Judy Tenuta

Known for her bold, accordion-playing "Love Goddess" persona, Judy Tenuta was a comedian, actress, author, and musician who amassed a sizeable cult following, especially within the LGBTQ community, with her whimsical, bawdy, and acerbic style. From the early 1970s until her death in 2022, Tenuta pushed against the boundaries of traditional stand-up, combining performance art, observational humor, and insult comedy with a fiercely independent demeanor that mocked modern beauty standards and celebrity culture. The multiple Grammy Award-nominee also co-hosted popular television programs (The View, Late Night with David Letterman, Entertainment Tonight, The Larry King Show), appeared on-tage in The Vagina Monologues and Menopause the Musical, and co-starred in the independent films Going Down in Lala Land, Gibsonburg, Celluloid Soul, and Garlic and Gunpowder. Born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois, Tenuta spent the '80s honing her skills on the Chicago comedy circuit. In 1987, after relocating to New York City, she hosted an HBO Comedy special alongside Ellen DeGeneres, Rita Rudner, and Paula Poundstone. Tenuta released her first album, Buy This, Pigs!, that same year and appeared on the Comic Relief II fundraising special. She became the first standup comic to win best female comedy club performer at the inaugural American Comedy Awards. She moved to Los Angeles in the early '90s, where she put together a series of one-hour comedy specials for HBO, Showtime, and Lifetime Television. In 1994, she released Attention Butt Pirates and Lesbetarians, recorded live at the C.S.W. Gay Pride Festival, which helped cement her icon status in the LGBTQ community. In 1995 her album In Goddess We Trust was nominated for a Grammy. Tenuta was still traveling the nightclubs through the late '90s and branched out into film and books, appearing as a dominatrix in the movie Butch Camp and publishing The Power of Judyism. She remained busy in the 2000s and 2010s, publishing a second book, 2012's Full Frontal Tenudity, lending her distinctive cadence to the animated programs Dr. Katz, Duckman, and Space Ghost Coast to Coast, among others, and continuing to perform stand-up. Judy Tenuta died on October 6, 2022, in Studio City, California, while in treatment for ovarian cancer; she was 72 years old.
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