Judy Tenuta

A set from Judy Tenuta was less a standup performance and more a manic coronation. She would frequently be carried to the microphone by a pair of oiled-up bodybuilders, arriving in a gauzy gown with a giant flower pinned to her head. Once deposited, she strapped on an accordion, snapped her gum, and addressed the audience as “pigs” and “stud puppets.” The rhythm relied heavily on her voice, swinging wildly from a cooing, innocent falsetto into a husky, aggressive growl to hammer the punchline.

During the 1980s comedy boom, when the default club comic was a guy in a blazer pointing out minor frustrations, Tenuta was doing high camp. She claimed to be a petite flower and the goddess of love, demanding absolute worship from the crowd. It was a complete rejection of how women were expected to behave on stage, dressed up as a Vegas lounge act gone wrong, and it earned her a devoted queer following that stayed with her for decades.

The accordion was a physical tool as much as a musical one. She didn’t use it for careful parodies; she squeezed out dissonant, wheezing chords to punctuate an insult or jar a room that was getting too quiet. The jokes themselves were rapid-fire, combining surreal threats with a heavy dose of Catholic guilt inverted into her own mock-religion, Judyism.

That religious framing was direct theft from her childhood. She grew up in a massive Catholic family in the Chicago suburbs, taking the rigid rituals of her upbringing and warping them into an onstage cult of personality. Tenuta died in 2022, having spent forty years proving that total, unblinking commitment to a bizarre bit will eventually force a room to surrender.