JUDY TOLL: THE FUNNIEST WOMAN YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF

D: Gary Toll

She was a natural show-off, a “sweet little blond Jewish angel” who could carry off uncomfortably intimate comedy: about her obsessions with men, about drugs and sex and problems with food, about an itch for stardom so maddening it sent her into the arms of Scientology. She was selling Chipwiches at the La Brea Tar Pits when Ivan Reitman called to buy the rights to her Groundlings play (it became 1988’s Casual Sex?), but Judy Toll never became a household name, even when she took on Andrew Dice Clay with a gender-bending parody of his act and guest-wrote for Sex and the City. Judy was not “sitcom pretty,” and she never quite broke through before dying of melanoma at age 44. Behind the camera, Toll’s brother Gary wisely avoids sentimentalizing her illness, and his perspective on her foibles – her hypochondria, her desperation to get married – is clear-eyed but loving. – Marrit Ingman

Saturday, Oct. 13, 12:30pm, Stephen F. Austin; Sunday, Oct. 14, 4:30pm, Alamo Drafthouse Lake Creek

This article appears in October 5 • 2007.

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James graduated from Columbia University in 2000 and moved to Austin a year later. Ever since, he has followed the arts and video game scene in ATX, editing and writing stories for the Chronicle along the way. Over his more than 20 years with the paper he has climbed the "corporate" ladder from lowly intern to managing editor.

Marjorie Baumgarten is a film critic and contributing writer at The Austin Chronicle, where she has worked in many capacities since the paper's founding in 1981. She served as the Chronicle's Film Reviews editor for 25 years.