![]() ![]() ![]() Sweeney, a native of Spokane, Wash., and a graduate of Washington State University, originally came to Los Angeles back in 1982 and arrived surprisingly free of show-biz aspirations. Where would a retired ovary go? What’s the anatomical equivalent of Florida? There was no way I could not find that situation hilarious.” Sometimes when ovaries are cut off from their “responsibilities,” they travel.’ One day, a doctor said, ‘Julia, we’ve lost one of your ovaries.’ I thought he meant it had stopped working, but he said, ‘No, it’s traveling through your body. “For instance, the surgeons left my ovaries in, but they moved them so that they wouldn’t be affected by X-rays. “Because death and illness are the most horrible things in life, of course that’s where the most absurdly funny things are going to happen,” she says. With her unflinching truthfulness tempered by her sweetly charming stage manner, Sweeney has drawn laughter from the most horrendous-and explicit-aspects of her illness. She was committed to telling the truth about her situation, and it’s awesome to watch.” She’s an engaging personality with intelligence, warmth and fearlessness. But it was a revelation to watch her come out from under all the characters she’s played in the past. Says Beth Lapides, the hostess and co-producer of Un-Cabaret: “It isn’t a surprise that she’s done such great work. I felt like I had a kind of squeaky-clean image, and I thought that if I talked about an intense sexual experience the audience would just feel sad for me,” she says, laughing, “or that they’d just be totally uninterested. “I never thought I’d talk about my sex life onstage, but I had a relationship going with someone while all this was going on, and the sex was part of the situation and part of the comedy. Once she began to speak of her illness onstage, she felt free to speak comedically of other personal topics. You’d see people’s hearts going out to her, and they’d also be laughing as hard as humanly possible.” “I knew she’d find a way to make people comfortable, and she did. “There was never a minute when I thought, ‘She shouldn’t do this,’ ” Griffin says. Some pivotal support and encouragement came from Kathy Griffin, Hot Cup’s organizer. The hardest thing was finding ways to talk about all this that didn’t freak an audience out.” “Especially because in the time we had together as cancer patients, we shared a very dark sense of humor-he teased me that I had started with cancer envy and then developed sympathy cancer. ![]() But it didn’t seem fair that I would talk about Mike’s cancer and not my own,” she says. Sweeney didn’t waver from that deeply personal approach when her own cancer was diagnosed. All of that had to come out somewhere, and it happened at Hot Cup and Un-Cab.” I’m finding syringes in the kitchen and I don’t know if they’re from Mike’s T-cell count or Dad’s diabetes, so I’m scolding both of them. Mom’s hysterical, Dad’s having heart palpitations, and Mike’s furious. I’m living in a house with a dying brother, and my parents have moved in to help. ![]() But I started doing these shows and I couldn’t not talk about what was happening in my life. “With the Groundlings and at ‘SNL,’ I’d always been in character. “I’d never been onstage as ‘Julia Sweeney,’ ” she says. But as her life at home became more difficult, the personal approach became a necessity. (She’ll perform at the Un-Cabaret tonight.)įor Sweeney, a graduate of the Groundlings with very little stand-up in her background, the decision to get intensely personal with her comedy was not taken lightly. The pain of watching her brother die and the horror of her own illness have often been gracefully transformed into life-affirming laughter during powerful, startlingly honest and magnificently funny performances for the Hot Cup of Talk series at the Groundling Theatre and at the Sunday night Un-Cabarets at LunaPark. Why not try thinking of your life as hilarious rather than nightmarish?”įinding the hilarity within her tragedies, and presenting it to audiences, has been Sweeney’s primary coping mechanism the past year. “Oh, I’ve certainly proved that you can be sad and depressed a good 16 hours a day-but you’ve got to do something else with those other eight hours. “Well, you can’t be depressed and sad 24 hours a day,” she explains. For someone whose life has been visited by so much darkness, she remains remarkably light of spirit, and while making no attempt to belittle all that has happened to her, she has been able to find some sparkling humor in many of the grim situations she has just been through. ![]()
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