A favourite word in the vocabulary of Dame Edna Everage is “spooky” – and the great Melbourne performer was responsible for one of the spookiest moments of my life. Once, after writing a newspaper piece about the dame and the actor-writer Barry Humphries, whom she describes as her “manager”, I was checking some voicemails and, after one of the interleaving bleeps, between messages from my daughter and my dentist’s receptionist, there was the voice of Dame Edna, expressing gratitude to “dear little Mark” for the views expressed. There was no preface or afterword from Humphries; she was, as it were, just herself. It is this uncanny sense of an independent existence from her creator that makes Dame Edna one of the most remarkable comic inventio