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Indulgent grandparents and well-fed friends aren’t the most demanding ., but when Melissa Rauch picked up the microphone at her bat mitzvah party, she was ready nonetheless — she’d been working on her comedy routine for a while.
“I did a tight 10 [minutes] for everyone in between dinner and dessert because this was a captive audience,” Rauch says over Zoom.
An executive producer of the newly revamped “Night Court” — which she refers to as a “new boot” rather than a reboot —
Rauch also plays Judge Abby Stone, the daughter of the US show’s original Judge Harold J. Stone.
As a child, Rauch was a huge fan of the original NBC sitcom, which ran from 1984 to 1992.
She spoke about her love of the show at a panel for the Television Critics Association in Los Angeles this past winter.
I’m remember being a kid, growing up in New Jersey and finding out that ‘Night Court’ was not filmed in New York, going on a trip with my parents and saying, ‘Where is ‘Night Court’?
I want to see ‘Night Court,’ and finding out that these guys are all the way in LA,” she said.
In an interview for The Times of Israel, Rauch reflects on how from her last series — the beloved
“The Big Bang Theory,” which ended four years ago — to her new show, all of her comedy stems from her Judaism.
I think so much about family dinners, often around Jewish holidays,” Rauch says.
“Celebrating Passover with my family is one of my favorites.
Those dinners were just filled with laughter. And that’s where I really fell in love with the idea of making people laugh because it was doing imitations of my mother.
That became such a driving force of, oh, you can create happiness for other people. And there’s something addictive about that.”
And that imitation of her mom? It became her signature characteristic on “The Big Bang Theory.”
As Bernadette Rostenkowski-Wolowitz, Rauch sounded like she was ingesting helium while amped up on speed.
She did that impersonation at her bat mitzvah party and it killed.
That was in her home state of New Jersey, which Rauch still seriously pines for, even while living it up in sunny LA.
In fact, Rauch jokes, she’s so Jersey that she’s just “one bottle of hair dye from turning into Snooki.”