As I was flipping through the pages of Paul Auster's literary memoir, Hand To Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure, I imagined a subculture of talented, passionate people who, no doubt, were born under ill-aligned stars. There are usually a few Paul Austers we meet now and again; strong mind, spiritual grounding, generally very friendly, albeit private, but boy, the worst luck imaginable--a life marred by financial downfalls, physical troubles, familial dysfunction.

Julia Sweeney doesn't have it so good either. She created a character (Pat) that grew too famous too fast (the career history of Pat stands in vivid comparison to Bart Simpson's "'I Didn't Do It' Boy"), withstood the bomb of a spin-off movie based on the gender-blurry Saturday Night Live sketch, and got a divorce. Upon moving to a one-bedroom bungalow in Los Angeles, she learned her brother had cancer. Soon, as she explains in the filmed version of her monologue God Said, "Ha!", her one-bedroom is accommodating her brother Mike, their mother, father, and herself.

She did have the fortune, mixed with humor and survival instinct, to create a movie about the big C without manipulating audiences with on-cue tears, swelling violas, the tactics usually in employ by the "suffering" industry meant to arouse a certain touchy-feely belongingness in the sufferer. Sweeney's tale isn't meant to "provoke," I gather. What she gives the audience is the option of staying with her (or not), as she glides from her father's National Public Radio fetish (e.g., the excitement of hearing Cokie Roberts announce she is broadcasting in her pajamas) to her brother's favorite apparel (a Reservoir Dogs T-shirt Julia gave him.)

Not everyone can handle a two-hour performance film with minimal music and action. Comedy movies are often recorded live in concert, with young folks cheering on the comedian in the street patois of the day, cameras capturing the event from a hodgepodge of angles. God Said, "Ha!" uses only a few angles, out of tasteful respect for the narrative. The style takes me back to a concert flick I viewed at the Film Forum late last year: the Jonathan Demme-directed Storefront Hitchcock, featuring singer/songwriter/Dadaist/depressive Robyn Hitchcock, filmed in an abandoned store on East 14th St, with a backdrop of New York pedestrians who occasionally stopped to look in the shop window.

I appreciate the changes in perspective Sweeney utilizes. They keep the film visually interesting, even when the monologue's tone becomes a hair repetitive (Sweeney's a gifted comic, but she overuses the conjunction "and" to tie every sentence, every thought, together.)

I'll let it slide, this time. After learning of her live-in parents' falling out, her brother's illness, and then her own detection of cancer, I knew any public-speaking concerns I had for Sweeney should be back-burnered. Her life has been as fraught with mishigoss as the title suggests (not an entertained "Ha!" but a sarcastic, bemused one). One scene discusses a desire to see her friend and former "SNL" castmate Phil Hartman (who would die by his jealous wife's hand in 1998) in his then-new film, Houseguest. I was spooked by the unexpected reference to Hartman, and hoped his murder didn't throw salt on existing wounds for Sweeney, whose brother passed away in 1995 from stage four lymphoma.

God Said, "Ha!" is such a tiny pin-drop of a movie, I couldn't help but be moved by her brief acknowledgment of Hartman, and her inclusion of Crash Test Dummies' "God Shuffled His Feet" over the closing credits (there's a throwaway moment in the film where Sweeney mentions her brother was a fan of the band's.)

I suspect her theatrical staging of the monologue (which ran in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and on Broadway) emphasized her jokes and broad Spokane accent over the reflectiveness of the film.

When I saw it at the Film Forum, there were people laughing, all right, howling as she transformed herself into her mother, a well-meaning but convenience-conditioned older woman who doesn't quite understand the notion of grating one's own block of fresh parmigiana cheese. "You don't hyeve to doo thyet," she says to Julia, after a long look of puzzlement.

"Showy," or "stagey," maybe those are the words I might use if I saw the piece in its Broadway run. I don't know why . . . it translates well onto celluloid as a theatrical entity. Live, would it be too over-the-top? Eager? Lacking in the freshness and quirks that accompany real conversation? Over-projected, over-rehearsed?

I'm grateful to have seen it in a tiny movie theatre filled not even halfway to capacity. It was a weekday afternoon, and the room was littered with people who were, for whatever reasons, outside of the 9-to-5 margins, maybe they were out sick with the flu their children brought home, or they were temporarily unemployed, and God Said, Ha! helped them realize the relative good luck in their lives.

Sweeney remains focused and optimistic, and because a strong sense of humor is a necessity for her, she eases her audience into the practice of laughter for its own sake.