TEARS OF A CLOWN: funny lady Judith Lucy tackles life’s big issues

For more than 30 years Judith Lucy has been making us laugh by candidly relating her stories of life’s disappointments, failures and hard-won triumphs. But, as Tiffany Dunk finds, there is a sensitive side to the ballsy comic as she embarks on a brand new journey.

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lab? A wet market? Denise Scott has an alternative theory as to how the COVID-19 pandemic originated. According to the seasoned comedian, Studio 10 roving correspondent and one-time Dancing With The Stars contestant, she believes there is an unlikely person yet to be investigated for their role in the global crisis – her friend and frequent collaborator Judith Lucy. The timing of Judith’s new ABC podcast Overwhelmed and Dying is suspicious, Denise muses, arriving just as we’re all pondering what is truly important in life and hyper-conscious of our eventual, inevitable demise. “I’m not saying she brought the pandemic on to help her podcast but… you know, she is a bit of a marketing guru,” Denise chuckles. “The timing is quite phenomenal. Then again, Judith Lucy’s timing is always impeccable.”

Overwhelmed and Dying was conceived at a time when Judith was not only struggling with the state of the world, but also attempting to work through three huge life events – the death of her beloved brother, Niall, the onset of early menopause and a spectacularly failed relationship – that had left her wondering, “What is the point of it all?”

“I was realising,” she says now of her lightbulb moment, “that my life was screwed and so was the world. It was this very weird combination of being possessed by a sense of urgency and wanting to go and do something about both of those things, and then feeling completely paralysed at the same time.” So she enlisted a multitude of experts and dived into a vast range of experiences to find answers to the big questions that she – and, she discovered, many eager listeners – were seeking enlightenment on.

“Well, I had no idea it was going to be quite as prescient as it was,” Judith, 52, laughs when Denise’s theory is put to her. “But I guess Zeitgeist is my middle name.”

Actually, it’s Mary. But it is true that Judith has made a successful career out of tapping into the shared experiences and concerns of many.

“The phrase ‘we’re all in this together’ is really being overused at the moment but I do feel like, if it’s happened to me, it’s happened to someone else,” she says. “We all have crazy families, we’re all going to experience people that we love dying and we’re all going to have relationship break-ups. I talk about it because it’s sharing experiences that connects people.”

Judith has been finding the funny side of life since childhood – possibly, she muses, the result of being considered “a bit of a weirdo” by her peers. “If I hadn’t cracked a few jokes at school, I’d have been in trouble,” she admits.

Growing up in Perth, her parents, Ann and Tony Lucy, were Irish immigrants who found the cultural divide between their homeland and their new one baffling. On her first invitation to an Australian barbecue, Ann was asked to bring a plate. And so she brought a single dinner plate in her bag, convinced her host must be running short on crockery.

The Lucy family didn’t shower. Instead they took a weekly bath, just as they had done back in Ireland. Judith’s first shower wouldn’t come until she was 15.

Ann was overprotective and the family insular, although Tony “was pretty good at going to the pub and sitting in the front bar,” recalls Judith. “Mum wasn’t really allowed to work or have any friends. Dad was very much a product of his generation, so I think Mum was pretty frustrated and that meant a lot of her energies were poured into me. Controlling my life, I think, was a way of getting some kind of control over her own.”

Generally speaking, the only people who entered the household were the Lucys themselves. Although Judith does recall one cringeworthy incident when, at the age of 12, a bemused school friend stayed the night. It would be the last guest she had.

“My mother burst through the bedroom door, saying at the top of her voice, ‘Oh my God, I’ve just had the most amazing shower! What an incredible shower it was’,” says Judith. “What’s weirder than your mum not having a shower is your mum not having a shower and then pretending that they have – and it was the most incredible experience of her life. So yeah, there was a fair bit of weirdness going on and I was lucky to have a big brother who could get me away from that.”

Niall Lucy was 12 years Judith’s senior. A serious music and arts buff, he

took his sister under his wing, taking her to concerts and introducing her to his favourite films and books. Despite the age difference, they were inseparable, a fact that proved helpful when their parents launched into one of their regular arguments. While Judith jokes that Niall’s motivation may have been creating a “mini him”, she credits her big brother with saving her from potential schoolyard bullies by “keeping me more on the cool side of things”.

But while they shared many secrets and adventures, there was one big one that Niall was keeping from his little sister: she was adopted. It was a tightly kept family secret that Judith would explosively learn at the age of 25 during a drunken Christmas Day lunch gone wrong. By this stage, she’d left Perth for Melbourne, embarking on the comedy circuit at the age of 20.

“It’s amazing how quickly you sober up when things like this happen,” she reflects now on the surprising admission, made by Niall’s wife after her husband got into a fistfight with his father, who, he said, had been picking on Judith.

“When I asked Dad about it later, he said, ‘Well, I just decided that, if I was adopted, I wouldn’t want to know’,” she explains. “When I look back, I do go, well, maybe Mum did try to tell me – when I think about the number of times she’d walk into a room and, apropos of nothing, go, ‘You know, adopted children are the luckiest children in the world because their parents really want them and they’re especially chosen.’ I’d be there, watching Gilligan’s Island, thinking, ‘Oh yeah, right, whatever.’ It never entered my head that she was trying to say that was me.”

