4 days Ago By Nick Dent
Save articles for later Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Famous comedians typically don’t hand out their phone numbers to just anyone, but Becky Lucas is the exception. If you check out the details for her upcoming shows, you’ll find her phone number listed in her artist blurb, along with an invitation to text her and ask her to “say something funny”.
Lucas came up with the idea because, with a new baby, George, keeping her so busy, she didn’t have the time to write the usual funny bio. Instead, she thought punters could decide whether to see her based on her witty replies. What could possibly go wrong? The number, for a start.
Becky Lucas worried that she might not be able to perform stand-up again after her son was born with a heart condition. Credit: James Brickwood “Some poor woman in the Blue Mountains called Mary started receiving hundreds of text messages from people saying, ‘Tell me something funny’. I gave her a nervous breakdown, I think.
“Anyway, it’s fixed now, so you can text me, but I have to say, it’s quite a huge job to be texting a bunch of people back.” She sighs. “I really should have just written the bio.
” Although her nervous manager urged Lucas to get a burner phone for the exercise, she hasn’t been trolled on the number. “I haven’t received any vitriolic text, which I think means I’m, you know, not famous enough.” But Brisbane-born Lucas has been a professional stand-up for over a dozen years, hosted the Melbourne International Comedy Festival Gala, and delivered an insouciant five-minute set on Conan O’Brien’s show in 2019.
During her appearance, she joked with the legendary late-night host that his dogs could tell if he had cancer. She was offered the spot after supporting O’Brien at the State Theatre in Sydney. “Nothing happened, though.
You know, back in the day, you’d do well on late night TV, and then you’d have the whole world at your fingertips, but these days, everyone’s a star.” We’re chatting ahead of Lucas’ new tour, titled Things Have Changed, but the Essence Remains . It’s her first stand-up show since 2022 and her first since becoming a mum.
For a while, Lucas had doubts it would happen at all. The past year has not exactly been funny, she says. Becky Lucas performing at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in 2022.
“My lovely little son was born with quite a complex heart defect that was picked up in utero, the 20-week scan. And so, my pregnancy, my first child, the journey was quite different. There’s so much about it that was normal and joyful, but there was just a lot of terror and anxiety around it.
” In August 2024, when George was five months old, he underwent five hours of open-heart surgery and spent 11 days recovering at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead. “I was so sad and so scared that I just thought, ‘Oh, I guess I can’t ever do comedy again.’ How can I marry these two parts of myself, like, being silly and irreverent, and then dealing with the heaviest, saddest thing possible?’ “This show was written in the times when things were improving.
And now, he’s recovered fully, he’s doing so well. I’ll always worry, but life is pretty good. And returning to stand-up feels like things are normal again.
” Lucas’ new show is not entirely about parenthood but, of course, it’s a part of it. “It really does take a toll on your body. Having a kid is just being hunched over a bag and fiddling around with zips constantly.
I’m like the letter C.” Oddly enough, Lucas has been thinking about motherhood since she was little. In her 2021 memoir, Acknowledgments , she recalls walking into rooms as a child and announcing that she loved kids but was not sure if she’d be ready to have them.
Her exasperated stepmum would reply: “For god’s sake! You’re seven years old!” Lucas now realises that this obsession stemmed from her parents’ divorce. “Maybe I realised that I was a bit of a hindrance,” she says. Lucas grew up on the mosquito-ridden Coochiemudlo Island, off Victoria Point in Moreton Bay.
Her mum, Mandy, is a country music singer, and her dad, Timothy, is an inventor who created the puddle flange, now a standard feature in Australian bathroom drains. They split when Becky was two. She attended Brisbane State High, a selective public school she describes as “a microcosm of the world”, graduating three years after Matt Okine, with whom she later helped write the Stan series The Other Guy .
(From left) Frank Woodley, Joel Creasey, Becky Lucas and Sam Simmons in the series LOL: Last One Laughing. Credit: Amazon Prime Video The stand-up penny dropped for her during a visit to San Francisco, where she stayed with an American flame from an earlier backpacking trip to Brazil. It quickly became crushingly obvious that the guy didn’t really want her staying in his apartment and was avoiding her.
