If it’s a mortal sin to speak ill of the dead, I have a confession to make

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While the saying goes we mustn’t speak ill of the dead, the truth is there is no better time to tell the truth about someone than when they are gone. They can’t sue. They can’t argue with you. And their friends, if they have any, won’t get into any kind of boring inaccurate defence mode because it will be, on the whole, “beneath” them.

We’ve all had that experience. There is this one person I know (a truly awful human being) and I earnestly wish I could tell you what I really think of her. If I outlive her, that will definitely happen. I will not hold back.

The late Barry Humphries pictured with his OBE in 2007.Credit: AP

Comedian Hannah Gadsby had the bravery to criticise her subject while he was still alive. Good for her. In Australia, that takes guts because of what author Mark Davis described as the Gangland syndrome (also our defamation laws). Our pond is too small to escape the eels biting back. Or lawyers taking a big nip.

I only bring this up now because Gadsby unleashed the de mortuis nihil nisi bonum (of the dead, nothing but good is to be said) zombies when someone dug up an old tweet of hers about Barry Humphries, who has been elevated to near sainthood since his death last Saturday. Thing is, Gadsby was already a public critic of Humphries, but her criticisms were reanimated after his death. In true zombie style, her critics tried to eat her brain (or at least her reputation). They failed.

Gadsby wrote: “Barry Humphries loves those who hold power, hates vulnerable minorities and has completely lost the ability to read the room.” Her view, with others, led to the Melbourne International Comedy Festival changing the name of its main award.

Hannah Gadsby called out Barry Humphries when he was alive and her tweets were resurrected after his death.Credit:

I’ll be honest and reveal I don’t have a terrific sense of humour. I sat stony-faced through endless Monty Python movies while at the same time asking my patient, beloved spouse to explain scenes to me. While I enjoyed The Castle, I didn’t laugh. Kath & Kim, same. Frontline, an Australian classic, made me extremely uncomfortable yet turned me into a fan for life. Believe me, there is much to commend these works without them having the capacity to make me fall about laughing. I will often describe something as hilarious based on the reactions of those around me.

I only saw Humphries live once, maybe 40 years ago, and I found the character of Edna Everage to be, how shall I say, mean and dull (he picked on a small woman, possibly of Indian descent, in the front row and I wanted to die on her behalf). No one around me was laughing either. And these were the days before political correctness set in. Mind you, I don’t find Gadsby all that funny either. But she doesn’t have to be funny to be right about Humphries.

But this is not about whether Humphries was funny. It was really about whether he sided with the powerful. Yes, he did. We should expect and hope that people in his position take on the powerful, not side with them. So why do we assume we should speak well of the dead?

That sentiment has infected our entire idea of what’s OK to say and when. No wonder anonymous social media accounts thrive.

The wonderful Patrick Stokes, philosophy academic at Deakin, tells me we have this idea that because the dead can’t defend themselves, we shouldn’t criticise them. Plus, the narrative of their lives is over, so why not make it a happy ending? We want to make stories out of our selves.

But all stories lie at least a little, says Stokes. “We tell a charitable story and charitable stories, by necessity, leave stuff out.”

So should we leave out Humphries’ old-fashioned views on transgender people and pretend he never said any of that? The good news is that one of his oldest friends, Miriam Margolyes, kept trying to change his mind until the end because she sharply disagreed with his views. And that’s the right approach. Pretending the bad bits never happened is infantilising a man who was renowned for his intelligence and his wit across nearly a century. He lived long enough to have recognised the world was changing, long enough perhaps to have moved his own views forward just a little.

Surely, the ultimate disrespect is to treat Humphries as if he was a child and brush over his bad behaviour. And, as Stokes points out, moral progress makes reactionaries of us all … it leaves everyone behind. “We have to be careful of this forced simplicity about the narratives we tell about ourselves and others.”

And goddammit, that’s true of both the living and the dead. How soon is too soon?

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