The astonishing thing about the opening night of Judy Gold’s annual run at the Post Office Café & Cabaret wasn’t that she killed it. She did kill it, resoundingly, but she’s been performing in Provincetown since 1992, so that is to be expected. What was astounding was that she arrived onstage at all. Thirty-six hours earlier, she had boarded a flight in Jordan following a week spent mostly in Tel Aviv bomb shelters and a border crossing fraught with tension.
Gold had been to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv as part of an Israel Pride peacebuilding mission organized by the Israeli Embassy. It was a trip layered with tragedy: the trip organizer was Sarah Milgram, the young woman who was killed with her boyfriend, Yaron Lischinsky, outside the Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. — she’d been there for a talk about getting aid to Gaza.
A social justice activist, Gold went ahead with the trip and was preparing to return home to New York City when Israel and Iran began exchanging fire. Every so often, she’d post short videos from the shelters. She was struck by the diversity of people waiting together for the next all-clear signal.
“I wish people would go to Israel and see it for themselves,” said Gold. “It’s not all one thing. It’s diverse. The people there are from everywhere.”
Occasionally, she’d furtively record a shirtless muscle bro walking by — letting her gay fans know that even in times of peril hotness finds a way. Although she never loses her sense of humor, Gold is serious about rising anti-Semitism. “It’s a huge problem,” she says. But she’s critical of Netanyahu and says that’s true for many Israelis. As for Trump’s claims about anti-Semitism at universities, the way she sees it, “He’s using that to advance his agenda.”
Still, she says, “If you talk to living Holocaust survivors, they will tell you that the climate here in the U.S. now is exactly what it was in Berlin in the late ’20s, early ’30s” — when the Nazis began gaining power.
Gold is adamant about the need for LGBTQ people, especially trans people, to come out and be seen and counted. Humor can change hearts and minds, she says, but personal connections are even more powerful.
“The only way we’re going to change the world is if you come out,” said Gold. “Trans people have to come out and identify themselves now, just like gay people had to come out and let everyone know that whether they believe it or not, or think it or not, they know and love a gay person. You also probably know and love a trans person.”
Gold has what the smart kids today call “platform agility” — she transitions between stand-up, writing, acting, podcasting, and social media, all the time writing new jokes with a precise awareness of cultural shifts. She is the author of two books: 25 Questions for a Jewish Mother and Yes, I Can Say That: When They Come for the Comedians We Are All in Trouble.
Yes, I Can, published in 2020, is part memoir and part history lesson on free speech. It’s academic and funny. There’s also a lot of insight into how the comedy sausage is made. It should be required reading for anyone thinking of stepping up to an open mic.
What is acceptable to audiences today has contracted in the past few decades. The mention of trigger warnings makes Gold roll her eyes and raise her hands to the sky. And no one rolls her eyes like Gold. It’s all in there — outrage, sorrow, perseverance, and also a quick check to make sure she got a laugh out of it.
The audience hung on Gold’s every word as she talked about her trip. There were rapid shifts between pin-drop silence and explosive laughter. When the war drama could bring down the mood, she’d seamlessly switch to her favorite subjects: being Jewish, motherhood, and people who are annoying.
What a great veteran comic like Gold brings to the stage is total mastery of breath. Breathing is as important to a comedian as it is to a ballet dancer or Olympic runner. The breath must move you from point to point, whether it’s physical, mental, or directorial, while always appearing effortless and unstudied. Hers is all that.
Gold rose to fame in the ’90s alongside a wave of groundbreaking female comics like Janeane Garofolo, Margaret Cho, and Wanda Sykes. Their willingness to reveal their inner lives continues to influence stand-up comedy today. It also still upsets people. Gold says she has the hate texts to prove it.
While her live shows are all about the funny, she hopes to leave the crowd, especially the gay men, inspired to show more support for women. “I often say this at the end of my act: ‘They made L the first letter in LGBTQ because guess who was there for you during your plague?’ ” she says. “Women’s rights are being taken away. We need to be each other’s allies and speak up.”
Her son Ben wandered past the camera as Gold was talking with the Independent from her New York City apartment, sending her on a riff about parenting. When Ben and his brother, Henry, were children, Gold says, she encouraged them to laugh at what they found funny but then to dissect the joke to understand why it was funny. She let them watch Family Guy and South Park. And, she adds, “I was really bad with bedtime.”
Her boys’ childhood summers in Provincetown dispelled the magic of the theater from their imaginations at an early age, she says. “After Henry was born in 1996, I used to go on at the Post Office at seven and Varla would go on at eight-thirty. She would be getting dressed while I was onstage. There were times when I couldn’t find a babysitter, and Henry would be sitting back there with Varla putting her tits on.
“I have to say, as a female comic with children, it’s harder on us,” says Gold. The upside, though: “We laugh a lot. Nothing is off limits.”
Gold is funny and feisty even when she muses on becoming a grandmother. “I can’t wait,” she says, but then again, “There will be my ex, my current partner, and if my ex gets in another relationship there will be that person: I’m going to have to really fight for my position, but I’ll definitely be the fun one.”
Fiercely Funny
The event: What the FU Tour 2025
The time: Every Sun., Tues., and Thurs. through Sept. 11, 7 p.m.
The place: Post Office Café and Cabaret, 303 Commercial St., Provincetown
The cost: $35 to $45 plus fees at postofficecafe.net
