Writer and comedian Julia Sweeney might be “older and wider” (as her new show proudly proclaims) than she was in her “Saturday Night Live” days, but she is still pretty darn funny.

Best-known for playing the androgynous character “Pat” and Chelsea Clinton during her five-year stint on “SNL,” Sweeney has survived motherhood, cancer and the ebb and flow of her career — and has the jokes to prove it.

‘JULIA SWEENEY: OLDER AND WIDER’ ★★★ When: Through May 30 Where: econd City’s e.t.c. Theater, 230 W. North Ave. Tickets: $26 Info: www.secondcity.com

“Older and Wider” is a 90-minute set of essentially observational standup, focusing primarily on Sweeney’s decision to leave her career and Hollywood behind for the life of a stay-at-home mom in suburban Wilmette.

While the standup set doesn’t follow the traditional narrative of a monologue as in her past shows such as “God Said Ha!” and “Letting Go of God,” it does have some structure. The jokes follow a timeline from her days in Hollywood circa 1999 through present day. While the new show doesn’t have the emotional hooks of those previous dramatic works, if you go into the evening expecting to laugh at a standup comic, you’ll enjoy it.

Sweeney happily embraces her “matronly” image. Gray-haired and, she says, therefore “invisible,” she admits finding the whole situation liberating; she no longer has to eavesdrop as people literally talk to each other — through her — as if she isn’t there. It gives her the freedom, she says, to not care what people think about her.

One of the most daring moments of the set is when Sweeney shares that she re-read the gospels from the Bible in the the order in which they are believed to have been written (Mark, Matthew, then Luke and John). Read this way, she says, the gospels feel like drafts of a screenplay, with the unseen hands of studio executives requesting revisions that up the stakes with each “new and improved” version of the story of Jesus’ life. In Mark’s telling, Jesus is healing the sick; by the time you get to John, he’s raising the dead.

Along the way, she also talks about the adoption of her daughter, Mulan. Though Sweeney legally changed her daughter’s name to Tara, her daughter would only respond to Mulan — a particularly mortifying thing for Sweeney, apparently. “This is Hollywood. People will think it’s the only Chinese name I know,” she exclaims.

She notes during the set that since 2008 she has bounced much of the material off her husband, Michael Blum. Blum is Jewish, Sweeney was raised Catholic and now considers herself an atheist. Still a people-pleaser, Sweeney’s novel idea for their wedding was to have her good friend Don Novello officiate the ceremony — as his “SNL” character, Father Guido Sarducci.

“My atheist friends and the Jewish side of the family thought we were poking fun at Catholics,” she explains. “My Catholic family thought the priest was just really funny. Everyone was happy.”

When Blum offered to be the breadwinner, Sweeney jumped at the chance partly because she was exhausted trying to work the amount of hours necessary to keep the Hollywood life going (nanny, maid, part-time personal assistant)? For the most part, you don’t get the sense that she misses her old life much.

Though she has recently received criticism for the non-gender specific “Pat” (including from writer and transgender activist Jill Soloway, the creator of the Emmy-award winning series “Transparent”), she insists the “SNL” skits were never about whether or not Pat was transgender — the humor came from everyone around Pat needing to classify Pat’s gender.

Still, she admits in “Older and Wider” that she rose to fame in part because she was the “Al Jolson of androgyny.”

It was one of the few moments in the show to get the least amount of laughs. One gets the sense that Sweeney has made peace with it, and so should all of us.

Misha Davenport is a Chicago-based freelance writer.