Accordion-playing comedian
LOS ANGELES —LOS ANGELES — Judy Tenuta, the absurdist, accordion playing “Love Goddess” of stand-up, who broke into the male-dominated 1980s comedy world while wearing Grecian gowns, preaching the gospel of “Judyism” and derisively addressing men as “pigs” and “stud puppets,” died Thursday at her home in the Studio City neighborhood of Los Angeles. She was 72.
Her publicist B. Harlan Boll announced her death in a statement, saying the cause was ovarian cancer.
A gum-snapping comedian with one of stand-up’s most distinctive voices — she might deliver the setup in a cooing falsetto, then use a husky growl for the punchline — Ms. Tenuta deployed a campy brew of insult comedy, physical humor and acerbic wit, lampooning everyone from Yoko Ono and the pope to Southerners, mimes and Vice President Dan Quayle. Sending him to San Francisco to comfort earthquake victims was like “sending Ronald McDonald to Tiananmen Square,” she said.
“My boyfriend said, ‘Judy, I’d like to see you in miniskirts.’ I said, ‘Yeah? Well I’d like to see you in Mason jars,’ ” she quipped at one set. At another, she joked, “My mother always
told me I wouldn’t amount to anything because I procrastinate. I said, ‘Just wait.’ ”
During her heyday in the late-1980s and early ’90s, Ms. Tenuta was sometimes carried onstage by a bodybuilder or borne aloft in a thronelike chair, raised on the shoulders of several muscle-bound men. Wearing gold lamé pants or a gauzy floor-length cape, she would introduce herself as “a shy, innocent petite flower” before revealing another, brassier side of her personality.
“Hey pigs, let’s party,” she would shout. “You know you’re begging for abuse from the Goddess of Love.”
Raised in the Chicago suburbs, where she said she was taught in Catholic school that women were meant to be subservient to men, she went on to subvert traditional gender roles while spreading a self-styled religion called “Judyism.”
“Women are love goddesses, and men are slaves,” she explained to the Los Angeles Times. Not that she despised men altogether: “I love all stud puppets — and I think they all should have a chance to be our furniture,” she said, outlining what she described as her vision of a new “ottoman empire.”
Ms. Tenuta often performed with an accordion strapped to her chest (among other monikers, she called herself the “Aphrodite of the Accordion”) and incorporated music into her sets. “Bring me your tired, your poor and your dumb,” she sang in one accordion backed number, “and keep their mouths open while I spit out my gum.” By the end of the night, she had usually spit her gum onto a man in the audience, then commanded him to swallow it.
“To complain that this woman is hostile is like complaining that a hurricane shouldn’t be so mean,” journalist Ellen Hopkins wrote in a 1990 article for the New York Times. “Whether she’s taunting male members of the audience about their masturbation habits or referring to herself as a Goddess of Love, her greatest gift is her ability to take male fantasies and transmogrify them into the stuff of nightmare.”
Ms. Tenuta began touring the country in the 1980s, and rose to national prominence after performing on “Late Night With David Letterman”
and starring in an HBO comedy special, “Women of the Night,” with Ellen DeGeneres, Paula Poundstone, Rita Rudner and Lizz Winstead. She was named the best female comedy club performer at the 1988 American Comedy Awards — the male winner was Jerry Seinfeld — and went on to receive consecutive Grammy nominations for comedy albums in 199596.
Ms. Tenuta also appeared in plays and musicals, performing in a Chicago production of “The Vagina Monologues,” and acted onscreen, playing a showgirl-turned marriage officiant on “General Hospital” and making a cameo in the Hilary Duff teen comedy “Material Girls.”
She started entertaining younger audiences by the late 1990s and 2000s, playing a psychic named Madame Judy on “The Weird Al Show” — she often collaborated with the host, comedian “Weird Al” Yankovic — and guest-starring on children’s TV shows including “Cory in the House” and “Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide.”
She also contributed voice work to animated shows such as “Johnny Bravo” and “Space Ghost Coast to Coast,” wrote books including “The Power of Judyism” and “Full Frontal Tenudity,” and produced and starred in an independent film, “Desperation Boulevard” (1998).