Thanks for the article GY. Btw Jean-Paul Sartre became a Communist.

Sad to hear another of Barry Humphries generation dropping off the perch.

There is another famous absurdist from the Greek age- Aristophanes a critic of Socrates and conservative traditionalist perhaps.

http://www.britannica.com/biography/Aristophanes

Clouds

This play is an attack on “modern” education and morals as imparted and taught by the radical intellectuals known as the Sophists. The main victim of Clouds (423 bce; Greek Nephelai) is the leading Athenian thinker and teacher Socrates, who is purposely (and unfairly) given many of the standard characteristics of the Sophists. In the play Socrates is consulted by an old rogue, Strepsiades (“Twisterson”), who wants to evade his debts. The instruction at Socrates’ academy, the Phrontisterion (“Thinking Shop”), which consists of making a wrong argument sound right, enables Strepsiades’ son to defend the beating of his own father. At the play’s end the Phrontisterion is burned to the ground.

Old Bazz might be the Secular patron saint of Australia, but the Americans pinched him, and rebranded him as Mrs Doubtfire, the Secular symbol for failed Fatherhood and the disastrous end of the family unit.

CM

Interesting.
I think the slaves that outnumbered the Athenians of his time by seven slaves to one, were having much more fun than the Spartans being too conservative for such humour, as an aside.

Opps…posted wrong thread two above.

Thanks Diver Dan. Kudos.

Above everything else Graham Young, get it right. Barry Humphreys and Peter Cook did NOT found the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. They were paid headline and featured performers who had nothing, zip, zilch to do with the management or organisation of the event.