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.
“They were first-rate professional, they were very funny and everyone, all ages, loved them,” Mazzu said.
Puke n’ Snot performed to full houses in Colorado the past 26 years, including the 32nd annual show that wrapped on Aug. 3, which drew an estimated 225,000 fans.
The cause of Kudla’s death was not immediately known. He was single and survived by an adult daughter, friends said.
Sieve posted a statement on the duo’s website Monday.
“Snot left us today,” he said. “I’m still processing it, hasn’t really hit me yet. It was sudden and totally unexpected. Probably a heart attack, we don’t know yet. 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.”
Jim Paradise Jr., the marketing director for his father’s Colorado festival, said he grew up with Puke n’ Snot.
Though he enjoyed walking along the roads around Larkspur, 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.'”
Paradise 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 worked as a college professor.
“He called himself a reformed English teacher,” Gilchrist said. She apologized for laughing Kudla’s jokes, then confessed, “I’ve been crying all day.”
Puke n’ Snot had fill-ins who would perform show Kudla called, “Puke n’ Snot, Send in the Clones.”
Sieve has told Paradise and Mazzu he intends to continue the act.
With their gross names, Puke n’ Snot were a natural draw to young fans, but those fans kept coming back year after year well into adulthood, until most of the audience was filled with adults more enthusiastic about the show than their younger counterparts. Mazzu said grownups would show up a half hour before each performance to jockey for good seats.
Lisa Botkin, a paralegal from Stapleton, was a Renaissance Festival “concubine” in 1984 and returned to the show every year. “Puke n’ Snot” was a must-see, she said.
“In some ways it was the same show, but it was never like seeing the same show,” she said Tuesday, saddened by the news.
Kudla was the perfect comedy foil, the straight man to Sieve’s needling jokes that constantly changed and usually involved the audience and current politics, she said.
“I just enjoyed their ribald humor,” Botkin said.
Joey Bunch: 303-954-1174 or jbunch@denverpost.com
