Reflecting her usual air of delicacy and good taste, the title of comic Judy Tenuta`s new album on the Elektra label is ”Buy This, Pigs!”
But then Tenuta graduated, so she says, from St. Obnoxious and Bondage
(actually the Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic High School), and she is a self-described goddess and the founder of her own religion–which she has named, as one might expect, ”Judyism.” So perhaps it is inevitable that this very amusing native of Oak Park should have leapt onto the national scene with all limbs working.
”I took over their minds, maybe,” is how Tenuta explains Elektra`s decision to make her work available to the record-buying public. But even though the imposition of will is her chief comedic theme–Tenuta likes to refer to her fans as ”stud-puppets,” describes herself as a ”petite flower- giver goddess-fashion plate-saint” and ends each show with the words ”You people mean nothing to me”–the shape of her career is both more and less mysterious than any thought-control scheme one could imagine.
Growing up in the midst of six brothers and a sister, Tenuta ”felt like I was the only island of sanity. My mom is Polish and she yells a lot and is really religious–there were statues of the Virgin Mary all over the place
–and my dad is Italian and was always singing opera around the house. It was like `Marat/Sade.”`
The high level of drama that prevailed in the family home naturally led Tenuta to think of the rest of her Catholic upbringing in theatrical terms.
”At least in our religion,” she says, ”people are willing to put on Halloween costumes to do a ceremony, which is what the priests looked like to me. They were very into this theater thing. It was like, `Oh, yes, let`s wear bright pink today because St. Bernadette died.` There was always something to look at.
”On the other hand, why does Mexico have a million gold statues of Mary, but they never have any food? If they would just trade in one of those statues, they could all have lunch.”
All things being equal, Tenuta`s parents would have wanted her to become a nun. But aside from forcing her to take accordion lessons, they were willing to let their daughter go her own way.
”After it became clear that I wasn`t going to be a nun,” Tenuta says,
”they never said I should get married, which is something that a lot of girls have to deal with.
”My mother was raised very strictly, and when she was 19, she married my father because her mother told her to. It turned out very well, but it was one of those almost medieval kind of things. So because their lives were formed for them, my parents made it clear that I could do what I wanted to–short of being a mass-murderer.”
Self-absorbed as a child (”My mother would catch me talking to myself while I played the accordion”), Tenuta became even more of a loner at Immaculate Heart of Mary–where she was surrounded by ”all these people who wanted to become cheerleaders and other silly things.”
Then it was on to the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, where Tenuta majored in art until she realized that ”you can work for months on a painting or sculpture and then people walk by and go, `Hmmm . . . nice.” I needed a more instant form of gratification, so I began to experiment with theater. But I never got parts because I never fit them physically–there was always someone who looked more like an ingenue or more dumpy–until I thought that maybe I didn`t want to mouth someone else`s words, maybe I wanted to say my own.”
The time to do that would come soon enough, but first Tenuta was treated to one of the lower levels of show-business Purgatory–working as a singing waitress at the Holiday Inn-Lake Shore Drive Motel.
”There was a crew of six girls,” Tenuta recalls, ”and we would dress up in the costumes of whatever the theme was that week–it could be `Oklahoma` or `Dames At Sea` or anything like that. Then we would do our numbers on the tables while all these drunken conventioneers were going, `We don`t care! We want a drink!` I finally got fired one night because I kept dancing and singing on my table; I wouldn`t get the drinks.
”That was about 12 years ago, and right after I got fired, I read this big article about comedy–I think it was in the Tribune–which talked about how Tom Dreesen had come out of Chicago. So after weeks of preparation, I went to Kingston Mines–they had a tiny, 40-seat room for comedy upstairs–and it was great. My material wasn`t very good, but the rush of energy was so strong that I thought, `I have to keep doing this.`
”Even then, the core of my character was there. I had the accordion, which was like a part of my childhood, and I wore long, flowing gowns because I`d always been taught to dress like a lady and, of course, I had the desire to be a goddess and rule the world.”(
The Chicago comedy-club scene was in its infancy in those days, with Ted Holum as its genial father figure. But as one room after another began to open up and a host of young comics began to stalk their scruffy, little stages, it became clear that Tenuta was something special.
Her material was quite bent (”The thing that scares me is when you`re forced to be nice to some paranoid-schizophrenic just because she lives in your body”), and Tenuta`s manner was even more bizarre–a blend of pathos and threats that made her seem, as one fan has put it, ”like a cross between Ophelia and Lady MacBeth.”
