Chapter 1: What unexpected turns did Julia Sweeney's career take?
All that stuff, but I couldn't believe anymore. So then I had to live in a world without God. And actually, I think that's a more beautiful world, and it's a more realistic world, and I think it's a truer world. That being said, I've rejoined the Catholic Church.
From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Nolman. On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they're thinking about and working on. On this episode, a conversation with Julia Sweeney about her career in comedy and performance and about the attractions of Catholicism.
And the music, come on, it can't be beat.
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Julia Sweeney is a writer, a performer, and an actor whose career has taken a path that very few people could have predicted. She first came to fame as a cast member on Saturday Night Live, where she created one of the most memorable and complicated characters of that era.
She has also appeared in the Hulu series Shrill, the Showtime series Work in Progress, the Starz series American Gods, and had a recurring role on Frasier. Her performance work has broadened through a series of one-woman shows where she has shared her crises, contradictions and questions and created an utterly original form of storytelling that blends wit and humor with intelligence and inquiry.
Her work has been performed on stages across the country, adapted into books and films and has helped redefine how personal narrative is performed. Julia Sweeney, welcome to Design Matters.
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Chapter 2: How did Julia Sweeney navigate trauma through comedy?
Thanks for having me. Julia, is it true you wanted to be a nun growing up simply because you liked their outfits? Well, that's partly a joke. I actually like their lifestyle as well. Oh, interesting. So you like that whole celibate, praying to God kind of— Well, not the celibate part.
But I went to all-girls Catholic school, and the nuns were absolutely the feminists in my particular environment. They were women who had chosen not to marry— to devote themselves to education. They all live together in this convent. And this particular convent for my high school seemed very... I just wanted to move in.
That seemed like a much better future than the future of having lots of kids. Although I think that's a perfectly wonderful future for someone now. But at the time, they were the feminists. And I still see many of the nuns that way.
Chapter 3: What was Julia's experience growing up in a devout Catholic household?
I really do admire the nun lifestyle.
Yeah.
You've described growing up in Spokane as something like a Norman Rockwell painting. You were the oldest of five children in a devout, tight-knit Catholic household. You said that your family did everything as a gang. What were the kinds of things you were all doing together? Well, I have to say, this is fun for me to remember because my mom, as we all do, changed personalities over the years.
And my best memories of her are when I was really young and there were five little kids and she would take us out like strawberry gathering and do a whole strawberry with shortcake and whipped cream thing in the kitchen. Or she really loved the chaos of little kids, especially before they could question anything that she was doing, which, you know, I'm sympathetic with.
And, yeah, and we laughed a lot. It was a lot of laughter in the young household. Before the drugs and alcohol really got a foothold in the family, I would say there was a lot of us all in the car together, all going out over to grandma's, all going out. We used to go out to the cemetery a lot and sit amongst all the graves.
It was almost like kind of the Mexican tradition of doing that, but we were Irish Catholics, but we... That was just a destination, the cemetery.
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Chapter 4: How did addiction issues impact Julia's family dynamics?
And so I have a lot of happy memories of that. And we all, and of course we were going to mass all the time and we all went to Catholic schools, but that was just, you could walk to. So we were together a lot.
Yeah.
Given the subsequent issue with drugs and alcohol, you really became what you've described as the face of dignity in your family. How did the two realities of strawberry picking and then having to deal with really such profound issues at such a young age affect you? Well, for one thing, I'm still processing it all. So I'm still in process.
But I would say where I am now thinking about it, and this is common for families that have a lot of trauma. And that doesn't mean there isn't a lot of love and laughter, but a lot of addiction issues and a lot of difficult personality issues. That one of the kids kind of becomes the public face. And that was me.
So like I was always doing really well at school, doing things that brought pride to the family. My parents could point to me and say, look what a good job we did. And then often there's another sibling who becomes what they call the scapegoat.
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Chapter 5: What role did humor play in Julia's life during challenging times?
And, you know, I also hate these kind of pejorative psychological stereotypes, but they hilariously fit my family. So they're useful as well. So like my brother Bill was breaking into people's houses, doing a lot of drugs, failing at school, you know, a truant. And I have so much compassion for him. I did even at the time when he was still alive.
Like, I remember standing on a street corner saying, do you not understand these are roles that we have been put into? Like, you don't have to be that person.
And I, in a lot of ways, I was just lucky enough to be a person who got assigned the role of the public-facing achiever because, first of all, it allowed me to live, which many people didn't in my family, and it gave me the tools to process it, which some of the other kids did not have. So... Anyway, I don't know if that answers your question. No, it does.
