Hey Grandma: Do you ‘Party’?

There's a fruitcake lady in my late night media

By Ben Clark

Click to see full size
Illustration by Sarah Hotckiss
Fruicake Lady

"Ask the Fruitcake Lady," for the uninitiated (read: the pop culturally inept), is a fixture of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. The occasional segment features viewers asking the 93-year-old woman inane, pre-recorded questions like, "My teenage son sleeps all the time. How do I get him to help around the house?" She offers replies like, "Well, all you got to do is get up there and say, 'Get your ass out of the bed! And I mean get it out!'"

In the same episode, David from Ireland asks, "Which toilet paper should I buy, the one ply or the two ply?" The Fruitcake Lady tells him, "Well, you know something, your ass will not know the difference, so why would you worry about that? I can't believe that you would actually ask someone something like that.ask your ass."

I've always been a Letterman guy; he appeals to my sophomoric but intellectually smug East Coast persona. I've always fancied Leno as more of a Midwestern-style values pusher, more bland than hilarious. But the Fruitcake Lady-she has most of my age bracket second-guessing our Late Show preference. When a young man asks if his children are going to be ugly based on the premise that his beautiful fiancé has an ugly sister and ugly parents, you have a late night talk show. But when an old woman replies, "Yes, yes. You're gonna have ugly children. You can depend on that. Absolutely"-then you have television worth watching.

The repercussions? Video clips are spreading across the internet like viruses. At water coolers and kegs, on blogs and message boards across the country, people are talking about how funny it is to hear an old woman say "ass" on TV. Hundreds of ornery grandparents are out fishing for an agent, shopping around videocassettes of themselves making fun of people in a bingo hall, looking for a last shot at the fifteen minutes that passed them by.

But Fruitcake Lady did not come out of thin air. The phenomenon that has become the Fruitcake Lady began in 2000, when Marie Rudisill took issue with Leno's seemingly endless stream of holiday jokes making fun of fruitcake. In numerous pro-fruitcake letters addressed to the producers of the Tonight Show, Rudisill attempted to restore fruitcake's reputation. In the hands of an expert such as herself, Rudisill wrote, the butt end of Mr. Leno's cruel jokes could become a delicious holiday treat.

Insofar as publishing a book makes you an expert in a field, Marie Rudisill was, indeed, a fruitcake expert. In a move that some might deem exploitative-capitalizing on the fame of a dead relative-she had published a cookbook entitled Fruitcake, Memories of Truman Capote & Sook, one of Capote's cousins. With what must have been a legendary feat of public relations on the part of her cookbook promoter, Rudisill landed an appearance on The Tonight Show in December 2000, just in time for Christmas. She taught Leno and guest Mel Gibson how to make fruitcake, appealing to "God, Almighty" several times during the course of the lesson in the hopes that He, in His mercy, might help the men follow her simple instructions. She corrected virtually every task they attempted to complete, leading Leno to ask if she was a bossy lady. "When you're my age," she said, "you have to be." In subsequent appearances, she cooked cherry pie with the equally clueless Cuba Gooding, Jr. and stuffed a turkey with culinary miscreant Hugh Grant.

Proximity To Death Incites Laughter

In those early days, it was not entirely clear if Rudisill was funny like my uncle who gets drunk and tells dirty jokes or funny like my uncle's dog who chases his tail around after he's been slipped a few of my uncle's beers. That is to say, it's difficult to determine, looking back at the tapes, if the audience is laughing with the Fruitcake Lady or laughing at her.

Old people usually incite nervous laughter from younger populations by very nature of their oldness. The elderly remind us of our own mortality, which makes most of us uncomfortable. There is also the possibility that one of them could drop dead at any moment-the impossibility of knowing how one would react in such a situation produces a steady stream of awkward smiles and uneasy chuckles in their presence.

