Judy Gold: Very Special Episodes

For comedian Judy Gold, having older parents meant that feedback in her household was often quite negative. "I remember the first time I did the Tonight Show. My mother leaves me a message, 'So...I...watched...and there are so many commercials! I mean, I waited and waited...' I'm like, 'Hello! Are your other kids doing the Tonight Show?'" she told host Ophira Eisenberg. "But you don't appreciate it until you're old...and they're dead."

Appropriately, Gold is guest-starring in a new Showtime series, I'm Dying Up Here, set in the Los Angeles stand-up comedy scene of the '70s. Gold began her own career about a decade later, in the eighties. "At that time...the clubs stayed open till two, three in the morning...I would go on for some mob boss and his mistress and two drunk people in the corner, but I knew I was funny...because the band laughed...that's how you know you're funny, cause they hear everything."

As a gay and Jewish comedian, Gold has always felt that being true to herself was particularly important, even when managers would advise her to censor her work. "I had so much material from being a new mom...all these things would happen and I was like, you know, every comic talks about their families, and you have to just treat it as it is, which is a non-issue." Over the years, she's become an advocate for coming out "so [that] everyone knows they know and love a gay person, or trans person, you know?"

Today, Gold hosts a weekly podcast called Kill Me Now, where she and fellow celebrities sit down and vent about what makes them angry. "Social media, people looking at their phones...or blatant unfairness" are all top picks.

To celebrate her well-documented love for sitcoms, we decided to give Judy the synopses from particularly weird episodes of classic 70s sitcoms, and have her guess the sitcom.

Heard on Judy Gold: Very Special Episodes

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