Julia Sweeney Tries to Explain Victoria Jackson’s Craziness January 23, 2012

Julia Sweeney Tries to Explain Victoria Jackson’s Craziness

By Hemant Mehta
January 23, 2012

A few years ago, a former Saturday Night Live cast member began spewing some vicious bile online:

Obama legally kills babies and now he can legally kill Grandmas!

Hitler did this. He killed the weak, the sick, the old, and babies and races/religions he didn’t like. Hitler also controlled the media. (Where’s the public debate between scientists on “Climate Change/Global Warming?”) Hitler had the VW bug invented as the state car. What will O’s nationalized car be? So… kill off the weak. That’s the plan. Tax the workers to death. Erase the middle class. Sounds like the evil governments we studied in high school long ago. The evil governments were : kings, oligarchies, facist, socialist, and communist. Now it’s called the Obama Administration. Sounds like candy or a rock band.

That’s what became of Victoria Jackson, who appeared on SNL from 1986 to 1992:

More recently, she appeared in a webseries called PolitiChicks. In Episode 1, they ripped on “Gays, Muslims & Gay Muslims”:

So after you hear all this, you start asking questions…

Is she really that crazy?

Is this all some sort of weird alternative comedy routine?

Is she trying to out-Colbert Stephen Colbert?

Julia Sweeney — also a former SNL cast member around the same time (she famously portrayed androgynous Pat) and an atheist who wrote a wonderful one-woman show about losing her faith — gets asked about Jackson a lot, as you might imagine.

In a post on her website today, she tries to answer those questions and reluctantly admits it’s probably not an act:

So, to answer the question that many have asked me…. Yes. She is for real. She really does believe all the things she says. To my knowledge, there will not be a day when she says: the jig is up. It was all a performance piece.

What bothers me is that she wants to have it both ways at once. She wants to get the laughs that are there for characters who are kooky and dimwitted, but then she also wants to use this persona to make real points and arguments. Points and arguments that are not ironic, they are completely naked and honest and forthright. But she’ll take the laughs…

…

She’s not Andy Kaufman (as many emailers have asked me.) The “there” you think is “there” is not “there.”

As far as I know.

If it turns out Jackson has been doing an act for this long, it may go down as one of the greatest Poes we’ve ever seen.

But if she really is as kooky as she comes across, it would just be… sad. How someone could get that brainwashed by the intertwining of conservative Christianity and politics — especially when she (presumably) knows many liberals, has worked with them, and ought to know they’re not as bad as she makes them out to be — is really stunning.

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  • I found myself screaming at my computer…That is 15 minutes of my life that I will never get back…

  • “Snopes is owned by George Soros!”

    Wow.  I’m just amazed that she didn’t mention that since Gore invented the Internet, obviously you can’t trust anything on the Internet.  That’s deep, deep delusion.

    Oh and “My liberal friend”. As in, singular.

  • “All terrorists are Muslims.  That’s just fact”.  Wow, the clip is neverending batshit crazy.

  • I get the feeling that it’s not an act, although for a comedian she does seem to be far off the deep end.  It’s possible in this fox news culture.  I think she’s simply causing too much real damage to people who listen to her for her to take off the mask and expect applause at the end.

  • I didn’t make it through the song.

  • Lord_Byron

    Those women make me head hurt by their stupidity. 

  • Thin-ice

    I”m shocked that they let this show continue on past the first episode or two, but it looks like it’s surviving. Enough female Limbaugh/Beck fans to keep it going I guess. Maybe a few conservative males stick around to look at the pretty legs, like on FOX. (What is it with conservatives and legs?)

    Victoria Jackson is so self-obsessed that she can’t even let the host finish the intro to the first show, before she butts in and takes over. And over. And over. Her verbal diarrhea made me nauseous. Excuse me while I go throw up . . .

  • Emma

    That video is enraging.  I try so hard to be loving and calm, but that crap is just ridiculous and harmful.  You know what conservatives?  I don’t hate you, but I wish you read some books and experience life and realize that your views are harmful and ignorant.  That is all.

  • Anonymous

    What none of them realize is that, like Ann Coulter, their ugly ideas and opinions make them ugly by association.  The opposite of what a warm, understanding woman should be.

  • Annie

    “They have dead eyes.”   Oh, dear.  Who are these women and who do they think they’re fooling by sitting in front of all those books???

  • Apparently somebody’s never heard of the Oklahoma City bombing, for starters.  Or the mass killings in Norway (am I remembering the country right?) last year.   Maybe we could all chip in & buy them a newspaper subscription?  Not that I expect it would help…

  • Marco Conti

    ”
    kings, oligarchies, facist, socialist, and communist” 

    How funny. For starters, I was born in Italy and I know a lot about Fascism. I don’t know what this “Facism” is, maybe a political party formed after the famous Herman Cain ad with the slow smile at the end, but if it’s related to “Fascism” it’s one morally bankrupt ideology.

    What is really sad is that you take these ladies and almost the entirety of the tea party to Italy and pretty much every single one of them would be a card carrying member of what was once known as “Movimento Sociale Italiano” or MSI. Who where the MSI? Since the Fascist party was declared illegal, it was the most right wing party in Italian Politics and the refuge of those fascists that had not been jailed or executed as well as their sympathizers (Neo-fascists).

