Julie Brown

Julie Brown has kept people rolling in the aisles for years with her movies and stand-up. She is known for taking on her Hollywood comrades with award-winning parody.

Now the comedienne is taking on Lady Gaga and Ke$ha on her new album, Smell the Glamour.

JN: (Jerry Nunn) Hi, Julie. How have you been?

JB: (Julie Brown) I have been good and making this record this year. I have been writing and working. My son got old enough so I figured I can start doing crazy stuff like this again.

JN: Is he embarrassed of you sometimes?

JB: You know what? He isn’t but I don’t talk about it. One of his friends showed him something online and he was so horrified that he stopped looking at it! (both laugh) I have tried to protect him because sometimes it is too insane. I am just his mom, right?

JN: Of course.

JB: He knows it is kind of out there and he also knows that I have a lot of gay fans. We will be out and some gay man will come up to me and say he is fan. This has been happening since he was little.

JN: Where did all the gay fans come from?

JB: I wish I knew. I went to acting school in San Francisco. We wrote a show and I was performing it in nightclubs in the area. It was really outrageous. Everyone was doing Shakespeare and Ibsen. I was eating coffee flavored douche. Suddenly I had gay fans show up. I guess they like the crazy humor especially when women do it.

JN: Gay fans stick with you forever.

JB: That’s the other thing. I have had so many gay men write to me on Facebook and say that my show Just Say Julie on MTV was what they liked growing up in the Midwest. They are my fans forever, which is great as a women and getting older because they still think I am hot and it doesn’t matter.

JN: I watched you making fun of Madonna in the movie Medusa: Dare to be Truthful over and over.

JB: Thank you. That was super fun. I had to deal with Showtime with that project. When Madonna’s movie came out I had to do it. I don’t want people to think that I don’t love her because I really do. But she reveals herself to be such a lunatic!

JN: Yes, and also self-absorbed, living in a weird little world.

JB: Yes! Can you imagine what she is like now after 25 years of that? When nobody tells you “no,” it must be so weird! The movie critics say ‘no” to her, that’s about it.

JN: (both laugh) That’s right. Do you know if she ever saw your parody of her?

JB: Oh, I do. We have some mutual friends. Vince Patterson, who choreographed her tour came over to visit me with a half drunk bottle of champagne and a note that said sarcastically, “ Good luck on your show, from Madonna."

JN: Oh, no!

JB: It’s that funny? Then her agent called my manager and said she really liked it. But I heard later from a mutual friend that she really hated the part where I ask the dancers not to sue me. Because her dancers really did sue her! Remember that?

JN: Yes, you just hit it on the head, so it was sensitive to her.

JB: Exactly and she really hated the dog cemetery scene. I guess she felt it was defiling her mother or something. But she is the one who took a camera crew to her mother’s grave in the first place. I heard there were things she didn’t like about it but she was gracious when it first came out.

JN: Why are you doing a parody of Lady Gaga now? She seems like a good target.

JB: I know. I think it is the same thing as with Madonna. She is a person who we love but it is crazy what they are doing. Part of you just wants to do that. She is just trying to be outrageous. There is not much a message in her, either. A lot like Madonna...

JN: You are doing Ke$ha, also.

JB: Yes. I am working on the video and I don’t think I want to look like her. I think I will do it with a girl my age and we are way to old to be going out and getting drunk. A little like AbFab. I am still thinking about it. What do you think?

JN: That sounds like a great idea. I think both artists need to be taken down a peg. They are too big for their britches.

JB: I think so too. They both became wildly popular and there is not a lot of substance there.

JN: Do you have to pay for rights to the songs?

JB: I don’t because I work around it. They are rewritten so they are not the exact music. Sometimes they let Weird Al do their songs but I just screw around with the chord and change it so I don’t have to. I am referencing it but not doing it exactly.

JN: What projects do you have coming up?

JB: I wrote Camp Rock and I was in it.

Camp Rock 2 is coming out this year but I am not in for the story but I wrote it. The first one was horrible to shoot because I was in the woods of Canada with twenty teenagers! I still get the money if I write it so I am like just send me a check.

JN: That’s great.

JB: I am working on a show called Melissa and Joey. It is a brand new show with Melissa Joan Hart and Joey Lawrence, who is so cute right now. He must be a gay icon. He is adorable. I am doing consulting on that job so I go in twice a week and write jokes and then I leave, the best job ever.

Julie Brown's new singles “Big Clown Pants” and “Another Drunk Chick” are now available on iTunes.