OPINION: What a Dame! Tribute to an honorary Jewish genius

In the last years of my grandfather Zigi Shipper’s life, I would regularly sit with him at his Bushey bungalow and record our conversations between mouthfuls of tea and biscuits.

On one such occasion, in April of last year, I spoke to the nonagenarian Zigi in the morning and the octogenarian Barry Humphries later the same day.

A year on and both heroes are gone.

Humphries, who died on the weekend at the age of 89, was performing a rare show as himself at the Radlett Centre, a theatre so provincial I have appeared on stage there. This was the first warm-up show before a national tour and included a story about the last time he saw the actress who portrayed Dame Edna Everage’s sidekick, Madge Allsopp.

In a nursing home, at the age of 100, she greeted her old colleague with the words, “We had a lot of fun, didn’t we Barry? If only I could remember what it was we did.” Having spent the day prising memories from a man suffering with dementia, that line hit me with the force of a gladioli to the face.

At the evening’s close, I waited outside the theatre in the hope I might get the man who would appear carved on my very own comedy Mount Rushmore (alongside Mel Brooks, Peter Cook and Larry David) to sign my copy of his memoir. I paced nervously during the agonising wait and actually tripped at one point, the only tragedy being it wasn’t the exact moment the comedy great appeared on cue to mock me.

When he emerged, every bit the dandy, Dame Edna’s “manager” repeatedly thanked us for coming and apologised that the show was a little rough around the edges since it was his first performance after a lengthy hiatus. I was able to thank him for all the joy he’d brought me over the years and my father was able to make him laugh by saying he’d seen a fair few of his farewell tours down the years.

He was undoubtedly frail and needed me to repeat my name when it came to signing the book although even that was brushed aside with a joke (“Oh, as in Darren”) but unfailingly charming and self-effacing, a far cry from Sir Les Patterson or Dame Edna.

It is, perhaps, worth pointing out at this point that Humphries was not Jewish. Yes, he had a complicated relationship with his mother and publicly declared an affinity with the Jews on multiple occasions and, possibly as a result of both these factors, Dame Edna, modelled on the aforementioned mother, was Jewish. As per an interview with the great Dame, “I looked hard in the mirror and saw that I was Jewish. My children definitely think I am. I have no real proof, just a feeling.”

Jewishness as a feeling seems about right to me. Dame Edna was not as nuanced a creation as a Fawlty, Partridge or Brent but a combination of Humphries’ extraordinary abilities and the central conceit that, at the dark heart of every celebrity is the belief they are innately superior to the paying punters (or “paupers” if you were in the cheap seats) meant nobody was ever funnier on stage.

The character’s dialogue was littered with lines taken verbatim from Humphries’ mother but they could have come from just about any Jewish woman of a certain age. “Remember you’re out” was used to admonish the young Barry when he misbehaved in a public place and would become handy years later when dealing with hecklers.

Another perennial favourite, “don’t be unnecessary”, could easily have come out of the mouths of either of my grandmothers and perhaps that’s the point; the specific is the universal and Humphries quoting his mother sounded like all our mothers and grandmothers.

The giant of comedy committed to the bit on his deathbed and beyond, releasing a statement two days before his death in which he thanked “everybody for the support and good wishes he has received but would like more and more” before a posthumously published obituary by Dame Edna in The Telegraph saw the “gigastar” compare her manager to Hitler, a particularly scathing assessment given the Dame’s Jewish roots.

He had the last laugh in one other way that has been slightly less well-documented and it would be remiss of me not to mention it here: it turns out that, despite my dad’s gag, the tour a year ago truly was the final farewell. Humphries’ timing, as ever, was impeccable.