Actors - Janeane Garofalo

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	Actors - Janeane Garofalo

Janeane Garofalo (born September 28, 1964 in Newton, New Jersey), is an American stand-up comedian, actress, political activist, and radio host on Air America Radio.

Background

Garofalo's father is an Italian American former executive named Carmine Garofalo and her Irish American mother Joan, who died of cancer, was once a secretary. During high school, her family relocated to Houston, Texas, where the trauma of the move prompted her famously self-loathing acerbic persona to begin to blossom. While studying history at Providence College, Garofalo entered a comedy talent search sponsored by the Showtime cable network, winning the title of "Funniest Person in Rhode Island." Her original gimmick was to read off of her hand, which was not successful in subsequent performances. Dreaming of earning a slot on the writing staff of the Late Night With David Letterman program, she became a professional standup upon graduating college with degrees in History and American Studies but struggled for a number of years, working briefly as a bike messenger in Boston.

Entertainment career

Comedy

The winner of numerous comedy awards and recognitions, she officially began her career in stand-up comedy in the late 1980s during the grunge era. Her appearance was often in line with grunge style: disheveled with thick black glasses and unkempt hair. Her comedy is often self-deprecating; she made fun of popular culture and the pressures put on women to live up to media-created body ideals.

Garofalo is a self-described pessimist: "I guess I just prefer to see the dark side of things. The glass is always half empty. And cracked. And I just cut my lip on it. And chipped a tooth."

Garofalo's comedy shows involve her and her notebook, which is filled with years' worth of article clippings and random observations that she uses for reference during her act for direct quotes, as with new articles, and to enhance the unprepared, fully conversational nature of her standup. Garofalo feels she does not tell jokes but makes observations and hopefully gets laughs.

Garofalo and comedian Marc Maron helped organize the weekly alternative "Eating It" standup comedy show, with different line-ups each week, which played for years at the Luna Lounge in New York's Lower East Side before the bar was finally razed. Later Garofalo and Maron would work together again to create a liberal radio network.

In April 2004 she was selected as #99 on Comedy Central's list of the 100 greatest standups of all time.

Television

Her television series debut was on the short-lived The Ben Stiller Show on Fox in 1992, on which she was a cast member alongside longtime friends Ben Stiller, Bob Odenkirk, Andy Dick, and David Cross (who was a bit player). A chance meeting on the set of the show led her to be offered the role of Paula on The Larry Sanders Show on HBO, earning her two Emmy Award nominations in 1996 and 1997.

Following The Ben Stiller Show's cancellation, Garofalo joined the cast of Saturday Night Live
in its ill-fated 1994-95 season. As detailed in Tom Shale's book Live from Saturday Night and mentioned in Jay Mohr's Gasping for Airtime : Two Years in the Trenches of Saturday Night Live Upon arrival at the show, she gave an interview in which she called fellow cast member Adam Sandler's comedy "childish." Writers on the show expressed dismay at what they perceived as Garofalo's negative attitude towards the show. According to them, Garofalo was insecure, tearing everyone else down to bring herself up, and she rarely assisted in writing sketches, never doing an "all-nighter" for a skit as many crewmembers did. The bitter atmosphere caused extreme discomfort and unhappiness for Garofalo and the show itself, and she left in January 1995, mid-season. She claimed that the reason for leaving was weak material and a sexist attitude on the show. The material on SNL at this time was mediocre, and other writers, such as Bruce Vilanch, have stated in interviews that many male members of the show frown upon women and homosexuals.

Garofalo has been offered many television series roles but has accepted few; for instance, she turned down the role of Monica, a role written with her or her type in mind and for which she was the first actress offered, on the hit NBC sitcom Friends. Two Garofalo-starring television pilots, an ABC show called Slice O'Life, in 2003, about a reporter sentenced to sappy human interest stories that appear at the end of news broadcast, and an NBC program called All In, in 2005, based on the family life and professional successes of poker star Annie Duke, were not picked up by their respective networks.

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