Gary Mazzu, artistic director of the Colorado Renaissance Festival, will always remember how early and how quickly the stands filled for Puke ‘n’ Snot at the Larkspur show.
Monday, Joe Kudla, who has played Thomas Snot, the comedic sword-fighting Shakespearean foil to partner Ralph Puke, played by Mark Sieve, at the annual show in Larkspur, was found dead in his Minneapolis home. He was 58.
Puke ‘n’ Snot performed to full houses in Colorado the past 26 years, including the 32nd annual show that wrapped up Aug. 3, drawing an estimated 225,000 fans.
Kudla was single and survived by an adult daughter.
“Snot left us today,” Sieve said in a statement posted Monday on the duo’s website. ” The Great and Formidable Thomas Snot, 34 years working the dirt circuit, and he didn’t even say goodbye. This morning he finally had a good excuse for missing rehearsal.”
Kudla did not always take care of his health and he was famous for his gallows humor, his friends said.
“Joe was one of those guys who was brutally honest; he just told it like it was,” said H. Rali Gilchrist of Castle Rock, Kudla’s friend for 15 years who had dinner with him the last two nights of this year’s show.
“Whenever anybody died, he wouldn’t say they died; he would say, ‘They’re taking a dirt bath.’ ”
Jim Paradise Jr., marketing director for the Colorado festival, said Sieve constantly nagged Kudla to eat right and watch his health.
“Mark said Joe told him when it was his time to get out of the canoe, he would get out of the canoe,” Paradise said. “That was Joe to a T. He lived life by his own rules.”
Sieve and Kudla began working together as Mouldy and Wart in 1973. Besides acting, Kudla had also been a college professor.
“He called himself a reformed English teacher,” Gilchrist said. She apologized for laughing at Kudla’s jokes, then confessed, “I’ve been crying all day.”