    So here we have what are essentially Fascist women, for their demagoguery is indistinguishable from that of their MSI counterparts, after adjusting for the different times and cultures, calling other people Fascist, (as well as communists and Socialists). I honestly don’t know how to fit the Oligarchs and the Monarchists in that soup, but one thing is clear: those books visible in the video have never and will never be opened.

  • Anonymous

    I figure those books are like Gatsby’s; the pages are uncut.

  • I couldn’t watch the entire thing – perhaps another day.   Sometimes I wish the space-alien shit was true so that I could be not of this species. 

  • M G

    When certain people ask me “But what if you’re WRONG!?”, I usually tell them it would be worth it to see all the bile and venom-spewing “christians” face their judgement day, and the rude awakeng that would ensue.

  • or the entire existence of the IRA….2 different Christian sects killing each other for decades.

  • I was born and raised in West Virginia. I know stupid and intolerant. How did that woman ever wind up in the cast of SNL? Was it a sort of right-wing idiot affirmative action?

  • Must be a very very tolerant and patient liberal friend.

  • Norway is right. Right-wing, Christian and anti-Islamist mass murderer Anders Breivik killed 77 people.

  • I decided to make the great sacrifice of re-listening to get the name.  Karl Beisner of The Cornwall Alliance.

    We believe Earth and its ecosystems—created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence —are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory.  Earth’s climate system is no exception. Recent global warming is one of many natural cycles of warming and cooling in geologic history.

    http://www.cornwallalliance.org/articles/read/an-evangelical-declaration-on-global-warming/ 

    So, her single ‘liberal’ friend is a Climate Change Denier.  Figures.

    oh, Muslim men are legally allowed to behead their wives in America.  You know, freedom of religion.  I swear, The Onion could not make this shit up.

  • Anonymous

    Oh Hemant, why do you waste my time.  Check out this episode 6:

    Who does Victoria love? Plus they drop some religious knowledge

  • Anonymous

    Oh noes.  Make it stop.  Would someone please turn off the interwebs for me:
    VJ writes a song about Julia Sweeney – her voice, her voice!

  • JSug

    I recall watching Victoria Jackson go from stand-up to SNL to (very briefly) movies, and back to stand-up. At first, I actually thought the whole ditzy blonde routine was just part her act. After a while, I began to realize that she never turns it off. So either she’s the greatest actor of our time, or she’s the genuine article, and has simply done well taking advantage of her natural tendencies. A few years back I got a copy of “Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live.” It’s basically just a book full of interviews with former cast members and other people that have worked on the show over the years. Turns out the other cast members didn’t think that highly of her, either.

  • Justin Miyundees

    What a torturous cretin.  Let me guess…. single?

  • If there’s any justice in the world.  Heeeey, but maybe we can throw her at Newt as a distraction?  He likes blondes… and adultery… and batcrap crazy… it’s a win/win and you know it!

  • Kathy Orlinsky

    I could only stand five minutes of that. However, if anything, it really made me feel sorry for Jackson.  She sounds like a stroke victim.  

  • NickDB

    I reply “Part of me really really hopes I’m wrong, because I’d love to try and punch god in the face”

  • Mostly I’m mad at Vicky for ruining UHF for me.

  • Gus Snarp

    There was a song? I didn’t make it through the host saying it was from a Christian conservative blah, blah, blah, blah….

  • Well, I was prepared for that. 😉

  • T-Rex

    She’s Victory Jackson. When’s the last time anyone cared about what she did or said? She’s irrelevant, especially if this is the only exposure she gets. Next!

  • Rrr

    Yeah… DECADES! DECADES, right? Like, so long i;d hafta take my shoes off to countem, only i;m tto fat, see.

    Oh sorry. Thought this was the Cranston, Rude Island thread.

  • I love that movie and now I can’t watch it without imagining this.

  • G.S.T.

    Ms. Jackson comes from what could be called a very segregationist background. According to Wikipedia, she attended Dade Christian School for elementary and high school. Dade Christian was one of the many all white, private, Christian “segregation academies” to open in fall of 1954 in response to Brown v. Board of Education. Though Ms. Jackson attended several colleges, her degree in theater is from the very conservative and Christian oriented Palm Beach Atlantic University. In short, it seems likely to me that Ms. Jackson was inculcated from an early age with a distrust of people whose skin color and beliefs differed from hers (even if those beliefs were Christian).

  • Why did I watch that video? Why?

    I am baffled by how they completely miss the boat, and mischaracterize the issues… like allowing gay marriage = churches forced to marry gay couples. That’s honestly what they think pro-SSM wants? I don’t understand the thought process. (or lack thereof)

  • Anon

    wut

  • Neuron

    I just got my first migraine. I’m 13. That clip was the most aggravating thing I’ve ever heard, next to “Don’t give me attitude!”

  • Neuron

    I just got my first migraine. I’m 13. That clip was the most aggravating thing I’ve ever heard, next to “Don’t give me attitude!”