Barry Humphries began his career as a Dadaist. His street performances around Melbourne in the early 1950s foreshadowed performance art in Australia. He was the most daring student prankster Melbourne University had ever known.

Years later, academic Peter Conrad accurately described Humphries’ adolescence as a “one man modern movement”.

The young man secured his first paid acting role after a number of complaints from various women about a Dadaist event called Call Me Madman!, staged at the University of Melbourne’s Union Theatre in 1953. It was anarchic, just like the early Dada shows of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich several decades earlier.

Call Me Madman! opened with a single musical phrase played on a violin over and over again, then a pianist sitting out of view of the audience sounded the same chords and notes in repetition, and ended in a ferocious food fight, with Humphries hiding in a cupboard from the outraged students who stormed the stage.

This parody taught him how to provoke his audience, securing their complicit and violent participation in his act. It also gave him his first taste of the power of an audience to determine what happens in the theatre. It was both risky and intoxicating.

When John Sumner, founder of...