Maxine Lapiduss: From "Roseanne" and "Ellen" to Variety With a Twist

If you tuned in to Bravo's Situation: Comedy last year, you saw producer Maxine Lapiduss dispensing no-nonsense wisdom to fledgling screenwriters as they navigated the precarious path of TV sitcom development. But the real (not “reality-based”) Maxine Lapiduss is no stern taskmaster, in fact, she's been making people laugh for years. Her stand-up act was featured in the documentary Wisecracks, and she has written and produced some of the most successful and ground-breaking sitcoms in television history, including Home Improvement, Dharma and Greg, Ellen, and Roseanne.

A gifted entertainer in her own right, Lapiduss performed stand-up comedy for many years, and in 1997 brought her wry look at Hollywood, SITUATION TRAGEDY: Observations on 10 years in Hollywood...with Bongos, to the stage in Los Angeles. The show won 14 Dramalogue Awards and was nominated for the Ovation Award (the Los Angeles equivalent of the Obie) for Best New Musical.

This week, Lapiduss returns to the stage again in Los Angeles with Mackie's Com-Varie-Ality Show! Co-written with Wendy Miller and starring Lapiduss, the show was partly inspired by the dismal state of television, over-crowded as it is with uninspired reality programming. Combining comedy, variety and “reality” (hence the name), the show harkens back to the television variety programs of the 1970's like The Sonny and Cher Show and The Flip Wilson Show.

In it, the multi-talented Lapiduss riffs on entertainment, politics, and being queer in Hollywood, in-between musical numbers with a talented cast and guest stars Deborah Gibson (aka former teen pop star Debbie Gibson) and Wendy and Lisa.

The knowing queer humor in Mackie's Com-Varie-Ality Show! is informed by years of work in an industry dominated by straight white guys. Initially, Lapiduss says, her popular stand-up act was anything but gay. “I would do observational humor and parody songs and all kinds of impressions. I wasn't out, I was still kind of doing this generic act. I didn't talk about dating, so I talked about everything else.”

That quickly changed when Lapiduss joined the creative team behind Roseanne as producer/writer (1990-92) and the gay character Leon (played by Martin Mull) was introduced on the show. “All this gay-bashing started happening, and I was hearing these butt-f***ing jokes, endlessly, for days and days and days. Finally I just said, ‘Guys, I have something to tell you. Could we ease up on the butt-f***ing jokes, cause I'm a big queer too.' So once that was out, it was great. It relieved all the tension.”

Coming out to her fellow writers on Roseanne had an unexpected impact on her stand-up career. “When that happened, I felt like I couldn't do my act anymore. Because I didn't have an act, I was becoming a different person. So I actually stopped performing for many years, and then the next time I performed was when I did my theatrical show, Situation Tragedy, which was about writing on sitcoms for so many years and being out in Hollywood.”

As it turned out, working on Roseanne was so rewarding that Lapiduss didn't really miss stand-up. She remembers, “There were a lot of stories that were very personal to me. Like Sara Gilbert's character going through depression when she was a teenager--which I did when I was 15, and thought about killing myself, a lot of it probably stemming from being gay and just not having an outlet. So there was that, and there was bringing on Sandra Bernhard's character, and just a lot of fun stuff that allowed me to have an outlet and a voice.”