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Rarely does anyone get the chance to tell their own comeback story.
Then again, very few have one as compelling as Julia Scotti.
With the help of Newport News native Susan Sandler — a writer, documentarian and professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts — Scotti has taken control of her narrative, which she fought for nearly half her life.
Sandler’s debut documentary, “Julia Scotti: Funny That Way,” was released Tuesday on major streaming platforms including Amazon Prime and Apple TV.
The film follows Scotti, a stand-up comedian for more than 40 years, as she shares her truths, many of them tucked into slick quips on stage.
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The comedian once toured with Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock, and as far as stages go, she’s been on plenty of them: the small and smoky basement types to the giant and shiny on national television, the kind that comes with the weighty opportunity to make a mark no one can erase.
Scotti’s moment came in 2016 when she auditioned for season 11 of “America’s Got Talent.”
She strolled onto the stage looking nothing like the comedians who had often tried out before; she was a 63-year-old woman from Whiting, New Jersey, in a shimmering baby blue top, silvery hair tufted around her face, her bright blue eyes beaming behind her glasses.
In 90 seconds, Scotti barreled through a routine that was surprising and a touch racy. She earned a standing ovation from the audience and dazzled the judges, Simon Cowell, Howie Mandel, Heidi Klum and Mel B.
After showering her with praise, Mandel asked Scotti why she’d waited so long to get on stage. That’s when she delivered her biggest truth: She was 28 the first time she did stand-up, she told him, and kept with it for 20 years. There were some other issues, she told Mandel. She asked if he wanted to know what they were.
He’d love to, he said.
“For the first 48 years of my life, I was known as Rick Scotti,” she said, tears welling as she talked about being transgender. “This is big for me.”
The judges were momentarily stunned.
“Whether you’re a man or whether you’re a woman, you’re human,” Mandel told her. “And you’re funny, and you’re talented, and you’re brave.”
During a recent Zoom interview with Sandler and Scotti, the comedian described her big TV debut as the “mother of all coming-out stories.” Her revelation was simply a footnote to her time on the show, though. She’d go on to be a finalist that season simply by being herself and making people laugh by being real.
Audiences crowded around Scotti after gigs and asked for hugs, Sandler said, herself included. Sandler said she “fell in love” with Scotti after seeing her perform for the first time in Nantucket, Massachusetts.
They became friends after the show and Sandler initially offered to help Scotti create a one-woman show, but the idea blossomed.
Filming “Funny That Way” took about five years and a ridiculous amount of combing through the artifacts of Scotti’s life — journals, poetry, manuscripts, old home videos and taped routines from way back when. Sandler eagerly consumed it all.
“My agenda was to tell a story about a beautiful human being who has found herself, her voice, her truth. In doing that, her art form has absolutely blossomed.”
In kind, Scotti divulged the details of her life, from struggling with identity and sexuality in her early 20s, to losing contact with her two children because of her transition, to hitting the road for gigs after transitioning, to her failed marriages.
The result is a documentary that is as entertaining as it is endearing.
“Julia is accessible because of who she is,” Sandler said. “Her humanity is part of everything she does.”
It took a long time to get there, Scotti said.
Scotti said she grew up in a dysfunctional Italian Catholic family in New Jersey.
Certainly not “Ozzy and Harriet,” she said.
Scotti knew for years that something was missing from her life.
“I knew at about age 21 that something was not quite right with me like it was with all my peers,” she said. “I thought that I was gay and I had several forays into that world, but each time I would come home and throw up.”
She was still attracted to women, so it had to be something else.
Even after marrying and having two children, Scotti struggled with wanting to be motherly, more nurturing, in a society that told its men to be the strong-and-silent type.
“I think as human beings, we get derailed early on in life by other people’s opinions of what we should be, what we should do and even what education we should have,” Scotti said, describing why it was difficult to find her normal. “It took a lot to break out of that and get away from it.”
After a conversation with an ex-wife, it finally clicked.
“She helped me get to that Road-to-Damascus moment,” Scotti said. “Then, everything just opened up.”
She began transitioning in 2000, long before transgender women were reflected positively in pop culture and many years before people in general would even try to understand instead of judge.
In the film, Scotti speaks at a meeting of PFLAG — Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays — about how difficult it was to find what “normal” was for her. Even though it didn’t look like the version others find for themselves, it was all right. There was light and life at the end of the tunnel.
Though relief came, so did heartbreak. She lost contact with her kids for 15 years and had to step out into the unknown long before much of the world would start to accept her for who she was.
“It was like the opening to the ‘Mr. Bean’ show,” she said. “He’s just thrown down in the middle of the street and there’s this beam of light around him. It was very lonesome, very frightening.”
There were so many misconceptions of who she was back then, like she was ill or an interloper. Some people still have the wrong ideas, she said.
“Take J.K. Rowling, who is just over the top,” she said of the Harry Potter author. “She’s so totally anti-trans, and how my life affects her? I don’t know but it seems to bother her terrifically.”
In 2020, Rowling tweeted a thread of opinions that many people believed to be anti-transgender. The author then published a lengthy blog post about her “five reasons for being worried about the new trans activism.”
Rowling isn’t alone, but all Scotti wants to say to those who feel like Rowling is simple:
“I don’t want to hurt you or hurt your kids. ... I don’t want to do anything other than get up in the morning, go to the diner, have a couple eggs, a cup of coffee, go home and, maybe, fall in love.”
Scotti took a break from the stand-up for a while, working as a teacher for seven years before deciding to get back on stage in 2011.
Back on the road, Scotti even performed at Cozzy’s in Newport News. Cozzy’s owner, Lorraine Cosgrove, was one of the first to give Scotti work after her transition, Scotti said.
Weekend Scoop
She doesn’t have set plans to visit Hampton Roads soon, but she will be performing at Richmond’s Sandman Comedy Club June 24 through 26.
She’s reconnected with her children and shares her love of comedy with her son, Dan, who spends quite a bit of time talking about the art form in the film with Scotti and watching clips of her old stand-up routines.
And the world is finally catching up a bit, Scotti said.
For those who are still a bit behind when it comes to human rights, Scotti slips in subversive jokes — like the one about North Carolina’s bathroom bill that prevented transgender people from using bathrooms that aligned with their gender identity. She nestles them between lines about the pangs of getting old or trying to run a marathon as a smoker.
Though it’s happening less frequently, every once in a while, a comedy club will bill her as “transgender comedian Julia Scotti,” which might’ve caused a profane word to slip out as she spoke.
“It’s like as if that was my first name,” she said. “I just want to be comedian Julia Scotti.”
Amy Poulter, 757-446-2705, amy.poulter@pilotonline.com