Judy Tenuta, Accordion-Playing ‘Love Goddess’ of Comedy, Dies at 72
She cracked comedy’s top ranks with a memorably outlandish act in the 1980s, when the stand-up scene was largely male.
Neil Genzlinger and
Judy Tenuta, a stand-up comic who shot to fame during the 1980s by delivering her frenetic, off-kilter comedy while dressed in outlandish outfits, playing the accordion and anointing herself “the Love Goddess,” died on Thursday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 72.
Her longtime manager, Roger Paul, said the cause was ovarian cancer.
The stand-up scene was largely a male one when Ms. Tenuta and other women, Paula Poundstone and Rita Rudner among them, began cracking comedy’s top ranks in the 1980s. The 1988 American Comedy Awards named her “comedy club female comic of the year.” (Jerry Seinfeld won the equivalent award for men that year.) Two of her comedy albums were nominated for Grammy Awards for best spoken comedy album, “Attention Butt Pirates & Lesbetarians” in 1995 and “In Goddess We Trust” in 1996.
Ms. Tenuta began drawing notice in Chicago in the mid-1980s. In 1985, she was one of the opening acts for Yakov Smirnoff at Zanies, the Chicago comedy club, and caught the attention of Larry Kart, who reviewed the show for The Chicago Tribune.
“Something of a cross between Elsa Lanchester” — who played the title character in the 1935 movie “Bride of Frankenstein” — “and Godzilla, Tenuta strolls onstage with an accordion draped across her chest and does her level best to impersonate a rather ill-tempered paranoid schizophrenic,” Mr. Kart wrote.
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“I’m not sure just why Tenuta makes me laugh so hard,” he added. “but much of it has to do with the vivid, lunatic theatricality of her presentation. She’s totally real onstage, and that makes all the difference.”
Ms. Tenuta got a bigger audience in 1987 when she was featured in an HBO comedy special, “Women of the Night,” alongside Ellen DeGeneres, Ms. Rudner, Ms. Poundstone and others. Two years later, HBO had her lead off “One Night Stand,” what became a long-running series capturing stand-ups in performance.
Ms. Tenuta, who also called herself the “Aphrodite of the Accordion,” appeared frequently in New York in the late 1980s and into the ’90s. She was not one of those comics who start gently and try to earn the audience’s affection. Her approach was audacious and took no prisoners; she would often greet the crowd by saying, “Hi, pigs.”
She performed not as herself but, as Stephen Holden put it in The New York Times in February 1988, as “a kooky invented character” wearing a prom dress and toting an accordion.
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By 1994, when she brought a new show to the Ballroom in Manhattan, she had a large gay following. That show included unflattering caricatures of Barbra Streisand, Cher and Diana Ross.
“Ms. Tenuta’s act has grown smuttier over the years and has involved increasing amounts of audience participation,” Mr. Holden wrote then. “Near the end of Friday’s opening-night show, she had an assistant choose two ‘stud-puppets’ from the audience whom she decorated with women’s undergarments and other sexually provocative regalia.
“For all the nastiness of her character,” he continued, “Ms. Tenuta keeps the mood giddy and playful. She makes it abundantly clear she is not to be confused with her invention.”
Ms. Tenuta promoted a faith she called Judyism.
“Judyism is a religion where you can forget about your problems for a while and think about mine for a change,” she told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1994. “It’s a way of life, religion and form of shopping.”
Judy Lynn Tenuta was born on Nov. 7, 1949, in Oak Park, Ill. She described her mother, Johanna Yanya, as a “fiery, funny” Polish woman. Her father, Ceasar, was an Italian-American sheet-metal worker.
Ms. Tenuta grew up with seven brothers and a sister in a strict Roman Catholic household, according to The Chicago Tribune.
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“I always felt like a love goddess,” she told The Chicago Tribune in 1992. “I would say to my brothers, ‘Kiss my hands and kiss my feet,’ and they would do it. ’Course, I had to clean their rooms — nice!”
She graduated from the University of Illinois, where she studied speech, theater and art. She learned improv during a stint with the Second City troupe in Chicago.
She sometimes performed with a fellow accordion player, Weird Al Yankovic, including on the short-lived “Weird Al Show” in 1997. She toured with George Carlin, appeared on talk shows and the occasional television series, and did voice work for animated television shows, including “Duckman” and “Johnny Bravo.”
She is survived by her life partner, Vern Pang, as well as several brothers and a sister.
Ms. Tenuta was often coy about revealing her age publicly, saying that she didn’t want to feel “restricted.”
“When you’re a goddess, you’re eternal,” she told The Tribune. “I don’t want women to feel restricted by age. As soon as somebody finds out you’re a chronological age, they put a label on you.”
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In 1986, Mr. Kart, of The Tribune, asked a number of comics for their “Ten Commandments of Comedy.” Among the rules Ms. Tenuta gave him were these:
“Never go onstage until the audience pledges to give you all their worldly possessions. It makes them feel needed.”
And:
“If a cigar-chomping club owner who used to run a strip joint tells you how to do your act, just politely say, ‘Hey, Sponge, why not stick to your own job, which is to cheat me out of as much money as possible?’”
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