A Brief Encounter with Dame Edna (Barry Humphries)

I lived in the Bay Area from 1978 to 1988, and I have a memory of occasionally seeing theater advertisements for "Dame Edna Everage," a middle-aged man in a sequined dress with outlandish wig and eyeglasses.   "Dame Edna, Strand Theater, May 1-10."   I never paid any attention.

Youtube Presents...Dame Edna

Recently, the cornocopia of Youtube and its algorithms have served up, for my interests in comedy, clips of Dame Edna. 

It turns out, she was very, very funny.   She had prepared anecdotes that were a hoot, often with multiple layers of double entendres, but her ad lib skills were just as stellar.   There seem to be hundreds of clips spanning decades - from mid '80s clips where she interviews Cher or Burgess Meredith or Tony Curtis, to the most recent ones, up through 2017, where the now mid-80s-aged Barry Humphries is interviewed about his remarkable career.

A Complex Act

Not to be too deconstructionist, but I think she's so interesting because it's a complex act.

Usually with stand-up comics, they are either to be taken as "themselves" (e.g. Jerry Seinfeld) or a consistent exaggerated persona (Rodney Dangerfield.)   Dame Edna is clearly a man in a dress, knowing he is a man in a dress, and knowing he has a nonpareil library of brilliant double-entendres to share with you.  (He knows that we know that she knows that the interviewer knows that we know that...) 

And she's also glowing with joie de vivre.  Even in the most recent recent interviews, well into his mid-80s, Humphries simply exudes vitality and charisma when he slips into his Dame Edna posture and voice.

Insult Comedy With A (Knife) Twist 

And most often, the style of comedy is insult comedy, like Don Rickles, except with Rickles, he knew, you knew, and we knew he was insulting you, and with Dame Edna, the insults rain down like two-sided gems from her self-involved fog.   For example, she tells one deskbound interviewer, in her shrill falsetto, "When I was just starting to become a bit successful for the first time - and you may experience this, one day, yourself...." 

She has a closet full of unseen characters for her recurring anecdotes - her late husband, her gynecologist, her son Kenny.  (In one winding anecdote (here, 4:30), she describes current events in Kenny's life, slowly becoming clear he is gay and living with his partner, as Dame Edna soldiers on obliviously and her interviewer nearly falls out of his chair.)

I've assembled a few informal links below.

Barry Humphries

Humphries is an Australian author, actor, and comedian, born 1934 (age 84 in 2019).  In a diverse career, he's been playing Dame Edna, among other characters, since the 1950s.  He has been married four times and is a bibliophile with a huge library.  He retired traveling as Dame Enda in 2014, but continues to appear occasionally in interviews.  He had several other stock characters, one an enormously boorish man (Sir Les Patterson) and one an enormously elderly man (Sandy Stone).

He authored over a dozen books (see Wikipedia.)  He's been the subject of both biographies and a documentary.   He had to turn his career around after nearly dying of alcoholism in the late 1960s.

Dame Edna

Always dressed in an outlandish gown (sequins, feathers), wearing bright lavendar (mauve) hair, and colossal rimmed glasses.   She had both some television "series," and international touring theatrical shows.   Tours included, "Dame Edna: The Royal Tour," which won a "Special Tony Award" in 2000.  Other titles include "An Evening's Intercourse with Dame Edna," and "Back With A Vengeance."  There are countless clips on Youtube.

Her Wikipedia is here and her official website here.

"I found the secret to my happiness has always been my ability to take pleasure in the misfortunes of others." 

Dame Edna and Cher, 1991

A Few Clips

Interviewing Celebrities
  With Whoopie Goldberg, 1988.  Here.
  With Cher.  1991.  Here.
  K.D. Lang. 2007.  Here.
  Interviewing Dave and Matt of Little Britain.  Here.

Being Interviewed

  Conan O'Brien 2005.  Here.
  "The Project" 2012.  Here.
  Jonathon Ross 2013.  Here.
  On the UK Michael Parkinson Show (undated).  Here.

