In this first academic study of Australian comedian, actor, painter, composer, poet, and writer Barry Humphries, Paul Matthew St. Pierre examines Humphries' achievement as a performer and a writer and his sources in music hall and Dada. With sixty-seven stage shows, twenty-four film and thirty-four video appearances, thirty-four television series and seventy-one television appearances, seventy-two audio recordings, and twenty-nine books, Humphries is a man of many disguises and a singularly important comic writer.