Erin Judge

July 21, 2006

CAMBRIDGE -- At 6:30 p.m. on a recent Sunday, a time when most comedians are still recovering from their weekend gigs, Erin Judge was multitasking. She sat with a group of writers at the Comedy Studio, folding programs and going over material.

The loose theme for that night's show was ``grow up," and the sketch team -- Judge, Arielle Goldman , Josh Gondelman , and Andrea Henry (Eric Cheung showed up later) -- batted around ideas about what might cause a quarter-life crisis. The conversation turned to Gondelman, a Spanish teacher by day, who related the career aspirations of one of his students: moon ninja. ``You mean a moonja?" Gondelman asked the kid. The writers crack up and immediately start working a moonja into the act.

``As soon as I get there," Judge says, ``I laugh hysterically with my friends for an hour and we generate material that we then have the privilege to showcase."

Judge, who's all of 25, may be the hardest - working woman in local comedy. She's a regular at the Walsh Brothers' popular Thursday night ``Great and Secret Show" and at Elisha Yaffe's ``Zebro" on Tuesdays, both at ImprovBoston's Inman Square theater. If that weren't enough, she's also host, head writer, roadie, and show runner for her own show, ``Erin Judge Presents . . .," which she's fashioned into a proving ground for the area's most promising young comics and sketch performers.

``There's so much talent right now," she says. ``It's very exciting."

Judge has had her own show before. As a senior at Wellesley College, she ran ``Last Call," a weekly improv show that allowed her to get comfortable onstage without a script. She liked making people laugh, but she didn't think about trying to make a living as a comedian until she graduated in 2002 to a bleak, post-9/11 job market. She didn't want to go back to Brooklyn, where she was born, or Plano, Texas , where she was raised. Boston felt like home.

Judge took a series of temp jobs to pay the bills and started hitting the clubs for fun. But she'd only done real stand-up once, and then only after a friend signed her up for an open mike and told her she had three days to come up with three minutes of material. She discovered she really enjoyed it. Eventually, she had to choose between grad school or comedy.

``I was unhappy with not having an idea of what I wanted to do with my life," she says. ``I went from not taking [comedy] very seriously to wanting it to be my real career in about a year."

A recent Sunday show drew a crowd of about 30, with the usual contingent of comics hanging out in the back. Doing the requisite crowd work, Judge finds a Georgia native and references ``Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil." When her crack falls short, she changes gears and takes a jab at overeducated Cambridge audiences instead.

``I try to talk about television in Cambridge and people are like, `We don't watch television,' " she said. ``Now I try to talk about books and people are like, `Oh, we don't read . . . bestsellers.' "

Her sarcasm makes for a nice recovery. Later on, she challenges the audience to name Pi to 10 digits, and a BU student beats out two Cal Tech alumni in the front row. ``Ha!" she says to the crowd. ``I hope your minds are blown by the way we're breaking down stereotypes at the Comedy Studio."

For the younger comics in the cast, ``Erin Judge Presents" is a way to plug themselves into the scene and get regular work. Goldman says Judge e-mailed her last spring when the show started, giving her the script and telling her to show up dressed as Carrie Bradshaw from HBO's ``Sex and the City."

It was a somewhat spontaneous invitation, but the two had gotten to know each other from playing the Studio, and Goldman was happy to work with Judge. ``She was one of the first people in the comedy community that really started talking to me as a newcomer, giving me advice, acting like I was a real comic."

For Judge, hosting has an entirely different rhythm than stand-up. It forces her to abandon her carefully written material and engage the audience directly with quick one- or two-liners.

``Sometimes the tried and true jokes fall a little bit flat when I'm hosting just because the audience is more interested in seeing me be more dynamic and more interested in them and more reacting to them," she says. ``When I start sounding like the other comedians, they become a little bit less engaged."

That said, if you catch Judge doing stand-up at the Walsh Brothers' ``Great and Secret Show," you'll see a sharper, more deliberate performer. She'll dissect the clueless beauty pageant winners who were sent to her high school to lecture about drug abuse. Or she'll describe in hilarious detail a conversation about bisexuality with her Brooklyn grandmother.

Dave and Chris Walsh have been working with Judge since her first days in Boston comedy, and they're impressed with how far she's come.

``I really admire her point of view and the - Boston Globe