Judy Tenuta, Accordion-Playing Comedian, Dies at 72
thewrap.comJudy Tenuta Kicks Cancer’s Ass,” which was shot at her home during the pandemic. Tenuta was born on Nov. 7, 1949, in Oak Park, Illinois, where she grew up in a staunchly Irish Catholic neighborhood.
She attended the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she majored in theater. Her interest in comedy took hold when she took an improv comedy class with the famed Chicago group The Second City, and she began opening for other comedians.Her mother, a fan of Lawrence Welk, encouraged her to learn to play the accordion and Tenuta began incorporating it into her act.
The accordion is currently on display at the Hollywood Museum in Los Angeles.She left Chicago and moved to New York City in the late ’80s to host an HBO comedy special with Ellen DeGeneres, Rita Rudner, Martin Short and Paula Poundstone.
By the mid 1980s, Tenuta gained a degree of notoriety for a series of television ads for MTV and Diet Dr Pepper.Her act featured her as different offbeat characters, “The Petite Flower,” “Fashion-Plate Saint,” ”Queen of Candy-Pants,” “Princess of Panty Shields,” “Empress of Elvis Impersonators” and the “Buffer of Foreheads,” as well as “The Love Goddess” and “Aphrodite of the Accordion.” Onstage, she appeared in “The Vagina Monologues” and “Menopause the Musical” both in LA and Chicago.
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