Left to explore the city on her own, she found her way to The Purple Onion comedy club in North Beach. After the hit her self-esteem had taken, the idea of getting up on stage herself no longer seemed so scary. She made the finals of Raw Comedy in 2013, and from there, she was off and running.
But Brisbane isn’t the most welcoming environment for a young comedian. “You’re doing some of the worst gigs in the country, like RSLs, pub gigs, gigs at truck stops on the side of the road.” This is the origin of Lucas’ style, which a Herald Sun reviewer accurately likened to “putting a silencer on a gun: you don’t hear the pearlers coming, you only know when they hit”.
“You won’t find many Brisbane comics telling long stories with a soft finish,” she says. “You have to pretend you’re constantly performing next to a screen with dog racing, because you probably are.” She was once paid to perform in broad daylight at a food court in a regional Queensland shopping centre, to a tiny and completely uninterested audience, as part of a Mexican food promotion.
It lasted two minutes before the franchisee gently escorted her off. Becky Lucas says motherhood is the “most beautiful, meaningful thing I’ve ever done”. Credit: James Brickwood In 2013, at 24, she moved to Sydney and bonded with the Brisbane wave of comedians: Okine, Mel Buttle, Sam Campbell, Damien Power, and Josh Thomas.
Before The Other Guy , she contributed to two seasons of Thomas’ show Please Like Me , working in the writers’ room to punch up scripts and make the other writers laugh. Not everything she writes does so well. In 2018 Lucas was banned from Twitter for drunk-tweeting that she would behead then-prime minister Scott Morrison .
“It’s something I always say to people,” she said at the time. “‘Oh, I’m going to chop your head off!’ It’s a joke. I say it to my friends.
” She now thinks her account might have been reinstated because Elon Musk doesn’t care. But she can’t remember her username. “I wouldn’t mind being able to log back on, but I also think, why would I want to introduce that back into my life?” Living in Marrickville with George and her partner, Chris, she’s starting to feel homesick for Brisbane.
“We’re in an apartment, and I’m really craving space. “Before I had a baby, I was like, it’s fine, I’ll be going to all these cute little bars with the baby. And now it’s like, no, you just want a yard.
You want everything you thought you didn’t want. “I basically wanna live in the Brisbane suburbs, which is the thing I was trying to escape my whole life, and now I yearn for it.” When she goes on tour, she’ll be bringing George along and breastfeeding him after gigs.
She says there’s something “freeing” about being a mother doing stand-up. “I used to be so neurotic when I was trying jokes and I would have too much time to think and ponder and get nervous. Whereas now, I go straight from nappy change and a huge day of being with the baby, and I arrive at the gig, and it’s like, ‘Oh, this is fun’.
” I remind Lucas that her autobiography contains an acerbic swipe at children at airports: “There are kids everywhere who think they are cuter than they are when in reality they’ve just reminded you that you’ve only got a couple of hours to take the morning-after pill.” “Jesus! I don’t really know if I stand by that any more,” Lucas laughs. “Like, why was I ever trying to be sassy about this? I take it back! “It’s the most beautiful, meaningful thing I’ve ever done, and I do regret that sort of flippant way I used to speak about children and motherhood.
And I’m sorry to any mum who felt that I was reducing her.” Becky Lucas performs Things Have Changed, But the Essence Remains the Same at The Street Theatre, Canberra, March 21; The Victoria Hotel Banquet Room, Melbourne, March 27-April 20; The Regal Theatre, Perth, May 2; The Concourse, Chatswood, May 9; Sydney Comedy Store, May 10; Brisbane Powerhouse, May 22-26; and Newcastle Conservatorium, July 26. Becky Lucas Worst habit? Opening instagram and hoping to find the notification that changes everything .
Greatest fear? That my posture will continue to form into the letter C. The line that stayed with you? “Them’s what’s thinks they is, ain’t.” Biggest regret? Buying an apartment underneath the flight path.
Did you know planes are really, really loud? Favourite book? Slow Days, Fast Company by Eve Babitz. The artwork/song you wish was yours? I’ve never really thought about an artwork being mine but I guess it would be pretty cool if I did the Mona Lisa . People love that thing .
If you could time travel, where would you choose to go? I’d like to go see what cavemen were like. It would be fun to know you were definitely smarter than everyone. I’d be cavemansplaining everything, all the time.
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