Top 22 Barry Humphries Quotes

When people laugh at me, they are not laughing in the way that they normally would at a comedian. They are laughing with relief, because the truth has been spoken, and political correctness has not strangled this particular gigastar.

Am I old-fashioned? I think I might be. I am a lucky woman, because I was born with a priceless gift… the ability to laugh at the misfortunes of others.

Glamour comes from within. My beauty regime begins with my personality.

I have charity work that I do. I started my own charity, the Friends of the Prostate, and I’m also working on awareness of the deviated septum. I do this because not many people are interested in it. There’s also Save the Funnel-web – they’re dying out.

Now the point of comedy is not just looking funny, it’s use of language. We have at our disposal a great language… and the imaginative, creative use of that language can be at the service of humour.

What is extraordinary about the character of Edna – and I speak as though I am completely outside this character and I am talking to you – I’m, as it were, in the wings, and she‘s on stage, and every now and then she says something extremely funny, and I stand there and think: ‘I wish I’d thought of that.’

I’ve never looked at my Facebook page or my website, because I’m fundamentally an amateur.

Madonna is a creation, so perhaps we should give her and the factory that created her a little credit, but I think that she should quietly disappear now. Poor Madge seems unable to decide whether she wants to look like Marilyn Monroe or Marlene Dietrich.

In Edna, I created a satiric portrait of my hometown of Melbourne, a large provincial English city paradoxically in far Southeast Asia. She’s a theatrical figure, related to vaudeville in some respects. She inhabits a world in which there are comparatively few female exponents of comedy.

I’m approaching 70. Unfortunately, from the wrong direction.

I have beautiful, beautiful clothes, designed by my bachelor boy son, Kenny. Kenny has a big following as it is, and even Lady Gaga has asked Kenny to design dresses for her. But Kenny isn’t very keen on, well, shall we say, extreme women. He likes someone that women all over the world can identify with.

I’ve played Beckett. I put on in the 1950s the first Australian production of ‘Waiting for Godot.’ I played Estragon. The most interesting conversation I’ve had about Beckett was with a Dublin taxi driver.

I think of myself as an actor. The duty of an actor is to be able to impersonate anything – a child, an old man, a tree, a chair, a woman.

I hate it when theater people go on about professionalism – aren’t they boring? I try to be as unprofessional as possible. And I’m a little bit politically incorrect.

I guess you could say I’m an addict – an adrenalin addict – I get great excitement and stimulation from doing stuff in public, even though I’m nervous and I have very bad stage fright.

I’ve decided the secret of parenting is benevolent neglect.

I have got to the point in my life when a lot of people I know have died or are dying, so I realise that somewhere outside the pearly gates is a queue, shuffling nearer and nearer to the celestial box office.

In Australia, they really want to turn me into a religion. A religion! Can you imagine? The Church of Edna? Oh. I don’t want to be over-revered.

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore were friends and the last people I expected would predecease me. They were, in a sense, casualties of fame.

Political correctness means nothing to me. Nothing. It’s the new Puritanism, darling. Preventing us from expressing ourselves.

I Sellotape whole tins of sardines to my face at night, attach two squeezed lemon rinds to my armadillo-skinned elbows, and put cucumber on my eyes. By the time I’m finished, I look like a fruit salad with added fish. In the morning, the pillow is pretty much a write-off.

My husband passed away a long time ago, and of course a lot of people have courted me. I’ve been taken to dinner and also to things like Larry Hagman, in particular years ago. And more recently, of course, little Hugh Jackman – and he’s too young for me though, frankly.