Judy Toll

A set from Judy Toll felt like someone cornering you at a party to explain why their week fell apart. Her rhythm was conversational and fast, tumbling from terrible romances to hypochondriac episodes without the neat setup-punch cadence of traditional club comics. If a confession made the audience tense up, she did not backpedal. She pitched her voice up half an octave, widened her eyes, and dared everyone at the tables to pretend they were any more put together than she was.

That raw, conversational approach made her a foundation of the nineties alternative scene in Los Angeles. At shows like UnCabaret, where performers threw out rehearsed punchlines to talk about real life, Toll was the person other comics stood in the back to watch. She helped define a style of personal storytelling that clubs had spent years filtering out.

Her live sets, later compiled on the posthumous audio release Shareaholic, trace a chaotic search for love through endless self-doubt and bad decisions. She could also play broad character work. Her Andrea Dice Clay routine saw her throw on a black leather jacket, fire up a cigarette, and use the Diceman’s loud, gravelly swagger to turn his crude machismo right back on men.

Toll started out doing standup in Philadelphia before moving west, joining the Groundlings and cowriting the feature film Casual Sex?. She carried that same candid voice into television writers’ rooms, writing for series like Sex and the City until her death from melanoma in 2002.