‘WE’RE ALL IN THIS SH*T SANDWICH TOGETHER’

Veteran Australian comic Judith Lucy, 51, gives Woman’s Day the lowdown about her new podcast entitled Overwhelmed & Dying.

This is such a refreshing take on a podcast! What made you come up with this concept?

I always tend to bang on about what’s happening to me and work under the assumption that if it’s happening to me then it’s probably happening to others, too.

You've always been open about your personal life. Do you find it easy to talk about?

I’ll always remember the first gig I had in Melbourne, I had so many props – I made the audience wrap themselves in toilet paper! After the show, a woman came up to me and said, “Maybe you should just talk about yourself,” and from then on in that’s what I did. The response I got from talking about personal stuff was just the best response. I’ve always said that we’re all in this sh*t sandwich together.

In your podcast, you talk about being disillusioned by your career. What do you mean?

I feel really lucky that I’ve been able to do comedy, but sometimes a job is just a job, and you have to work out if your purpose is something different. I thought, “Was I really put on this Earth to talk about my breasts and passing out again?” I also suffered from panic attacks and performing became really difficult.

It's an intense time right now. What should we do to switch off?

In the first episode we interview a woman called Gretchen Rubin, who wrote The Happiness Project, and she says that the best antidote to anxiety is action. So I think finding something you’re really passionate about is a really good way of dealing with everything that’s going on. OVERWHELMED & DYING is on the ABC listen app