![]() ![]() 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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