No, she really must think that Obama is a jihadist militant. I love that people want to give her the benefit of the doubt, and want to believe she’s as smart as that. No! So many people ask me that, like is this all performance art? But no. Sometimes I wonder, is she just being like an Andy Kaufman? Is this a lifelong art project? We have a lot to talk about! I left, and then two days later I think I saw something like, Victoria Jackson says Obama is a jihadist! Whatever it was, it was just. We spent a lot of time talking about what we wished we knew if we could do it again. No, but we do have a lot of things we can talk about: how difficult it was for us at the time and how we wish we had been smarter. At the 40th reunion, we had a good time and we really kept off the topics where we disagree-which is every topic. That's one of the problems, too, but you don't wonder where you stand with her. One of the things that's so endearing about her is that there's no filter. Did you have a good working relationship? You were honest, but as diplomatic as you could be. You spoke to Salon a couple of years ago about Victoria Jackson. Sweeney, who now lives just outside of Chicago with her husband and daughter, spoke with Salon about her friendships with Zander and Phil Hartman, and the weirdness of “SNL” reunions, and shared some insight into how to interact with a certain Tea-Partying fellow alum. Her one-woman shows-“God Said Ha!” “In the Family Way” “Letting Go of God”-have appeared on and off Broadway, been adapted into award-winning films, and even earned her a Grammy nomination. Because, though her first few years were brutal-her marriage broke up, she lost her brother to lymphoma, and she was diagnosed with cervical cancer-she has found tremendous success as a writer (most recently, of the essay collection “If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother”), an actress and a critically acclaimed monologuist. It may have been a bold move, to leave a high-profile job like a spot on the “SNL” cast-but for Sweeney, it was the right one. After Zander left following the 1993-94 season, Sweeney decided to break her contract a year early, despite the protestations of Lorne Michaels. (Sadly, Pat was spun out into a feature film called “It’s Pat!”- infamously and nearly unanimously considered a box-office disaster.)īut even with the success of "It's Pat," and close friends like Zander and Hartman, Sweeney was often, understandably, frustrated. “We were together in the same office and joined at the hip the whole time at ‘SNL,’” said Sweeney.Īnd together, they worked on a number of winning sketches, including, most famously, "It's Pat"- which featured an androgynous character whose indeterminate gender unnerved everyone Pat encountered-which had everything to do with other people’s issues, and not Pat’s own. Fortunately, she discovered an ideal collaborator and good friend in the writers room: Christine Zander (whom Salon interviewed, which will appear in the coming weeks), who’d worked closely with Dunn. And when she did get airtime, Sweeney found herself being relegated to supporting, often matronly roles, even when she was doing impressions, like her boobaciously vapid Loni Anderson to Phil Hartman’s mean-drunk-misogynist Burt Reynolds, and her dead-on Jane Pauley. And this would only continue throughout Sweeney’s four years on “SNL.”Īnd it made it hard for Sweeney, she told Salon, to get the kind of airtime enjoyed by her male colleagues, especially for her own sketches. And with Jan Hooks leaving at the end of the season, the cast became very male-heavy, and with it, the show’s tone. In the second half of the season, he’d bring on two more guys, Adam Sandler and Tim Meadows. To replace Dunn, he brought on Julia Sweeney, whom he scouted from the L.A.-based sketch comedy troupe the Groundlings (one of Michaels’ go-to spots, where he’d also picked up Lovitz and Sweeney’s mentor, Phil Hartman), and cast four new men: Chris Farley, Chris Rock, Rob Schneider and David Spade-the latter two, promoted from the writing staff. Suddenly, Michaels found himself changing up the cast. And because he wouldn’t oblige Jon Lovitz’s request to take a few months off to film a movie (“Mom and Dad Save the World”), the funnyman quit-though he would make several appearances throughout the season. Lorne Michaels let Nora Dunn go following her boycott of the Andrew Dice Clay episode the previous spring. Season 16 of “SNL” marked a seismic change, after five years of relative calm and stability amid the solid, ensemble-like cast.
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