playwrights of color and more people of color in leadership positions, among other demands.So when FastHorse asked Chavkin, the Tony-winning director of “Hadestown,” to oversee the Broadway run of “The Thanksgiving Play,” Chavkin first wanted to make sure that the playwright wouldn’t prefer a person of color to direct.FastHorse said she wanted someone on the creative team — otherwise made up of people of color — who understood what it was like to be a “well-meaning liberal white person.” In other words, someone who has felt the urge to say all the right things and appear as progressive as possible.“She said, ‘I need your expertise,’” Chavkin recalled.FASTHORSE, 51, has had a winding path to Broadway. She started out as a professional ballet dancer, before an injury led her toward film and television. After she became exhausted by that industry’s handling of Native American issues, she switched to theater, where she observed that people tended to be more open to doing the work necessary for sensitive and accurate portrayals, she said.Around the same time that she started writing “The Thanksgiving Play,” she co-founded a consulting firm called Indigenous Direction that began advising arts groups on Indigenous issues.From left, Henrik Carlson, Ruhaan Gokhale and Christopher Szabo prepare for their scene. The adults directing them explained that they were demonstrating the troubling way that Thanksgiving has been discussed in schools.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesAlong with Ty Defoe, an artist from the Oneida and Ojibwe Nations, FastHorse began working with an important company in Thanksgiving — Macy’s — on a question not unlike the one at the center of her play: How could they make it so the Thanksgiving Day Parade, a celebration of colonialism to many Native Americans, was not causing continued harm?Under FastHorse and Defoe’s counsel, the 2020 parade included a Wampanoag blessing and a land acknowledgment recognizing that Manhattan is part of Lenapehoking, or the land of the Lenape people. Last year’s parade added a float designed in consultation with Wampanoag artists and clan mothers.Macy’s also agreed to make a cosmetic — but, to the consultants, important — change: Tom Turkey lost his belt-buckle hat, and in its place appeared a top hat. He is no longer portrayed as a pilgrim, Defoe said, but a “show turkey.” A Macy’s spokeswoman said the change was part of their “re-evaluation of potentially upsetting symbolism.”On Broadway, it is perhaps unsurprising that the process of staging a play about white people discussing Native American representation can start to mimic the script itself.“We’ve had a lot of questions: a lot of questions about Larissa’s life experiences, a lot of questions about what she wants to accomplish,” said Sullivan, who portrays the history teacher. “I’m coming awake to all of the things I didn’t even realize I needed to be thinking about.”There tends to be some guilt, FastHorse said, in the rehearsal room over a lack of knowledge of the horrors perpetrated against Native Americans, including the Pequot Massacre in 1637, which figures prominently in the show.Though it is first and foremost a comedy, the play does not shy away from violent imagery and rhetoric, even when the actors involved are children.TO FILM THE VIDEOS, which are shown between the live scenes, Chavkin and FastHorse gathered two dozen children and teenagers in February inside the auditorium of the St. Francis de Sales School for the Deaf in Brooklyn. Some were dressed as flamboyant turkeys and others wore stereotypical pilgrim costumes, with belt-buckle hats and wooden guns.For the New York City-based elementary and middle school students dressed as pilgrims for the video, Thanksgiving pageants are an unfamiliar relic of history.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesThe vision, Chavkin said, was to chart the course of how young people are taught to understand Thanksgiving, from 5- and 6-year-olds singing a silly song involving pumpkin patches and teepees, to high schoolers discussing the 1997 police crackdown on a march of Native Americans in Plymouth, Mass.“You watch young people move through the educational system,” Chavkin said. “What we’re trying to do over the course of these four films is make that arc really palpable, starting with sort of obediently following a very nationalist, colonialist narrative.”In one scene, four Indigenous children, some flown in from across the country, perform a punk rock version of “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” complete with a dummy of Theodore Roosevelt with a plastic saber stuck in him.Of course, if you’re asking 12-year-olds to sing part of “Ten Little Indians,” a 19th-century nursery rhyme that includes disturbing lyrics involving the death of Native Americans, you need to explain why.FastHorse told the children before filming that she had found these lyrics (including the couplet, “Two little Indians foolin’ with a gun …. One shot t’other and then there was one”) in a student activity posted online for teachers.“We want adults to be aware that this isn’t OK,” FastHorse told them. “The song actually exists and is still being put out into the world.”The young actors nodded that they understood. For them, as elementary and middle school students in New York City, Thanksgiving pageants are an unfamiliar relic of history. These days, they said, their teachers mostly avoid the subject. More