Roseanne Barr

Comedian

• Born: November 3, 1952
• Place of Birth: Salt Lake City, Utah

• Date of birth: November 3, 1952
• Place of birth: Salt Lake City, Utah

COMEDIAN, ACTOR, AND ACTIVIST

Barr combined her sharp wit with her feminism to create the “domestic goddess,” a comic persona who made her audience of ordinary women feel that their lives were significant.

Early Life

Roseanne Cherrie Barr was the oldest of four children born to homemaker Helen Davis and salesman Jerry Barr. Growing up in Salt Lake City, she often felt uncomfortable because she and her siblings—brother Ben and sisters Geraldine and Stephanie—were among the few Jewish children in an area of the country dominated by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or Mormons.

Barr’s life abruptly changed on September 17, 1968, when she was hit by a car while she was walking in a crosswalk. The car’s hood ornament hit her head, causing a large gash, and she was dragged twenty feet before the driver stopped the vehicle. She eventually recovered and suffered no long-term physical damage, but the incident changed her outlook on life.

She became aware of her own mortality, and she was determined to live a more adventurous life. She also fell behind in her schoolwork, had trouble sleeping, and suffered memory loss. Seeking relief from these problems, she checked into a state mental hospital in Provo, Utah, in 1969.

Not long after her commitment, she became pregnant. She moved to Denver, where she lived in a Salvation Army home and placed her daughter, Brandi, up for adoption. Years later, after Barr had become a well-known comedian, she reunited with her daughter. Barr eventually moved to Georgetown, Colorado, where she lived in a hippie community and met Bill Pentland, a motel night clerk who later worked for the post office. The two moved to Denver, were married in 1974, and had three children, Jennifer, Jessica, and Jacob.

Life’s Work

While living in Denver, Barr became active in the women’s rights movement and performed in a guerrilla theater group connected with the feminist Woman to Woman Bookstore. She began developing a stand-up comedy routine, telling jokes aimed at raising women’s consciousness. She performed at comedy clubs in Denver and later traveled to other cities, perfecting her act and her comedic character along the way.

By the early 1980s, there were numerous comedy clubs throughout the country where aspiring comics could try out their material. However, most of the comedians were men, and women who were funny were stereotyped as being shrill and unfeminine. Barr did not let these perceptions bother her. She did not apologize for being overweight, outspoken, and not conventionally pretty, and she used these characteristics as a source of her humor. Barr knew that blue-collar women, such as she considered herself, were not the perfect homemakers depicted in television shows and that raising children could be as bothersome as it was fulfilling. She expressed these truths in her act, and by dubbing herself a “domestic goddess” and “an urban guerrilla fighter housewife” she sought not only to make her audiences laugh but also to offer respect to the women other feminists had demeaned as “just housewives.”

Barr’s big break came in 1985, when she was booked at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles. An employee of The Tonight Show saw her performance and invited her to appear on the program. Barr made her national television debut on this show on August 23, 1985, and her well-received routine resulted in an avalanche of offers for additional work. She starred in a comedy special for Home Box Office (HBO) in 1987, and she appeared in a television commercial for Pizza Hut.

Her growing popularity led to her own network situation-comedy program. Roseanne debuted on October 18, 1988, and remained on the air for nine seasons. Barr played Roseanne Conner, a blue-collar wife and mother similar to the character she created for her stand-up routine. Her character was married to Dan Conner (actor John Goodman) and had three children and a younger sister. The show was in the tradition of other sitcoms about working-class families, such as The Honeymooners and All in the Family, but unlike the others it focused on the wife in the household, not the husband. Both Roseanne and Dan worked, their family experienced financial difficulties, and their kids were not always model children. Barr also starred in the 1989 film She-Devil with actor Meryl Streep.

While Barr achieved success with her work, her relationships appeared to be in shambles. She battled with her program’s writers and executives, firing two head writers and acquiring greater control of the show. She carried on a highly publicized affair with comedian Tom Arnold while she was still married to Pentland, and she insisted that Arnold be hired as a writer for her show. She married Arnold in 1990, less than a month after she divorced Pentland, but she divorced Arnold in 1994, alleging she was the victim of domestic violence. She claimed to have repressed memories of her parents sexually and physically abusing her and announced during a television appearance that she was a victim of incest. Her parents vehemently denied these accusations and even submitted to a polygraph that showed they were not lying. Barr refused to retract her remarks and remained estranged from her family for more than a decade. In a 2011 appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show, Barr expressed her regrets about the allegation, saying that "incest" was the wrong word to use but that she did experience abuse.

Barr’s penchant for notoriety turned ugly on July 25, 1990, when she sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” at a baseball game. After singing off-key, she grabbed her crotch and spit on the ground. Her performance ignited a firestorm of criticism. She was denounced in the press and insulted when she appeared in public. President George H. W. Bush issued a statement that condemned Barr’s actions as “disgraceful,” while businessperson James Rees organized the Bar Roseanne Club. Rees’s advertisements for the club in Rolling Stone attracted six hundred members, most of them men. Amid the controversy, Barr continued to star on Roseanne and to appear in other television programs and films. In 1995, she married her third husband, bodyguard Ben Thomas, and the couple had a son, Buck, before they divorced in 2002. In its final season, Roseanne had dropped in the ratings and had deteriorated in quality. By the time the last episode of the show aired on August 26, 1997, the public had grown tired of Barr’s program and her confused personal life.