At the same time (and this is where the belly laughs come in), old people are funny because we perceive them as alien to the mainstream adolescent culture that exists in this country. Putting them on television is tantamount to placing them in an environment they understand very differently from us. The environment is not unfamiliar to them, but their familiarity with it is unfamiliar to us-to watch them interact with this environment on our own terms is half the reason for the Fruitcake Lady's success. It is the half in which we laugh at her.

By the time Rudisill came on the show to give a second fruitcake lesson to Leno and Tom Cruise in 2002, it was clear we were laughing with her too. It was also clear that Jay Leno was being upstaged. If you access the archive footage on the NBC website, you can see Rudisill in this particular episode saying, "You take your nuts, and you just take 'em and [here she is interrupted by Leno who tells Cruise to stick his nuts in the molasses].you do this real easy now. Now, I'm telling you now, Jay, when I said put the nuts in that, I mean the walnuts and the pecans. Do you understand that?" Laughter ensues. Towards the end of the segment, when the cakes have been placed in the oven, the Fruitcake Lady says to Cruise, "Gimme your hands here, you bum, you. God, Almighty-come here, Tom." And she wipes off his hands, cooing all along, until Leno tries to move things along. She reprimands him as she continues to wipe Cruise's hands, "Can't you leave people alone? Have you got to butt into everything?"

This was the last appearance the Fruitcake Lady made in person on The Tonight Show. I believe-and I freely admit to dramatizing things here-that Jay felt threatened by a force with which he could not contend. The Fruitcake Lady had been far funnier than him and had wiped batter off Tom Cruise's hands, an act he himself had always fantasized about. He probably walked off the show that afternoon, screamed at his producers for putting that "old, worthless hag" on with him, and when they tried to show him how well they'd done in the ratings that night, he lost it. Leno ran down the hall to Rudisill's dressing room and knocked down the door, using his chin as a battering ram.

"Alright, Grandma," he said, "Here's how it's going to go down! I made you, and I can unmake you. You think you can stand out there and one-up me, but you're headed home to Florida and you're going to die there, alone! You're never going to work in this town again!"

"You can't do that to me you hooligan, I'm Truman Capote's aunt!" Rudisill replied and then kicked him in the groin.

Later that week, executives for the show decided that they couldn't have Leno angry but they also couldn't give up the ratings-machine that Rudisill had become. And so, after extensive discussion, they settled on creating an "Ask the Fruitcake Lady" segment, filmed monthly in Florida, which would never require Leno to be in the same room with Rudisill again. Jay pretends to be happy about introducing her bits, but if you look at the television from the right angle, there is an unmistakable glint of rage in his eye.

Grandchildren Be Spouting Rhymes

The second foundation of Marie Rudisill's success is that she "gets" it. The Fruitcake Lady understands the teen-centric culture in which we operate. When Cody from Winacha, Washington asks, "I just started dating a new girl, when is it okay to start French kissing?" the Fruitcake Lady tells him, "Well.I guess that time has come to French kiss her when she permits it, because when you start sticking your damn tongue down her throat, either she likes it or she's gonna knock the living hell out of you."

The Fruitcake Lady's first key to comedic success was based on her oldness, which posits her as an outsider relative to the norms of today's (youth) culture. In fact, the Fruitcake Lady is not as culturally retarded as she initially looks-she throws the word "ass" around liberally and speaks frankly about sex. Her advice to college graduates is "keep your head high and your dress down." As old age is generally associated with encroaching conservativism and anachronistic behavior, the Fruitcake Lady's main asset is her personality: she's modern, and she's no prude. The cultural values we associate with her day and age are, in fact, frozen in time-the time of her own youth, a time of fighting Germans and cooking fruitcakes. So when the Fruitcake Lady's outsider façade is breached by the revelation that she is in many ways an insider, we are shocked into laughter. The powers of perceived senility combine with the speech and sensibilities of modern life: a pop phenomenon is born.

Ben Clark B'05 is modern, and he's no prude

Back to Top

the college hill independent

http://www.theindy.com