  Co-interviewed with Donald Trump & Ivanka (1990; at 15m0s).  Here.
  Novelty interview with Edna, Les, Barry together 2012.  Here.

Shows
   1976.  Here.
   Also 1976, "Barry Humphries Show" (24 min).  Here.
   UK Christmas Special 1988 (in large part audience questions).  Here.

Biography
  The Man Inside Dame Edna.  2008.  (Hour).  Full video on Youtube.  Here.
  60 Minutes Australia.  Here.
  Heroes of Comedy: Barry Humphries.  Here.
  Interview by Clive James, as Barry Humphries, with Peter Cook, 1987.  Here.
  Dinner Speech, Barry Humphries, 2017.  Here.
  Lengthy newspaper interview in The Guardian, 2018.  Here.

How Tresidder Union at Stanford Got Its Name

Recently, we watched the 1999 documentary, One Day in September, about the 1972 Munich hostage crisis (99 cents, Amazon), composed almost entirely of archival TV footage. 

Alongside that Germany topic, I just finished reading Brit author Julia Boyd's Travelers in the Third Reich, a very impressively researched collection of diaries and letters and memoirs from diverse people making diverse visits to Germany in 1930s (politicians, actors, authors, journalists, tourists).  In 2018, the book was a London Times non fiction bestseller.

In the 'Travelers" chapter on the 1936 Olympics, we have some paragraphs on "Californian Mary Tresidder's" and visit to Garmisch-Partenkirchen for the February 1936 winter Olympics.

Tresidder?  Related to Stanford Student Union???

Quick to Wikipedia.

Mary Curry (1893-1970) was the daughter of the Curry's who owned Camp Curry at Yosemite.

Web sources vary, but Mary Curry married Donald Tresidder around 1920.  She was in her early 40s in 1936 in Germany.   She wrote a book, Trees of Yosemite in 1932.

 Donald Tresidder (1894-1948, here, here, here) was a kid from rural Indiana  - Tipton, pop. 5000, about 50 miles north of Indianapolis.  He taught school for a year before matriculating premed at University of Chicago. 

After that freshman year at U Chicago, Tresidder ended up with his sister on a trip to Yosemite because the railroad to their original goal, Southern California, was washed out.

At Yosemite, Tresidder met a professor who invited him to come to college at Stanford.   He had service in WW1, then finished both college and med school at Stanford.  He continued to work summers at Yosemite, and never practiced medicine, becoming instead president of the Yosemite Company.   He was involved in the 1920s buildout, such as Ahwanee Hotel.   He met Mary Curry during his Yosemite summers.

Tresidder ended up back at Stanford in 1943 as President, was a success at fund raising, and supervised the founding of SRI /Stanford Research Institute.   He died at age 53 of a heart attack in NYC in 1948.    Tresidder Union is named after him.

Mary Tresidder outlived her husband by many years and died in 1970 in her permanent suite at the Ahwanee Hotel at Yosemite.

How Did Tresidder Get Into Boyd's Book on the 1930s?

Boyd quotes a couple paragraphs from Mary Tresidder's diaries of her 1936 trip to the Winter Olympics.   Growing up around Yosemite, the Bavarian Alps must have felt familiar.  The quotations in Boyd's book are sourced to the Tresidder diaries online at the Stanford Digital Archive.

In the book, the next section is on journalist William Shirer's notes on the same February 1936 Olympics.

More Biographic Details

According to Stanford Daily (here), Mary Curry graduated Stanford in 1915 in English (Donald graduated in 1919).  Mary also got a Stanford M.A. in English  in 1916, and she started work on a PhD at Yale, which was broken off based on Donald's marriage proposal.  They married in 1920.  The Stanford Daily obit says Donald did med school "1922-1925" and "graduated in 1927."  He may have been doing med school part time while working as a researcher on botulism and public health.

In 1939, Tresidder had an illness that required him to come down from Yosemite, and he became a member of the Stanford Board of Trustees, then the Board's President, then the University's president.

Tresidder was a private pilot (pic):

click to enlarge

Mary's 1936 diary is in a difficult to read script.