Variety called it “hysterical pee-in-your-pants funny”, San Francisco Chronicle described it as a “dirty”, “silly” and “swell party”, while San Francisco Weekly asked, “Who is this guy and why am I laughing so hard?”
Coming to this year’s Edinburgh Comedy Festival is an award-winning one-man show from San Francisco, which has just finished a three-month sell out run. It’s based on ferocious, fast and funny true stories from the life of writer/comedian James Judd, using as a guide envy, greed, gluttony, wrath, pride, lust and sloth - the 7 Deadly Sins.
He relives his varied careers as a forgotten employee of AT&T, where he did nothing for a year, an even shorter-lived career as a dot.com journalist (which led to an insane night with five Chinese billionaires in a Chinese bordello), and as an under-prepared criminal defence attorney representing violent teenage girls who couldn’t have been further away from his own somewhat flamboyant lifestyle
We caught up with James to have a good laugh about his school days as a partially deaf gay trombone player in the Marching Band (!), botox, rodeos, having Rosie O'Donnell hit on him and fighting with Bette Midler. We also found out more about this fabulously sinful show of his.
So, tell us about this show of yours, 7 Sins.
It's a collection of the most embarrassing moments of my life wrapped into one easily digestible fizzy pill of humiliation. Some people call it Narcissistic Personality Disorder. I call it talent!
Where did it all begin for James Judd? Did you always know you were funny?
I knew I was different. I was a very tall sort of fat kid with a huge head of curly red hair and who always wore long sleeve shirts and pants, even during summer. I was a big ball of awkward. Unpopular. The only person less popular than me was the kid who only had one ear. Ironically, I was also sort of deaf. The fact that I had two ears was really my only social advantage. But it made school very hard.
I taught myself to read lips but every time my teacher would turn her back to me I would lose the thread of the lesson and then I would get called upon. My always wrong answers would frequently get big laughs. The teacher might ask while facing the blackboard, "Where did the first ship land in America…James?" And I would answer, 'Eleven!" The teacher said I was being sarcastic but that laughter was my lifeboat. So even before I realised I was gay, I knew how to cover my tracks with humour.
Unfortunately, it's not so easy to hide the fact that you're gay when you're the only trombone player in the Marching Band who wears a wide-brimmed straw hat to band practice, but even back then, I suspected that damage from the sun would last longer than a few taunts. Besides, brass instruments are highly reflective. I usually got burned anyway. Eventually, I went on to earn four college degrees, three of them advanced and one of them a law degree, but I was still known as "the funniest guy in law school." I once got a client out of jail by making his prosecutor laugh after court. It's important to be able to tell a good story. You never know where it's going to come in handy.
"[The show] is a collection of the most embarrassing moments of my life wrapped into one easily digestible fizzy pill of humiliation. Some people call it Narcissistic Personality Disorder. I call it talent!"
How do you test out your material?
Here's how you write a good joke - first tell it to a drunk, any drunk, 'cause timing doesn't matter so much with the shit-faced but, if it gets any sort of laugh at all, you've got the beginnings of a bit. Next - try it during after-work cocktails with a few straight female co-workers. Tell the punch line right to the one you know will spill beer on her boobs. Yes, you've intentionally ruined her dress but she's used to it and it's for the eventual betterment of mankind. Humour heals the world!
Your first big hurdle - casually work it into a conversation with a straight, male co-worker over lunch. If he says something like "that's inappropriate for work" or he chokes on his sandwich, congratulations. A joke is born! With a little luck you'll be telling this joke for the next 18 years. When you've said it again to another couple of hundred random people - grocery clerks, people on the bus, inmates, old people who can't walk away quickly - and at least a third of them have laughed it's time to face the gays (men only).
Here's the catch - no booze. Sobriety is essential. Gay men who are not drunk are the hardest audience in the world to make laugh. They pretend to listen but they're really only thinking about one thing - balls. What's better? Shaved, waxed or hairy like a monkey? My partner is from Puerto Rico and he's so hairy he can catch bananas with his feet. What was I talking about? Oh, yeah. Sober gays. They don't focus. And groups of gay men on vacation aren't much better. They'll come to a show but only because they need something to do until their E kicks in. It's why drag queens are so popular. It's much easier to focus on a tall wig and a big, glittery eye as you lose touch with reality.
