Tony Toni Tone Whatever You Want

Andrea Powell, Judith Lucy and Colin Lane from Judith Lucy's Spiritual Journey ...

This is her schtick: mordant, deeply personal one-liners that represent an unusual gift for wounding, comic disdain.

Sometimes they seem just too personally cruel, too lacerating, too honest, to be really funny. She drops them out of those trademark red painted lips in that familiar sandpaper voice with no shame and seemingly little regard for her own dignity.

They've been her lifeblood in more than 20 years as a stand-up, radio and television personality, and few local funny people think aloud so candidly. Over the years she's mused about being mistaken for a transvestite, medical problems (including a gall bladder operation, panic attacks and having colonic irrigation), sleeping with a male prostitute, and failing to keep a former boyfriend erect.

"I first saw her doing a 20-minute spot at the Hilton in Melbourne in 1990 or 91," says comedian and director Tony Martin. "The entire piece was about things that had been yelled at her by drunks from moving cars; it was raw and hilarious and set the tone that she's been perfecting for two decades now."

Lucy even built a show around the humiliation of being unceremoniously sacked from Sydney's 2-Day FM breakfast radio program; and for years has denigrated her dead parents, in many ways the spine of her act, on stage.

They were Irish immigrants who came to Perth 15 years before she was born; Lucy only found out she was adopted one drunken Christmas Day after a family argument. She was 25 years old.

She says in her book The Lucy Family Alphabet that they came to see her perform on stage just once. And when she told her father she had taken heroin: "He just refilled my glass and changed the subject," she writes. And: "If Elvis Presley had paid them a quick visit, Mum would still have commented that he'd outstayed his welcome -- hadn't he ever heard of Wheel of Fortune?"

They come in for a shellacking again at the start of her new TV series, Judith Lucy's Spiritual Journey. It's a show in which she asks the Big Questions: "Why are we here; is there a god; what happens when we die; and, why is a funny lady like me banging on about religion and spirituality?" But one query provides the through-line for the series, as it does for most of her work: "How did my life come to this?"

Raised a devout Catholic, but a committed atheist by the time she left school, she's perplexed by the extremes as she approaches middle age. "I can tell you which of my friends has had herpes, but I can't tell you what any of them believes," she says.

K. Clark's Corner: Random Jam: Tony! Toni! Tone! "Whatever You Want"

Ahhh, 90's black radio. A magical time when it was possible to hear both creative, expansive hip hop and R&B (Mary J's "Real Love," Outkast's "Elevators," Aaliyah's "One In Million," and so on) alongside the revolving door of whatever booty poppin' track was the flavor of the month ("Tootsie Roll," "My Boo"). Not that I don't love a good disposable dance track, but in moderation, which radio today seems to have completely forgotten. But I digress. Among those tracks in the former category was Tony! Toni! Tone!'s mid-tempo jam "Whatever You Want." I love how the acoustic chords mesh with the super heavy bass line, as well as the weirdly romantic keyboard sounds that crop up during the bridge. Anyways, listen below.

Tony! Toni! Tone! Songs, Diary, the Blues, Feels Good, It Never Rains, Whatever You Want, Little Walter

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