In subsequent years, Barr returned to stand-up comedy and maintained an Internet blog. In 2003, a reality program about her life, The Real Roseanne Show, aired for a few episodes but was quickly canceled. Three years later, she starred in a comedy special for HBO, Roseanne Barr: Blonde and Bitchin’. She began studying Kabbala, a type of Jewish mysticism, and she appeared to be happier and more stable.

Barr published her third book, Roseannearchy: Dispatches from the Nut Farm, in 2011. In early 2012, she announced that she was seeking the Green Party's presidential nomination, explaining that she felt that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats had been effectively serving the American people. Although she lost the nomination to Jill Stein, she did not give up the fight for the White House as she announced in August that she would be running for the Peace and Freedom Party. Still posting liberally on social media sites about various issues, she and her running mate, Cindy Sheehan, managed to come in sixth place in the general election. That same year, she was the subject of an infamous "roast" on Comedy Central. Two years later, she began hosting a new reality show on Investigation Discovery about helicopter moms, called Momsters: When Moms Go Bad (2014–15).

In 2015, Barr revealed to the public that she was suffering from macular degeneration and glaucoma and was progressively going blind; she also discussed in interviews that she had been smoking marijuana as a medicinal aid for the condition. She later learned, and subsequently reported, that she had been misdiagnosed and her vision loss was in fact due to a mole growing on the inside of her eye, a condition that could be corrected by surgery.

Roseanne returned to ABC in March 2018, eleven years after its original run ended. The revival drew significant attention due to both Barr's and her character's support for Donald Trump, winner of the contentious 2016 US presidential election. Trump himself lauded the reboot. With its new, politically polarizing overtones, the abbreviated tenth season received generally positive reviews from critics and was considered a major hit for the network. The revival proved short-lived, however. In late May of that year, Barr made a racist remark on Twitter about Valerie Jarrett, a former adviser to President Barack Obama, which Barr later deleted and tried to excuse. Within hours, ABC had condemned Barr's action and dropped her show. A sequel spin-off, The Connors, aired without Barr. During its first episode on October 16, 2018, the characters deal with Rosanne's death from an opioid overdose. As of 2024, the show remained the highest-rated comedy on ABC. Barr returned to the stage in 2023 for one night. Her performance, Cancel This!, aired on Fox Nation.

Significance

Barr eventually became such a lightning rod for controversy that her comic talent was lost amid her notoriety. At her best, however, Barr was a brilliant comedian with a crack sense of timing and the ability to use her life experiences not only as a source of humor but also as a means of drawing attention to the serious concerns of housewives and mothers.

Bibliography

Andreeva, Nellie. "Roseanne Barr's Risk-Taking ABC Revival Shakes Up TV Landscape, Becoming Biggest Hit of Broadcast Season—Deadline Disruptors." Deadline Hollywood, 10 May 2018, deadline.com/2018/05/roseanne-barr-donald-trump-bruce-helford-disruptors-news-1202380575. Accessed 30 Aug. 2024.

Barr, Geraldine. My Sister Roseanne: The True Story of Roseanne Barr Arnold. With Ted Schwarz, Carol Publishing, 1994.

Barr, Roseanne. Roseanne: My Life as a Woman. Harper & Row, 1989.

Davis, William P., and Jaclyn Peiser. "'Roseanne,' the Reboot: A Timeline." The New York Times, 29 May 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/business/media/roseanne-reboot-timeline.html. Accessed 30 Aug. 2024.

Dugan, Christina. "Roseanne Barr Thought She Was Going Blind for a Whole Year—but It Was a Misdiagnosis." People, 27 Mar. 2018, people.com/tv/roseanne-barr-thought-she-was-going-blind/. Accessed 15 May 2018.

Press, Joy. "Roseanne Barr Reflects on Motherhood ahead of Momsters Second Season." Los Angeles Times, 27 Nov. 2015, www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/la-ca-st-roseanne-barr-momsters-20151129-story.html. Accessed 30 Aug. 2024.

Teeman, Tim. "Roseanne Barr on Losing Her Sight, Smoking Weed, Rejecting Feminism, and Not Voting For Hillary." Daily Beast, 20 Apr. 2015, www.thedailybeast.com/roseanne-barr-on-losing-her-sight-smoking-weed-rejecting-feminism-and-not-voting-for-hillary. Accessed 30 Aug. 2024.

Walsh, Savannah. "Roseann Barr on Being Canceled. 'I'm the Only Person Who's Lost Everything.'" Vanity Fair, 10 Feb. 2023, www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2023/02/roseanne-barr-on-being-canceled-im-the-only-person-whos-lost-everything. Accessed 30 Aug. 2024.