The only audiences tougher are the lesbians. Even the big ones who look slow are usually fidgety. It's hard to get a whole bunch of dykes in a room and not have them start to fight or switch partners or have one suggest that the time you're using to tell them a joke would be better spent hiking or rescuing dogs. Trust me, getting a hundred lesbians to laugh in unison is a lot harder than getting them to take pictures of a whale. "Look, Peg! Breach!" Click. Click. Click. Click. But they're the best, most loyal audience in the world. If you can win the lesbians, your joke is ready for its moment in the spotlight!
On the flip side, if your joke bombs in front of a paying audience more than a hundred or a hundred and fifty times, it's time to put it aside until you get to Canada. They'll laugh at anything. They're like the kid with one ear. You wouldn't call him retarded but….
What topics are the most controversial?
One of the segments in my show revolves around this tiny but violent teenage girl I represented on my first day as criminal defence attorney. I used to say that if this were a movie she'd be played by one of the Olsen twins, but not Ashley, the nice one. She'd be played by Mary Kate, the coked-up anorexic one who killed Heath Ledger. Sometimes there would be audible gasping. Listen, all I'm saying is that you don't get to be a teenage billionaire unless you're willing to have a few people whacked. In the old days, when someone found a body they'd call the Godfather. Now they call Mary Kate. I find that suspicious.
But eventually I cut it from the act because I don't want the police to find my dead body in an alley with my skull crushed by a tiny pair of Manolo Blahnik strappy sandals and maybe an incredibly expensive pair of giant black sunglasses with blood splatters hastily dropped in a nearby dumpster. If it does happen, tell the cops to look for the nearest miniscule billionaire draped in a giant shawl and clutching a latte in one hand and a couple dozen Gucci bags in the other. She did it.
What's the worst show you've ever had?
I was booked into the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas to do three shows a night for a week. The Riviera is the shittiest hotel in Vegas, and that is a tough list to top. You have to be worse than the one's they've already blown up. It's a filthy, stinking shithole. But that wasn't the problem. The problem was that it was Rodeo Week, and not the fun, fabulous Gay Rodeo where you get to see some guy dressed as Posh roping a goat or tough girl tackling a steer and branding it with the hot iron she's holding in her teeth. This was the real shit kicking, shit for brains rodeo.
I was awash in a sea of cowboys wearing ten-gallon idiot hats and too-tight Wrangler jeans with their pointy-boots and those giant, shiny belt buckles. Why the giant buckle? I think it's so that they can find their dicks when they're drunk. And they've all got their arms around their little fillies who are all wearing the same blue, denim dress with orange make-up over their sunburnt faces and their bangs teased up into a little satellite dish. Let me tell you, those satellites are not picking up any signals.
All week long, I'd be up on stage telling my funny stories and they'd be looking up at me with their eyes swimming in cheap beer and their minds on the quick, unsatisfying sex they're going to have as soon as they get back to their hotel rooms. They'd shout, "I don't git you! Where's Carrot Top?" And I'd shout back, "I hope a Bronco breaks your balls off so you can't breed!" By the end of the week, I was so strung out from listening to the rodeo crowd shouting, "Yee haw!" or "Miss Patsy needs to go tinky-wink", I quit for a few years and went to law school. Other than that, I've never really had a bad show or a bad review, although my standards are pretty high. Anything less than "This show stinks!" or "Suffocating your dying grandmother has more laughs than this turkey" is considered a winner.
I was once kicked off a radio show in Colorado and escorted out of the building during a panel discussion on the "funny" news of the day. The topic was a man who had just had his penis bitten off by a pitbull whilst trying to have anal intercourse with it. The rest of the panel bemoaned an unbelievable act of animal cruelty, and then I suggested that the next person who tried it should begin with something easier to handle like an old poodle, maybe one with just three legs, and then work up to the feistier breeds. Common sense, People.
