God Said, 'Ha!'

Released 1998
Stars Julia Sweeney
Directed by Julia Sweeney

There is a kind of luminous quality in the way Julia Sweeney talks about her life and family in "God Said, 'Ha!'" She wanders the stage for an hour and a half, talking about a year in her life when her brother, Mike, was dying of cancer. This is a sad subject, painful to her, and yet she makes humor of it. She is a comedian, and, like the hero of "Life Is Beautiful," she deals with life with the gifts at her command.

What she weaves out of her memories is a funny love poem to Mike and her parents--who all moved into her small house for the duration of the crisis. She sees their human weaknesses, she smiles at their goofy logic, she lets their habits get on her nerves, but above all she embraces them. And when, midway through the year, even more bad news descends upon her, she is able to transform that, too, into truth and fond humor.

Watching "God Said, `Ha!'," I wished that I could show it to people who wondered why I didn't approve of "Patch Adams." This film has a dignity, an underlying taste, in the way it deals with subjects like cancer and dying. It doesn't simply use the subjects as an occasion for manipulative sentiment. At the end of the film, we feel we've been through a lot with Julia and Mike Sweeney and their family. We're sad, but we're smiling. I was thinking: Life's like that.

Summary by Roger Ebert

This is one of the most life-affirming movies I've ever seen. I hesitate to call it a movie, because it's actually a filmed version of Julia Sweeney's heartbreaking and heartwarming one-woman show about the worst year of her life. What's wonderful about her is her humorous point of view. She never whines about why has this happened--about why her brother is dying from cancer at 31, about why she contracts cancer at the same time, or why her family must all live in her tiny bungalow and rob her of her privacy and sanity. She never asks those questions. She knows her brother Mike is in stage 4 of cancer ("stage 5 is death"), and there's no room for selfishness. It's her complete selflessness and plucky humor that pulled her through this terrible time and helped her see the silver lining of getting to understand her parents better. It's to her credit that she was able to create a show from her pain that can teach every one of us a lesson or two about life without being the tiniest bit pedantic, and it's even more to her credit how incredibly funny and deeply moving it is. I laughed one huge gut-laugh after another, and, yes, I had some tears. Sometimes I cried for her because she refused to. --Bill Alward, December 26, 2001