That fateful argument didn’t change the relationship between brother and sister, but it certainly changed the one between the elder Lucys and their two children. In the weeks that followed, Ann’s health deteriorated rapidly. Tony, who had suffered a major heart attack years earlier, became her full-time carer. In the aftermath, Niall refused to speak to his father but when they did reconnect a year or more later, Judith says the relationship was still “pretty strained”.

The final time the four saw each other was when Judith returned to Perth for a show in 1999. “We had lunch at my father’s local and it was not a great day,” she says. Once again an argument erupted – this time without fists – and afterwards Judith’s father sent a fax to her hotel room, saying that he disowned her. Six weeks later, he was dead. Her mother passed away just 10 months after that.

Judith’s traditional way of working through the craziness in life has been to talk about it on stage, finding the humour in the darkness. But the death of her parents is the one and only time in her career when she wishes she’d waited a little longer to open up. “Sometimes you don’t realise how tough it is to talk about something until you look back on it,” she says now. “I started touring a show about my father’s death only a few months after he died. And the show actually involved me getting out of a coffin at the start of it. Then, while I was touring it,

It was a tightly kept family secret that Judith would learn at age 25 during a drunken Christmas Day lunch gone wrong.

my mother died. And I wound up including that in the show as well. And I just look back at that entire period

– I was in my early 30s – and I was just completely out of my mind. Generally speaking, you have to have sorted things out to some degree before you get up on stage and try and make a room full of strangers laugh.”

Judith has often worked those painful life patches through with Denise. The pair met when Denise was 34, Judith just starting out, and swiftly found a common bond in their autobiographical style of humour.

“We absolutely trust each other with the stories we tell each other, and they’re pretty blatant,” says Denise. “I’ve told Judith stuff I’d never tell anybody else. We work through a lot of painful aspects of life together because we have no intention of saying, ‘Oh boohoo, poor us’. But that’s often our starting point – we have a whinge and then we push on until it becomes funny.”

When Niall was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2013, Denise witnessed the devastating effect it had on her friend who, nevertheless, put on a

brave face and swung into immediate action to help her brother, his wife and their son.

“If you know Judith, practicality isn’t the word that normally springs to mind,” she says with a smile. “But she was providing practical help to Niall’s family and also doing a lot to stay with him and be connected. It was first and foremost on her agenda.”

“We had about 12 months with him after he was diagnosed and I spent an awful lot of time in Perth while that was happening,” recalls Judith, who turned 46 that year. “It was weird. We reverted back to our childhoods in a way. We spent an awful lot of time sitting on the couch and watching TV together. But I’m very glad I got to have that time with him.

“Not a day goes by that I don’t think about him – the same with my parents. There are certain things that will remind me of them all. Music is still the big one with my brother because he loved music so much. There are an awful lot of artists I can’t listen to, like Bob Dylan, music that I will always associate with him.”

Menopause reared its head not long after, adding the wild rollercoaster ride of hormonal fluctuations at a time when she was deep in grief. But at least, she thought with a slight sense of smug pride, she still had a happy relationship. For five years she’d been dating a man several years younger than herself, a man she had come to believe was “the one”.

That happiness, though, was shot to smithereens in one afternoon. Sitting in the backseat of a taxi, Judith was heading with Denise to a local radio station to plug their show, Disappointments, when her phone lit up. She took a series of calls from her manager, her accountant and her boyfriend. Money was disappearing from Judith’s bank account, she was told. Mysteriously, it was going into her boyfriend’s account, without her knowledge nor, he insisted, his own.

“She was saying it was a dreadful mistake and I don’t know why I came to

“It took her a day or two to grasp it and it was harrowing. Judith was so fragile.”

the conclusion but I said, ‘Oh no, he’s f**ked you over’,” Denise recalls. “It took her a day or two to grasp it and it was harrowing. Judith was so fragile.”

Surely, you’d think, there must have been signs. But Judith – and her close friends – were stunned. “I just couldn’t believe it,” says Denise. “I was in shock too. But Judith had to deal with heartbreak and a very harsh reality.”

Being taken advantage of by the man she thought she’d spend the rest of her life with, just as she was turning 50, felt like the final kick in the teeth. Judith went into a downward spiral. At first, she retreated. Then she considered chucking it all in and admitting defeat. Maybe she should be off doing good for the world, she thought, rather than pursuing a career that was no longer making her terribly happy. Luckily for her fans, Judith found a way to take action that would prove the antidote to her anxiety. The idea of Overwhelmed and Dying was born, a project that has helped her recover her innate optimism.

“I loved talking to people and finding out how everybody else makes sense of this crazy old shit sandwich that we’re in together,” she laughs. “Connecting with people makes me truly happy.”

Is she open to the possibility of connecting romantically with someone again? Perhaps. Eventually.

Currently, an online petition is doing the rounds, urging Network 10 to appoint Judith as the next Bachelorette in its reality dating franchise. Denise, for one, has signed it eagerly. “She would turn that show on its head,” she says. “I think it would be hilarious and it might even work.”

But Judith doesn’t need a reality show to prove to her friend just how resilient she is. “What I love about Judith is that she’s into love – like nobody else I know,” Denise says. “Nothing seems to kill her romantic side. She has a real belief in men and sex and love, and a real passion. I find that remarkable because she just bounces back no matter what is being thrown at her.” AWW