”I was different,” Tenuta says, ”so agents and club owners didn`t know what to make of me. But I wasn`t thinking, `Oh, I`m going to get famous!`
Instead I was trying to come up with stuff that I thought would be important to people–which was mainly that they should worship me.
”In Judyism, I pray for special blessings for you: wealth, power, small animals, unlimited socks and love-slaves aplenty. And these can arrive at all different times; you never know when they`re going to happen.
”My religion is real nice because it allows people to forget about their troubles and think about mine for a change, which is really what it should be about. And people should know that they don`t have to give up their faiths to follow me. They can be Episcopalian or Baptist or Jewish or Catholic or Greek Orthodox and still be a Judy-zombie.”
That approach, plus Tenuta`s free-and-easy references to the Catholic church, seem likely to offend certain segments of the public. (Her album includes a country-and-western love song to Pope John Paul II that concludes
”I just want a cowboy to whom I can confess/I just want a cowboy in a long, white silky dress”). But she often has found that her humor has the opposite effect.
”I did a show at Quincy College,” Tenuta says, ”and there were a couple of priests in the audience, and one of them was much older than the others. I thought he was going to have a heart attack, but he really got into it.
”The only horrible response I got was at a show where I split the bill with an all-female improv group. I got offstage and this one girl says, `You think you`re something, don`t you?,` and the next thing I know she`s choking me. The stagehands thought it was a joke until I turned the color of my gown, which was blue. But I don`t think that was a reaction to my material; she was just a psychotic.”
Well-received in Chicago, Tenuta began to venture out on the road in 1980 –working in Atlanta, Denver, Minneapolis, Austin, Knoxville and other cities.
”The college towns are very hip,” she says. ”In Knoxville they`d bring me offerings; one guy gave me an armadillo. In Raleigh, N.C., though, they just didn`t get it. It was like `This girl needs to be branded.” But that`s the home of Jesse Helms, so I`m almost complimented that they didn`t like me.”
Eventually the word about Tenuta spread to New York, and when she got a chance to perform there at Caroline`s in 1983, her career kicked into a higher gear–leading to an appearance on ”Late Night with David Letterman,” a recent HBO special called ”Women of the Night,” her new album and a series of concerts with George Carlin.
But there is one sore point in Tenuta`s career, which Los Angeles Times critic Lawrence Christon touched upon in his review of ”Women of the Night.” Enthusiastic about her performance, Christon was struck by certain resemblances between Tenuta`s style and that of current ”Tonight Show”
favorite Roseanne Barr. (”Barr`s self-exalting misanthropic persona,” he wrote, ”is a touching-off point for Tenuta, who, like Barr, refers to herself as a goddess and has nothing but amicable disdain for the `stud-puppets` out there in the audience who she fancies want to possess her.”) And Christon went on to say: ”If Roseanne Barr had never happened, who knows what approach Judy Tenuta would use?”
But Tenuta`s stylistic traits have been in place for at least a decade, as anyone who saw her back then can testify; while Barr was virtually unknown outside the Denver area (where Tenuta often performed in the early 1980s), until she moved to Los Angeles several years ago and made her ”Tonight Show” debut.
Of course Barr is essentially an updated version of Totie Fields, while Tenuta is a much hipper comic who works on many levels at once. But it would be a shame if Barr`s popularity led anyone to think that Tenuta is not an original.
Delivered in much the same way an angry drunk hurls a bowling ball at a recalcitrant ten-pin, Tenuta`s material may seem at first to be merely an attempt to exercise power.
But instead that attempt is the subject of her routines–which depict, in luridly surrealistic detail, the widely shared desire to reshape the world to suit our own sweet selves.
”People ask me,” Tenuta says, ”`Would you like to have a movie career?` And I say, `Well, maybe.` But what I really want is world domination. I don`t think that`s so difficult to admit.
”On the other hand, I just want to bear fruit for mankind. Make pancakes for some guy on death row or have kids by a nuclear waste dump–that`s what I was meant to do.”
One wonders, though, if the financial rewards that success is sure to bring will interfere with Tenuta`s delicate comic balance, robbing her of some of her vital, earthy zeal.
”Believe me,” Tenuta says, snapping her omnipresent wad of chewing gum, ”I haven`t been making enough money so that it`s an interference. You can trust me on that one.”