"I need the gays! What performer doesn't? I'm guilty of many sins but I'm not too proud to beg."
What was the best?
Any show where everyone walks out alive is a success, and if just one person has an orgasm I've done my job. It infuriates the ushers, though. I can't tell you how many times an usher has shouted, "And just who is supposed to clean up this mess?" But clearly, although the show is about me, there are three female characters that people love to quote back to me.
The first is Mary Applebaum, the conniving little vixen who stole the 5th Grade Book Report Championship from me. The second is Amy, the aforementioned "alleged" criminal who all but tried to eat me while I defended her. The third is Lisa, the Chinese hooker who helped me celebrate my 36th birthday in a Beijing whorehouse. And my mum appears at various intervals throughout the play…and sometimes in the audience. She's like a stalker. I never know when she's going to show up but if you're at the show and a staunch American woman stands up 20 minutes in and shouts, "That's not exactly how I remember it!" that would be me mum.
I come from sort of a strange family. When my parents met, my father was a missionary from Utah. My mother was a cocktail waitress from Las Vegas. I like to tell people I was the only hard-drinking Mormon in kindergarten who could shoot craps. She's always barging in my dressing room while I've got no pants on and I'm trying to remove the safety pins from the undershirt I've fastened to my knickers (it's a great look - very Alan Cumming), and she'll say, "When are you going to stop being such an evil queen?" I'll say, "It's not evil queen. It's drama queen." She'll say, "I don't care if you're a Dairy Queen. You should get a real job!"
When you're in Edinburgh, do you plan to go out on the scene at all?
I know only one Scottish guy and he's straight and married. Immediately after my first show I'm hopping on a train to Glasgow where he's taking me to a match between the Glasgow Rangers and the FBK Kaunas, what that is. Will there be triple-toe loops? I hope so. I've never been to any sort of European sporting event. However, having recently discovered though that I am one-eight Scottish - my great, great grandparents were MacFarlane's from Killin - I plan to wear the colours of my clan and crush the skulls of my enemies with beer bottles…or something like that.
The other side of my family was a pack of hunchbacks who lived outside of Liverpool and worked in a brass factory polishing buckles. They were widely known to be morons. I also have this sort of "conditional agoraphobia" problem. When I'm touring I tend to spend the 23 hours a day I'm not on stage in my hotel room laying in front of the television watching either CNN International or home improvement shows. I can switch back and forth for so many hours and so many days that the line between world news and bathroom renovations is often blurred. I was in Toronto on the day Saddam Hussein was captured. All day long the news channels showed the same 20 seconds of him standing in a jail cell having his teeth examined. I kept thinking, "Someone should paint that wall behind him a Robin's Egg Blue and maybe toss in a few funky pillows." But I digress.
I do hope to see the scene. I'm very curious. Scottish gays are a total mystery to me. But my participation will be as a still, cool observer much like the anthropologist who goes to Africa to see the giraffes or Las Vegas to see Cher - an untamable animal is best observed in its natural habitat. My partner Eric and I are going to be married in San Francisco in September. He's meeting me in London after the festival and we're doing our honeymoon in Greece first. If we still can stand each other after two weeks of island hopping in the blazing heat with worthless American dollars we'll tie the knot. Yet though we've been California State-Registered Domestic Partners for years, my father's side of the family - the Mormon, Republican, George Bush-loving, global warming-denying side of the family still refuses to call him by his name. Eric is a native Spanish speaker. The Mormons refer to him as my "Spanish friend." I don't care. His family calls me, "El gigante blanco - the white giant."
After the festival, what's next for you?
Probably cancer and some radiation. But I'll survive. I survived two deadly Brown Recluse spider bites in one year. The first time I didn't know I'd been bitten because the bite was on my ass and I frequently have pimples in that area so I didn't really notice anything out of the ordinary right away, only that I had a headache so bad I thought my head would explode. I was living in Palm Springs at the time. Palm Springs is a desert oasis outside of Los Angeles. Straight people go there to golf. Gay people go there renovate mid-Century houses. Everyone goes to drink and have plastic surgery. You can Botox while you Detox.