And as I was preparing and doing my research for our interview, I was also the oldest of four, three brothers and myself. I was also the sort of appointed face of dignity, overachiever, look at what Debbie's doing, which was really hard for my brothers. Because they were, well, why can't you be like your sister? And I'm like, they don't want to be like me.
Chapter 6: How did Julia's character Pat challenge gender norms?
I'm hiding so much stuff that they don't want to have to ever think about. But it's interesting how we take on that role. And I know you also were quite a caretaker to your brothers. Oh, yeah. I was very much the caretaker and grew up thinking, I mean, I'm only just dealing with this psychologically now. From such an early age, I felt capable. That was the word. Like, I can do it.
I would look at my mom and think, oh, I could do that better than you. Like, oh, you're having trouble getting the dinner on the table. That seems easy to me. You know, like I can do that. I can clean this room. I can clean that room. And I used to think, oh, it was so narcissistic in a way.
Chapter 7: What insights does Julia have about her relationship with religion now?
But I also don't blame myself either because I fill the needed spot. And I just thought, I can do everything and I'll have enough energy left over to do the things I want. And it's only now that I think, no, you didn't have enough energy left over to do the things you wanted. Yeah. It really took up all your energy to do that. Yeah.
You've said that your instinct to make people laugh may have been tied to things not being directly addressed at home. Oh, yeah, for sure. When you think about that period now, how did those sort of two tracks of life and personality all track to each other? Well, first I had a dad with an incredibly great sense of humor and a wonderful storytelling instinct.
And he exposed me to a lot of other great storytellers and comedians. So I had good role models in that way. But I now see me being able to either just rant to my girlfriends or to my siblings about what was frustrating me about our parents and then other siblings, too. was the same level of relief that my brother got from doing drugs. You know, you separated yourself from it.
Chapter 8: How has Julia's storytelling evolved in her one-woman shows?
You got the endorphins and the dopamine hit from people laughing. You got to share in this eruption of sound of laughter over the absurdity and the inability to escape the absurdity of the situation. It worked exactly like a drug. And yeah, what a great drug. I'm not knocking it. I'm just saying that I now see we all had our ways. So like my sister Meg, she just withdrew.
She just withdrew into herself. In Japan. Yeah. And then she moved to Japan where she's been for 40 years. Yeah. And she's at my mom's funeral, which was last summer. Meg said, my only way to escape our mom was to literally move to the other side of the earth. And learn in a completely different culture. And language. And language. That is very different, Japanese culture and language.
And she didn't move to Tokyo. She moved to a small, the smallest of the bigger islands in Japan in a city that has like 8 million people and four foreigners. I mean, like, she went there. And I just said, Meg, I feel so glad that you had the wherewithal to do that. That was a big thing to do. Well, overachieving and productivity are as addictive as anything.
And also it keeps you busy so you're not really thinking about how sad it really is. Yeah. Yeah. All that being said, you were voted funniest girl in school year after year. That's true. What kind of humor were you developing? Was it just sort of a natural wit and whimsy or was it more of a... Well thought out way of talking about funny things, joking, the beginning of stand up.
Talk about your humor at that time. I'm not even sure. I mean, I remember my first time I got my big laugh and I think it was second grade. There'd been an article about horse meat was being used in the local hamburger stand. It's probably not even true. Was this the bugle stand? Yes, the bugle thing.
And I said, OK, but it's so funny because when I told my husband that he said, did you even make that joke up? And I said, no, I don't think so. I think I might have heard that joke somewhere. But I remembered it, or maybe it wasn't a bugle, something else. Anyway, I got a huge laugh, and it was like somebody shot me with something, heroin or something.
It was absolutely... I could feel it in my bloodstream. Like, oh, God, oh, that felt good. And I guess I was good at seeing ironic things and hypocritical things, and I was good at... Saying them not in a way that made people so upset, that got most of the room to laugh with me. I don't know why that is, actually. I don't think it was thought out. I just did that.
At the same time, I believe you were also competing in debates. You were writing and delivering monologues. What were you writing about back then? I remember Walcott Gibb had a thing where you memorized like a paragraph that was about a funny, it's very early David Sedaris kind of stuff, you know, like a play gone wrong.
You know, somebody, I remember Ring Out Wild Bells was a Walcott Gibb short story that I memorized and performed over and over again. And it was just all about a guy who doesn't sew all the bells onto his costume before the play ends. until he's on stage during the play. And every time he moves, the bells ring so loud, so loud, no one can hear anything.
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