Judith Lucy sprung on to the stage on Friday night energetically shaking a pair of maracas (no, that’s not a euphemism).
Twenty years into her comedy career Lucy has come a long way from ‘The Late Show’ were she first garnered national attention. Lucy’s career has included feature films, several television series of her own, appearances on a plethora of TV programs and thousands of stand up gigs.
Somewhere along the way Lucy became a huge star and playing two consecutive nights at the Perth Concert Hall was a measure of her popularity.
Personally I’ve always found Judith Lucy a little grating. I put it down to two things. Firstly I find she has a very distinctive voice, it’s not ‘nails down the blackboard’ annoying, but there’s a ‘climbing over the mountain and down the other side’ modulation in Judith Lucy’s speech patterns that does my head in. Secondly she’s got a great love of creating particularly ocker idioms.
But on Friday night I put my personal thoughts aside and sat back to hear two hours of Judith Lucy’s reflections on life and the world around us.
As soon as she laid down her maracas Lucy left the stage and headed straight into to crowd to get to know the audience a little better.
Straight off the bat Lucy chatted to Rhonda and Ruth, a couple who have been together for ten years. “Ten years, and you can’t get married because the Prime Minister is a dipshit” proclaimed Lucy. The line got a massive round of applause. The second married couple Lucy interrogated had been together for eight years, “so not as long as the lesbians” she said.
The golden rule of attending a comedy show is not to be late, it’s almost a given that the comedian is going to create at least five minutes of material around you. So it was bad news for the couple coming in late only to find Lucy in the aisle staring them down.
After meeting several different audience members Lucy returned to the stage and proclaimed that she’d had a fairly awful year in 2014 but she was doing her best to turn it into positive comedy material.
Above the stage an image of the comedian in her communion dress was projected, surrounding her was her grandmother and parents and her older brother Niall. Lucy shared that everyone in the photograph was now gone, her brother having passed away from lung cancer at the end of the year. This emotional starting point kicked off a journey focussing on the fleeting nature of life and where Lucy is now as a woman in her late 40s.
From humorous observations about discovering she had early onset menopause, to her new boyfriend twelve years her junior and her adventures during the filming her TV series ‘Judith Lucy is All Woman’.
Lucy’s great talent is she doesn’t see any boundaries on acceptable conversation, so she happily asks the audience for their thoughts on dick pics and why younger people have removed all their pubic hair. She doesn’t hold back in sharing that she has a plump mons pubis and happily tells the tale about that time she woke up next to a stranger in her bed, only to later realise it was a jumper.
Lucy wants questions answered and has no fear in putting audience members on the spot asking if anybody really liked the film or book ’50 Shades of Grey’ or if we actually like getting dick pics via SMS. The comedian doesn’t hold back and overshares that there is a strong connection between grief and masturbation.
For almost two hours Lucy took us on a roller coaster ride of questions and unexpected answers, and while the topics were random and seemingly interlinked underneath it all there was an underlying theme that life moves fast and maybe we shouldn’t over think it. Judith Lucy isn’t proclaiming ‘Carpe Diem!’ but she may have a soul mate in the self-help book ‘Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff’.
At the end of the night we had a bundle of laughs and left the auditorium more uninhibited than when we entered. Lucy signed off with a quote from a 12th century Sufi poem that suggested we ask no questions of a moth with its fleeting life, the picture of her on the screen transformed into an animated moth with Judith Lucy’s head – which promptly got zapped by one of those buzzing blue lights you have hanging from your veranda.
Judith Lucy’s ‘Ask No Questions of the Month’ was at the Perth Concert Hall on Thursday and Friday.
Graeme Watson
