By Nate Sloan

“Hubris is like the Phillips-head screwdriver in my comedy toolbox. And glamour is the claw hammer,” explains Julie Klausner, who’s easily one of the most hubris-filled and glamorous comic performers I can think of. She’s glamorous like Joan Collins, not Fergie. Her thick burnt-sienna whorls of hair, sensual husky voice and ashen eyes lend themselves naturally to characters like man-eaters and power lesbians. And now, she and writing partner Rachel Shukert are producing and starring in Wasp Cove, a new serialized monthly soap opera at Comix featuring Jodi Lennon, David Rakoff and several other actors eager to revisit 1980-era Aaron Spelling.

“Rachel and I had discovered Dynasty over the holidays, a show that is somehow more insane than anybody ever realized when it was actually on the air,” says Klausner. “People who write sketch comedy who think their premises and characters are so fucked up just got served by Aaron Spelling 25 years ago. To make anything more bananas than the original series seemed like a fun challenge. It’s also worth noting that Rachel and I are huge Jews, and we always found it funny how Dynasty is basically Aaron Spelling’s love letter to WASP culture—between the gin and the sniping and the square-jawed shiksa goddesses pushing cold veal aspic around on their plates. To think, all this from a man who couldn’t be more Jewish if his first name was Rabbi.”

As one might suspect, the coastal Connecticut inlet of Wasp Cove, where Klausner and Shukert have set the faux series, is filled with all sorts of scheming social climbers. Shukert’s character is Donna Van Hampton Kettering, a former model and sister to Daryl Van Hampton. “I’m married to Rip Kettering, the virile CEO of the Fruzhen Glaazhen frozen yogurt conglomerate,” she explains. “I have to decide what kind of flowers to order for the Great Room, choose the font for the annual Junior League Equestrian Ballet Luncheon invitations and make sure the garnish for the gin is properly prepared. Not to mention retaining my husband’s love by satisfying his every sexual desire.”

Even keyboard wonderman Yanni washes up on the cove, played by David Rakoff.

“The reason why we have Yanni in the show—not just because it makes me laugh to see David wear a mustache—is because in real life, Yanni was Linda Evans’ live-in lover for nine years.” Klausner says. “And based on Yanni’s arrest record for domestic violence at the time, we can deduce that he hit her at least once. Which is shocking considering that Linda Evans is built like a brick shithouse and has hands the size of large hamsteaks swaddled in thick leather.”

Looking back in Klausner’s comedy toolbox, I wonder if pastiche is like her electric stud finder? Last year, she made a series of hilarious videos with Jackie Clarke based on the fabulous life of forgotten soap star Brenda Dickson. Much of Klausner’s work tends to identify with and pay homage to strong females trapped in a time long before today’s starlet-obsessed age. In Free to Be Friends, which ran for some time at Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, she spoofed 1970s children television programs with two strong female leads.

“I think there were better parts for women to play in the ’70s and the ’80s. We were fresh from the first wave of the women’s movement and then tits-deep in its backlash, so people were thinking about women in a different way then,” explains Klausner. “You had genuinely idiosyncratic character actresses playing leads, like Teri Garr or Carol Kane, and way before Baby Mama, there were chick buddy movies, only starring, like, Lily Tomlin and Bette Midler. Can you imagine if they made Big Business or Outrageous Fortune today? It would star Jessicas Biel and Alba, and I would kill myself.”

Rachel and Julie met in 2006 while performing together in Hell House, a Brooklyn staging of a haunted house designed to scare straight young Christians living in the Bible Belt. Julie played a cheerleader undergoing some abortion complications, and Rachel was a mean girl mowed down in a school shooting.

Wasp Cove is part of a recent spate of comedic exploration of the soap genre. Within the past several months, A.D. Miles’ splendid spoof, Horrible People, and the UCBT’s live improvised daytime soap, As the Diamond Burns, have suddenly come to fruition. When asked how they feel to be a part of this creative groundswell, Rachel says, “I think it indicates that Julie and I have our fingers pressed firmly against the throbbing prostate of the zeitgeist.”

‘Wasp Cove’ premieres May 19 at Comix, 353 W. 14th St. (betw. 8th & 9th Aves.), 212-524-2500; 8, $15/$20.