Home Girl

Photo by Debra DiPaolo

Although Julia Sweeney lives only blocks from the civic triage of Hollywood, her Larchmont neighborhood resembles the bungalow-and-bougainvillea idyll of old Los Angeles; the comedian’s compact home, built in 1921, is the California dream made wood and glass. Its earth-tiled living room is filled with religious icon ography, while Marx, Jung and Chomsky coexist on bookshelves with Butler’s Lives of the Saintsand volumes on film noir. A large Gronk painting dominates the dining room, and beyond the French windows lie a small yard and pool, and past these, a studio. "I love this house!" Sweeney says in a voice filled with both wonder and gulpy laughter.

Best known for her androgynous Saturday Night Live character, Pat, Sweeney turned her back on every comedian’s dream when she quit the show in 1994. There were compensations for returning to Los Angeles: her cats, Sunday mornings spent listening to Harry Shearer on the radio, and time to move on from a divorce. And there was the movie, although when It’s Pat came out the reviews were summary and scalding. "It’s Pat, It’s Bad and It’s Going Straight to Video" ran one typical headline. Sweeney would have felt like a critic’s piñata were it not for the fact that a far bigger tragedy was unfolding.

At the same time It’s Pat opened, Julia’s younger brother Michael was stricken with lymphoma. She spent a month in Rochester, New York, helping him get back on his feet, then brought him to her home, from which they would drive to UCLA for his punishing program of radiation and chemotherapy. Michael didn’t have health insurance, so Julia quickly went through nearly every penny she’d saved from SNL.

Caring for a critically ill brother would have been traumatic enough, but when Sweeney’s vexing mom and dad also moved into her bungalow for nine months, a lifetime of resentments erupted. Her house — now threatened with foreclosure — was no longer a home, and she spent long hours holed up in the backyard studio, trying to maintain her equilibrium. Then, in the middle of all this, Sweeney was diagnosed with a rare form of cervical cancer and began treatment herself. And then Mike died.

Perhaps the only way she could have grappled with her loss and the events surrounding it was to work the experience into a performance. The result was God Said, "Ha!", which Sweeney premiered in January 1996 at the Magic Theater in San Francisco. "I opened up there," she confesses, "because if I got bad reviews I didn’t want to have them appear in L.A." She needn’t have worried, for the show was a smash and continued its success over the next year at L.A.’s Coro net Theater and on Broad way at the Lyceum. Last year she made a "concert" film of two intercut performances, produced by her friend Quentin Tarantino; it opens this week at the Nuart Theater (see New Film reviews).

The film captures Sweeney’s ordeal as well as her personality — a rueful blend of irony, determination and guilt. She proves herself that rarest of monologists, the one who speaks of personal tragedy without taking out a copyright on it, who recounts its bloody moments without tears. "Julia has a real eye for the absurdity of life," says Sweeney’s friend Al Franken, who met her on SNL. "She has a dark sense of humor with a sunny sensibility. She is not a sappy person."

The most striking feature about Sweeney onstage and in person is her unconditional candor — a handshake-and-eye-contact kind of honesty that feels vaguely antiquated. Like Lynda Barry’s cartoons, her anecdotes are both exotic and universal, quiet moments of shared revelations. "When I first started doing the show, I thought it was this underground, alternative comedy, and I saw myself as a rebel," she says. "I didn’t realize it would have such mass appeal. In San Francisco audiences were half-filled with people my parents’ age who were loving it."

If Sweeney seems to impersonate a character from the guileless 1950s, it is probably because she was coughed out of the psychic time tunnel of Amer i can Catholicism. Al though she enjoyed much about her parochial-school days in hometown Spokane, Washing ton, and still marvels at the mysteries of the Church, she inevitably came away with chronic feelings of remorse and zero self-confidence.

"I felt almost paralyzed for years," she says. "At times, even when I was in my 20s, I could hardly leave my room because of guilt, and I didn’t even know what it was about. I’d berate myself for being fat — not merely because I felt unsightly, but because I was literally taking up too much space in the world."

Sweeney’s search for her own identity never seems to end. Six months ago, she wanted to speak to Camille Paglia and e-mailed her through the online news magazine Salon. Contacting the author of Sexual Personae hadn’t seemed that big a deal; after all, the maverick feminist had gamely appeared in a scene in It’s Pat, so it wasn’t as though they were strangers.
fcBut then Sweeney was e-mailed back by Paglia’s assistant, who announced that she couldn’t put her in touch with her boss. "How can we be sure you are who you say you are?" glared the reply on Sweeney’s computer screen.