December 8, 1995
MATTHEW BERSON
Bulletin Correspondent
"I've wanted to be a comedian since I was 13 years old," laughs "Roseanne" staff writer Cathy Ladman. "It took me 13 years after that to get the guts to do it."
At her office in the TV studio, the New York-born comedian, now 40, is clearly as comfortable with her success as with her East Coast Jewish origins.
She says her parents still live in the same house -- in Queens -- where she grew up. And for all she knows there's still a box up in the attic full of all the old records that introduced her to the funny people she emulates.
"Nichols and May, Vaughn Meader and his `First Family' album," she begins. Other late-'60s/early-'70s influences she cites -- Robert Klein, George Carlin, Lily Tomlin and Bill Cosby -- evoke an era when stand-up comedy was reaching new heights.
After an early stage experience at Connecticut's Camp Kendale, where she played Princess Winifred in "Once Upon a Mattress," she took theater and film classes throughout her years at SUNY Albany. In the late '70s, while teaching school in Philadelphia, she saw hot stand-up comic Rich Hall do his schtick at a local club.
"I went Wednesday night, and went back the following Wednesday." She was smitten.
But at the time, she laughs, "I was 22 years old and horribly afraid."
Soon afterward she moved to Manhattan, determined to launch her comedy career.
"I just put it in my [journal]: `I'm gonna do it this day.'" On open-mike night at a club called Good Times, "I did."
She spent the next four years working the New York clubs, and in 1985 moved to Los Angeles with her boyfriend.
"We broke up the day after we moved all our stuff to L.A."
Jump-cut past a few years of hard work and a lot of road time under the guidance of "a very aggressive agent." Ladman was getting better fast. After starring in her own HBO comedy special, "One-Night Stand," she was named "Best Female Stand-Up Comic" at the 1992 American Comedy Awards.
"It was really nice and validating," says Ladman, who now lives in Santa Monica while maintaining a residence in Manhattan. "But I was really trying to please my parents."
She draws heavily on her relatives in her work onstage, which is largely autobiographical.
"[My family] happens to be Jewish," she explains, adding that Jews and non-Jews alike can find much with which to identify in her routines.
"It's not a religious thing, it's a cultural thing." Her family, she says, "had all the angst and arguing -- all the bad things -- and none of the dancing, none of the food. It was all about the pain."
Now she turns that pain into laughter.
Since June, Ladman has been a staff writer for "Roseanne."
"I've learned more from the show `Roseanne' than the person Roseanne," she says of the program's infamously difficult star. "I guess I actually have learned a lot from her, but nothing you can print."
Currently collecting ideas for a possible TV program of her own, Ladman is working on a one-woman show which she hopes to perform not in small clubs but in larger venues.
"I just want to work [with] people facing forward," she pleads, alluding to the fact that in larger theaters, the seats are bolted to the floor while in clubs, seats can move around. "That's all I ask."
Remember that request when you go to see Ladman perform at this year's "Evening of Kung Pao Kosher Comedy": Jewish comedy performed in a Chinese restaurant over not one but two evenings -- which happen to be Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
"I'm more of a pasta-and-pizza gal," she notes. "But I do like Chinese food."
"An Evening of Kung Pao Kosher Comedy"; Dec. 24 at 6 p.m. (sold out) and 10 p.m., Dec. 25 at 5 p.m. and 9 p.m.; Hunan Restaurant, 924 Sansome at Broadway, San Francisco. Tickets available at all BASS ticket outlets and at Modern Times Bookstore, 888 Valencia St., S.F. Information: (415) 431-7363.
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