God Said, “Ha!”

First, a confession. I once urged Julia Sweeney not to become an actress. Luckily, Julia disregarded that advice and went on to become, as she calls herself, “a woman of many media.” Most people know her best from her four years on TV’s Saturday Night Live, where she created the endearingly goofy, mysteriously androgynous Pat, or from the 1994 movie version, It’s Pat, which she cheerfully admits was a “bomb.” As a far more complex character — herself — Julia has since written a deeply moving and yet also hilarious one-woman show about a truly terrible year in her life, God Said “Ha!” On stage in 1996, later in a book, an audiobook, and a CD, and now on the big screen, Sweeney takes us deeply into her soul, telling about the “sympathy cancer” she developed while caring for her terminally ill brother while they shared her “cool girlie bachelorette pad” in Hollywood with their dotty Irish Catholic parents from Spokane.

When I met Julia in 1982, she was a 21-year-old newcomer to Hollywood, a fresh-faced kid from the University of Washington, where she earned a degree in economics. She called herself “Julie” then, and just as old friends of Lauren Bacall still call her “Betty,” it’s hard for me to think of my old friend as anything other than Julie Sweeney. She was working as an accountant for Columbia Pictures and spent her nights religiously attending screenings of old movies at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Nuart Theater.

Julie’s exquisite sense of life’s absurdities already was highly developed. When we’d get together in a group of fellow film buffs and struggling writers at Tom Bergin’s Irish bar on Fairfax, I’d ask her how her day at work had been. She would casually report that she’d just cut a multimillion-dollar profit participation check for some Hollywood superstar. Then she’d order an Irish coffee and we’d get down to more serious talk about the Billy Wilder or John Huston movie we had just seen. Julie was very good at number-crunching, but she was overqualified and it was mind-numbing work relieved only by the occasional pleasure she derived from cutting a check for one of her favorite filmmakers. 

One night at Bergin’s, Julie anxiously and earnestly told me of her plan to quit accounting and try her luck at acting. I spent two or three hours going through all the reasons why that was a bad idea. Most were horror stories about how actresses are misused, abused, and discarded in Hollywood, and how unhappy most of them become after a few years of such treatment. I think I even mentioned how, in 1932, the actress Peg Entwhistle jumped to her death from atop the “H” on the Hollywood Sign. My basic message was that Julie was too a nice person to subject herself to the Hollywood rat race. No doubt I was transposing onto her some of my own misgivings about the industry; I was then earning my living on the lowest rung of the Hollywood ladder, screenwriting. Julie listened intently to my rant before announcing with a serene smile, “That’s all very true and very interesting, but I’m still going to do it.”

I should have realized that a person with her rare combination of brains, beauty, wit, enthusiasm, and chutzpah would be able to carve out a niche for herself somewhere in the business, but all I could see were the long odds against her. Confessing one’s shortsightedness is good for the soul, and it’s particularly appropriate in this instance, for Julie proceeded to make her first splash on the Los Angeles stage in the lead role of a 1988 play she wrote with her then-husband Stephen Hibbert, Mea’s Big Apology. Developed from sketches she performed as a member of the comedy troupe The Groundlings, it is a sweetly amusing, if rather one-note, comedy about a mousey accountant named Mea Culpa. As the name suggests, Mea is a Catholic girl whose response to every situation in life is to apologize for her supposed failings in the most humbly self-abasing manner.

Playing Mea, as she would do in her later role as Pat, Julie displayed a surprising eagerness to disguise her natural good looks and make herself seem as geeky as humanly possible. I began to wonder what had happened in the dark recesses of her Catholic girlhood to make her dwell on such grotesqueries. But I gradually realized that the key to Julie’s ability to connect with audiences of all persuasions is her brave exposure, in a comedic vein, of the embarrassing insecurities and anxieties we all share, whether or not we like to display them to others or even admit them to ourselves.

Julie walks a tricky artistic tightrope with masterful aplomb in God Said, “Ha!” Taking a giant leap into thematic territory so dark it would give even Ingmar Bergman palpitations, she stares unflinchingly into the face of death, sharing the gruesome details of her brother Mike’s slow deterioration from lymphoma and her own realization that she has cervical cancer requiring a radical hysterectomy. The stunning congruence of these inexplicable events at a time when everything seemed to be coming together so well in her life meant that “there was nothing I could do but accept the surreal nightmare that life had become.”

… In those days a lot of people were telling me not to become an actress. Now people are trying to tell me not to become a director.”

