Letter to the Australian newspaper accuses nation of being in danger of losing their sense of humour over university email row

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Barry Humphries has apparently defended the Sydney university professor suspended for allegedly sending racist emails, saying Australians were in danger of losing their sense of humour.



Barry Spurr, the chair in poetry at Sydney university, wrote about “mussies”, “chinky-poos” and mocked the Australian of the Year, Adam Goodes, in a series of emails sent to friends and colleagues over two years from his university email account.

The university has suspended him pending two investigations but a letter seemingly from Humphries in the letter pages of the Australian on Tuesday defended Spurr, saying Australia was losing its sense of humour.

“Has Australia gone slightly mad? I read in the London press of some poor professor in Sydney who has been persecuted and suspended for sending emails to a friend in which he employs outrageous vernacular epithets for race which would be offensive if they were not so clearly jocular,” he wrote.

“His reported response to the storm in a teacup which followed this revelation is, unsurprisingly, bewilderment. How could anyone take such deliberate touretting seriously? The answer, I fear, is that there are a lot of Australians these days who are totally bereft of a sense of humour. The new puritanism is alive, well and powerful.”

Humphries also seemed to reference the News Corp columnist Andrew Bolt who was prosecuted under section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act for writing a column about light-skinned Aboriginal people.

“Not long ago some poor guy was actually prosecuted for saying that the Aboriginal welfare services were sometimes exploited by faux Aborigines, even though we knew it was true,” he wrote.

Humphries also brought up his own directorship of the Adelaide cabaret festival and his efforts to ban the word “fuck” in routines, saying it was comedians with no sense of humour who objected to the stance.

“We really ought to be aware of this malignant brand of cultural fascism, and restore our reputation as a funny country before it’s too late,” the letter ended. It is signed “Barry Humphries, London, UK”.

Guardian Australia has contacted Humphries’ agents in the US and Britain to verify the letter.