Ian Warden | My perspective has changed on Barry Humphries' work

In recent times the festival has done some "cancelling" of Humphries after some of his expressed thoughts about transgender people caused deep, deep offence.

This year's festival is underway and immediately after his death the festival said it had no plans to do anything to honour the cancelled Humphries. As I write, though, the festival is reported to be thinking of ways to uncancel Humphries and to honour him after all.

Also as I write there is considerable pro-Humphries anti-festival fury. Instinctively this columnist sided with the liberal pro-Humphries furies (even though there are some awful folk among them). I have sided with the stand that Humphries was a comedic genius and that those who take indignant, censorious offence at anything a comedian quips are woke snowflakes who should wake up to themselves.

Piers Morgan, perhaps the most obnoxious of the people whose side I instinctively took, has seethed that these festival snowflakes are "gutless" and "should grow a pair".

I am out of touch with contemporary colloquialisms and so am not sure what it is he wants woke snowflakes to grow a pair of. Heads, perhaps?

If Morgan means gonads then it is a bewildering accusation that someone capable of taking offence at something said by Barry Humphries (or by any entertainer) is somehow insufficiently entirely masculine, is a humourless eunuch.

You can tell I am presently tenderised by and sensitised to this subject. Here is why.

The death of our beloved Barry Humphries moved me to go YouTubing to revisit many of the great man's interviews and performances.

In the course of this tango down Memory Lane, pushy YouTube hustled and nudged me into watching the feature films The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972) and Barry McKenzie Holds His Own (1974).

Humphries, creator of the Bazza McKenzie character, stars in and wrote much of the scripts of these inconsequential blockbusters.

Adventures' producer Phillip Adams has said of it, with a kind of larrikin pride, that "it is the most inconsequential film ever made".

That's true, but Humphries is wonderful in Adventures. He plays three different characters (Bazza's Auntie Edna, a crazed psychiatrist and a hippie hypocrite) and portrays each of them with his characteristic flair and aplomb.

But the experience of watching these two films (or "filums" as Humphries' Aussie philistines always pronounce the word) after decades since one last saw them turned out to be an emotional-cultural adventure in its own right.

I like to pride myself on being open-mindedly liberal, utterly opposed to censorships of any kind, tolerant of everything ever depicted in the arts.

And yet during my McKenzie-fest I was startled to find myself sometimes flinching, gasping, groaning, moaning the occasional pained "Jeez!" and "Oh my God!" and "No! That's too awful!" at some of the films' deepest descents into ocker gutters.

There is hair-raising racism (often at the expense of First Nations people), some pornographically unpleasant sexism (including vividly vulgar expressions to describe female body parts) and a galaxy of homophobic-isms.

And even though I am an atheist, I winced with pain (imagining the offence given to decent Christians) by a crassly blasphemous passage late in Barry McKenzie Hold His Own.

Barry and his drunken mates repel and kill the vampire Count Plasma (the satanic fiend is about to sink his fangs into Auntie Edna's neck) by making a big crucifix out of spent Fosters' beer cans and brandishing it at the Count.

A crucifix, the symbol of Our Redeemer's sufferings and sacrifice, made of beer cans!

A spasm of something (part-revulsion, part-horror, part-outrage, part-emotions for which there are no words) shivered my sensitive timbers.

I am elderly now and was around to see and be delighted by these two films when they were first unleashed on Australia and the world. I loved them then (in those olden days they never gave me a moment's offence) and still find lots to love about them and to chortle at.

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Some of the films' euphemisms for a man's visit to the urinal (to "point Percy at the porcelain" to "shake hands with the unemployed") still seem harmlessly amusing and quaint. Perhaps patriotic men who love Australia and its culture have a duty to keep these expressions alive by using them every day, every time they have to excuse themselves.

But Australia was naive, insensitive and culturally clodhopping when the films were made. Our nation is considerably grown-up and changed, and thinking, evolving Australians (men like your highly evolved columnist) are not the persons they were in the neanderthal 1970s.

But my sometimes highly sensitive and snowflakey reactions to the shocks of my McKenzie movie marathon rather startled the person I am in 2023.

Can it be, I agonise, that my once manly humour-appreciating "pair" might have withered away over the years, rendering me an emasculated old snowflake?

Would I want the "offending" things in the McKenzie films cut out by righteously indignant censors wielding their wokeness-sharpened scissors? I'm not sure.

But I am taking myself too seriously. I restore myself to my senses by remembering Dame Edna's psychotherapeutically indispensable advice "Never be afraid to laugh at yourself. After all, you could be missing out on the joke of the century."