What saves her, and makes the story so compelling and life-embracing even with its overwhelming grief, is her unshakable ability to laugh. For all his suffering, Mike was touched with the same grace; they joked that they should put up a sign outside her home reading “International House of Cancer.” When she was told that her ovaries did not have to be removed and that she could still have children with the help of a surrogate mother, the recently divorced Julie responded by joking, “Oh, great. Now I have to meet a guy and a girl!” Despite the agony of the situation, this ironic approach to such absurdities gives her the spirit to survive.

Much of the humor comes from Julie’s wry commentary on her parents, whose arrival from Spokane for the duration tums her life as a liberated single woman topsy-turvy. As she puts it, “I suddenly felt like this Catholic schoolgirl again, in a uniform,” sneaking around to smoke cigarettes and make out with her new boyfriend as if they were back in high school. She describes her jokes about her parents as a “rant,” and there is a barbed edge to her hilarious impersonations of her ditzy mother that can’t entirely be wished away by Julie’s concluding expressions of love and appreciation. For here we see all the family mishigoss that left Julie with her seriocomic view of life, enabling her to cope with the noisy chaos of her large Irish Catholic family, the guilt and repression of her religious upbringing, and her abiding but low-key faith, by learning to shape it all into a mature, reflective work of art.

While mining the specific facts of her religious and ethnic background for comic gold, Julie has done what all firstclass comedians must do. She has created an acting and writing personality that is simultaneously unique and universal in its appeal. And as only the best and most protean comedians can, she has displayed the ability to keep coming up with fresh characters when she has finally wrung the life out of the old ones. So I can console myself by realizing that it would have been hard for anyone in the early Eighties to extrapolate the hunched, simian-eyebrowed, mewling, Uriah Heepish character of Pat or the wise, rueful, but indomitable survivor of life’s worst blows in God Said, “Ha!” from the smart, vivacious young woman sipping Irish coffee with me at Bergin’s.

Last year, I had a reunion with Julie and finally was able to relieve my burden of guilt by offering my belated mea culpa for not having had enough belief in her youthful dreams. When I finished, she replied with her characteristically dry wit and that same serene smile, “That’s OK, in those days a lot of people were telling me not to become an actress. Now people are trying to tell me not to become a director.”

Quentin Tarantino is one person who didn’t say that to her. A former film geek himself, Tarantino became a pal of Julie’s, traipsed around Ireland with her, gave her a small role in Pulp Fiction, and agreed to let her direct the movie of God Said, “Ha!” He serves as executive producer and even makes a walk-on appearance during the end credits of her one-woman film, wearing nerdy shorts, applauding, and presenting her a bouquet of flowers. Tarantino’s faith in her directing ability was well placed, for the film has a rare sensitivity and assurance for the work of a first-time director, with a powerful sense of discretion in handling big emotional moments without cheapening them by overemphasis.

When Julie tells of Mike’s death, she quickly turns her back to the camera and walks into semi-darkness, allowing us to empathize with her inner feelings without having to see her act them out. Then, almost nonchalantly, she lights a votive candle, seen in a quick closeup that concentrates our emotion and releases it like the meditative closeups of objects in the films of the great Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. The candle conveys the strong, simple, and unabashed religious faith that sustains the filmmaker’s undying memory of her late brother. Such faith is hard to verbalize, as Julie painfully discovers when she offers her mother a Jesuit priest’s suggestion that heaven may be a single “instant” of awareness between life and death. Her mother abruptly slaps her in the face, prompting Julie’s bittersweet realization that “maybe you don’t walk into the bathroom of a Catholic mother of five who’s Cometing [cq] out the tub and tell her that heaven is an instant.”

God Said, “Ha!” opened in February in New York and Los Angeles, and was scheduled to go out to a wider audience in March. As I write this column, I don’t know how the movie will do at the box office, but I can’t imagine anyone who sees it not being moved by the rich and humane experience it offers. I know this because of the empathy that God Said, “Ha!” has stirred in the hearts of so many people who have seen or heard or read it in one of its various incarnations, each of which has a special quality of its own.

I gave a copy of the CD to a friend of mine whose husband had just died of cancer, and after listening to it, she passed it on to a friend who had cancer herself. Both women told me to express their heartfelt gratitude to Julia Sweeney for showing them how to cope with life’s terrors. The gift she has given her audience in God Said, “Ha!” follows that wise prescription offered long ago in the Book of Ecclesiastes, “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.”

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the April / May 1999 issue of Irish America. ⬥