It's full of really, really old people with no wrinkles and giant lips trying to stay alive as long as possible. It's nearly impossible to die there. Emergency rooms on every corner. Like Starbucks. There are places where you can get an EKG and a latte at the same time. The doctor looked at my tongue, checked my eyes, looked into my ears, and said, "Well, I guess it's a brain tumor." What kind of idiot says, "I guess it's a brain tumor?" What happened to, "Let's go into my office? Bring a loved one and some tissue." You can't just say, "I guess it's a brain tumor!" When the brain scan failed to turn up anything suspicious I said, "Don't you want to see this weird thing on my ass?" He said, "No," and sent me home with a bunch of Demerol. Good times!
But this reminds me of a joke. A gay man walks into his doctor's office and says, "Doctor, my ass is killing me." The doctor says, "Drop your pants, bend over, and let's have a look." The doctor does his examination and says, 'Well, I've got good news, and I've got bad news. The good news is I can see the problem and I guarantee it can be fixed. The bad news is you've got a dozen red roses stuck up your butt." And the man says, "Really? What does the card say?" Bada bing! The cowboys and the Canadians love that one.
"I once stole a pair of Alec Baldwin's underwear from a trailer on a movie set. I had high hopes they would give me some sort of super power or at least more chest hair but alas…I got nothing but an itch."
Have any famous people come to see your show?
Only one - J.Lo came when I was in Winnipeg. She was filming a movie there with Richard Gere. I was too nervous to look at her during the show but afterward I stood on the stage and looked down into the audience and thought, "Wow, just moments ago J.Lo's ass was sitting right there…and there…and there…and there."
I have had a lot of weird celebrity encounters. There was the night Rosie 'O Donnell hit on me. There was a very ugly encounter with Geraldo Rivera. A tussle over the last of the macaroni and cheese with Sarah Jessica Parker. A fight with Bette Midler over the last hanger in the coat rack on a commuter flight to Los Angeles. Goldie Hawn once tried to force me out of a parking space (she won - big surprise.) I once stole a pair of Alec Baldwin's underwear from a trailer on a movie set. I had high hopes they would give me some sort of super power or at least more chest hair but alas…I got nothing but an itch.
Is there anything you want to add?
Yes! Please come see my show. I need you. Sometimes my shows are entire filled with really, really old straight people. True, they think I'm hilarious but honestly, I'm not always sure they really know who I am. Sometimes after the show some old person will congratulate me on my Oscar for Forrest Gump. I need the gays! What performer doesn't? I'm guilty of many sins but I'm not too proud to beg.
Listen, I know one-man fringe shows can be scary but this one isn't. No one dies. No one cries. There's poignancy in the show whatsoever. I don't recite poetry or perform any sort of modern dance. I don't sing show tunes (most of the time). I will not try to make you "think." There will not be a moist-eye in the house at the end of the show (although sometimes the seats are damp but that's the problem of the guy who comes after me.) It's just sixty minutes of funny! Funny, funny, funny and then it's over and then we can go smack the enemies of our clans with beer bottles. You can bring your straight friends. Bring the girl who spills beer on her boobs. Bring your mother. And if those are the same person, next year I will come see your show.
7 Sins, by James Judd
Gilded Balloon
Teviot, Dining Room
13 Bristo Square
Edinburgh
0131 668 1633 / www.gildedballoon.co.uk
30 July-25August 2008
The Edinburgh Festival takes place from 30 July - 25 August 2008. Find out more at www.edcomfest.com. Plus, check out our guide to the Edinburgh Scene.
Want to see more from comedians appearing at this year's Edinburgh Comedy Festival? Buy the Pam Ann - Come Fly With Me DVD online now. You'll save money to put towards Chewin' the Fat - The Complete Collection, featuring Karen Dunbar.