Canning Laughter

Comedian Judy Gold has subtitled The Judy Show, her latest one-woman show, “My Life As a Sitcom.”
That’s not quite accurate; The Judy Show never feels like anything approaching
a sitcom, despite the obsessive papering of the set’s walls with posters of
vintage sitcoms like The Brady Bunch
and MASH. Gold has taken what amounts
to several stand-up routines, and hastily tied them together with her fondness
for canned laughter and situational comedy.

The haste prevents The
Judy Show from ever really taking flight, along with the relentless joking
about being Jewish. Overbearing Jewish mothers immediately conjure up phantom
rim shots in my head; I’m just not genetically disposed to appreciate them, I
suppose. But Gold’s material has a well-worn quality to it that, coupled with a
rambling story, wears out her welcome quickly. She’s a talented, funny woman,
but the running gag of her pitching her own sitcom, complete with a theme song,
grows old quickly. (And what’s the last sitcom that had a theme song with
verses? Frasier?) Her cause isn’t helped by her flat singing voice, either,
which elicits dread every time music starts playing.

Over the course of 80 minutes, Gold hints at what could have
been a more interesting show than this one, with its tales of high school
humiliation and unending Jewish jokes. Her time spent writing for The Rosie
O’Donnell Show would seem promising, but she dismisses it as soon as the topic
arises. She’s also guest starred on several sitcoms, but doesn’t mine what it’s
like for a fan of sitcoms to actually appear on one. She resolutely sticks to
her stand-up, sometimes dragging in a comparison of her life to a sitcom from
the ’60s or ’70s.

Instead, Gold whines (a lot) about her uncomfortable pitch
meetings with network heads about the sitcom of her life, which is always some
variation on “I’m a Jewish lesbian living on the Upper West Side!” In her
telling, the executives never remember her name and refuse to acknowledge the
fact that she is, indeed, a lesbian mother of two. This seems to be enough to
convince her that she deserves some sort of TV deal, even a reality show (which
was filmed for OWN, Oprah Winfrey’s network, before the deal fell through), but
The Judy Show doesn’t really back up her claims. Gold is at her best when she
relaxes and tosses in a seemingly off-the-cuff joke, rather than the
over-eager, polished-apple jokes meant to endear her to audiences. Saying that
a hypnotist she went to as a teenager probably molested her? Hilarious. Talking
about a Jewish summer camp? 1982 called, and it wants its jokes back.

The Judy Show: My Life As a Sitcom

Open run, DR2 Theatre, 103 E. 15th St. (at Union Sq. E.),
www.judygold.com; $65.