Cabaret Sensation: Jackie's Hilarious Tales of Hoffman

Add Carol Burnett's rubber face, Sarah Silverman's outrage, Ethel Merman's vocal throttle, and Gladys Kravitz's world view, and you've got Jackie Hoffman, the Xanadu costar who has long been the most versatile Jew in New York. I saw Jackie at Joe's Pub last night in her riotously funny cabaret act called Scraping the Bottom: The Most Offensive Songs of Jackie Hoffman, about which she explained, "I spent the last year on Broadway playing a muse and I couldn't come up with an idea for a new show!" That's OK! The resulting retrospective was a hilarious yelp at everything from the club itself ("I'd perform in a toilet," sang Jackie, "and it looks like I am!") to people who make out in front of her ("I'll make a deal," our bedraggled star belted. "Don't kiss while I eat and I won't shit on your meal.") But Jackie's mainly angry at the biz itself, especially since she recently got to film scenes with Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher for a movie called What Happens in Vegas, "and then they replaced me—with Queen Latifah!" Even more upsettingly, Jackie developed a uterine fibroid that scarily kept growing (though she was thrilled it wasn't a baby.) Having undergone a sonogram, she decided, "At least my UTERUS is in films." Pause. "Replaced by Queen Latifah!" Jackie turned out to be fine, so let's make her—and her removed noncancerous growth—big stars already. They can be the new Judds.