I guess there are some lines you don’t get to cross. ABC went ahead and gave Roseanne Barr her own show, in spite of a history of terrible Trumpisms and lunatic conspiracy theories — they must have known she was a bomb ticking on the set. But she finally went too far when she made racist comments comparing a former Obama official to an ape, and ABC gave up on dealing with her and cancelled the show. I feel for her co-workers (and especially Wanda Sykes, who quit first), but this is what happens when you agree to work with a terrible human being.
It’s too bad ABC didn’t factor in the repugnance of their star. I think this will mean that Roseanne will be persona non grata almost everywhere…but maybe she can still get a gig at Fox News.
And another “martyr” for the free speech grifters. But seriously what a vile human being she is!
I raised an eyebrow over the cancellation, times have certainly changed, and in some cases, in a very good way. Good riddance to bad garbage, her bullshit has been intolerable for some time now. I have no doubt she’ll claim “comedy! joking!”, but I can’t remember back to when she was actually funny.
Given that we live in the age of Wingnut Welfare, I assume she’ll just open a patreon, write a book, and get a segment on infowars.
@Caine:
I was just saying something similar on Mano’s blog. I think you’re right that the cancellation has a significant amount to do with changing norms, and I agree with what I think is your subtext that progressive activism including advertiser boycotts is an important part of this change.
O’Reilly may have lost his job for sexual harassment rather than racism, but I think the willingness and ability of people to have an impact through advertiser boycotts, up to and including forcing the cancellation of the highest rated show on a network, has changed the television landscape. I can’t know whether that played a role in this case (or how big a role), but my suspicion is that these are exactly the kinds of effects we should expect when more and more people are willing to judge advertisers for associating with oppressive jerks.
@Porivil Sorrens
Well, take credit for writing a book anyway.
It may not pay as much as actually creating good content, but it requires so little work that the per-hour wage is better by a fair margin.
@4
Well, either that, or get offered a government position by the blobfish in chief.
The way things are going, I wouldn’t be surprised to see her to clinch the GOP nomination in 6 years.
Has Roseanne ever not been sleazy white trash? Isn’t that the image she had cultivated her entire career? How is anybody surprised at this development?
willj, #6
Oh god, it’s gonna be Rosanne vs Oprah, isn’t it?
Artor, #7
Actually, she wasn’t always “sleazy white trash.” During her standup career all the way through the run of the original “Roseanne,” she was relatable to many people. The original show was quite progressive in many ways, while on a working-class family and depicting them positively (which wasn’t all that common at the time). All this right-wing bullshit is relatively recent, and is kind of sad.
For that last one to happen, she’d have to be rejected as too toxic by Fox News and by Breitbart, which I doubt will happen. Even this new age of Wingnut Welfare, appearing on Infowars is still scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Crip Dyke@4–
Minor addendum: O’Reilly got away with sexual harassment, with Fox picking up the legal tab for many years. He lost his job only when it became public knowledge and advertisers started pulling out.
@5 Hey man, don’t insult blobfish like that.
The thing I don’t get was why did they bring her back? We seem to live in an age of ‘reimaginings’. Nothing new is made, old stories are brought back from the dead with better CGI.
Okay, can we please make this not a thing on Pharyngula. Seriously folks, it’s been discussed before. “White trash” does far too much splash damage to be acceptable.
I very distinctly remember the time when I was, oh, 7 or 8 years old, and a bunch of neighborhood kids told me that the Myers family was all “white trash”, because they lived next to the railroad tracks and my uncles and grandmother were seasonal fruit pickers (and my dad worked at a gas station). They were pretty insistent. They didn’t seem to think that my statement that my grandmother was a wonderful woman who loved me mattered very much.
Then they robbed me of the small amount of change I had in my pockets and threw rocks at me until I ran home, proving that they were of much higher class than I was.
Of course it ended this way.
It was always going to end this way.
This was an event set to happen from the moment the reboot was greenlit.
And all her old costars signed on anyway.
Yeah, perpetuating negative stereotypes about the working class when the people fucking over our country is near uniformly rich corporate barons is bullshit. Roseanne is bad because she’s a rich white racist idiot, not because she cultivates a working-class image.
Roseanne is of course saying that it was a “joke”. If so, I need someone to point out to me the set-up and then the punchline. Because that’s the way real jokes work.
yes she is the kind of working class that in the end votes against the union and for the bosses.
uncle frogy
I’m not sure if millionaire actors/wanna-be politicians really count as being working class. She puts it on as an affectation, but she’s about as working class as George “I have my cowboy boots on” Bush was.
She was working class, growing up, and through her first marriage. Then she started stand up comedy, and it went from there. Ever since she became famous and grew a big wallet, she’s been a mess and an asshole. I don’t know that she can honestly relate to working class anymore, and I don’t think she has for a very long time. Now she plays pretend at it.
Are you kidding? She’ll probably have Betsy DeVos’s job in a couple of months!
Robert Serrano @9:
Really? Because my memory of her when I was a kid in the 80s was that she had a reputation as being sleazy and crude.
People are going off the deep end fast in the Trump era. I thought Kanye had set the tone for crazy rants lately and Roseanne goes and surpasses him. We go from a byproduct of Kardashian fishbowl insanity to resurrecting a 90s sitcom masterminded by a bozo conspiracy loon. Yipes.
Someone I know who is a huge conspiracy aficionado had told me a while back about his newfound admiration for Roseanne Barr but the significance of that didn’t register until now.
What she said about Valerie Jarrett was emetically racist. What she said about Chelsea Clinton was a huge indicator of her lunacy. The typical anti-Soros trope shows Roseanne has jumped head first into the conspiracy cesspit without a facemask or snorkel. Although even I have serious misgivings about his ill gotten financial gains the smears of Soros and his Popper inspired Open Society endeavors are just plain bonkers. She said: “By the way, George Soros is a nazi who turned in his fellow Jews 2 be murdered in German concentration camps & stole their wealth-were you aware of that? But, we all make mistakes, right Chelsea?” Roseanne is thus frickin nuts and toxic. Anti-Soros rants are my indicator of dangerous fringe lunacy.
The upside if a silver lining can be found is that there is no danger of losing Leonard from Big Bang Theory and Sheldon’s mom is also safe. Maybe Sara Gilbert will make another appearance on BBT for some reason although I only watch the reruns on TBS.
I’ve read that many syndication networks are also dumping reruns of the original series. Anything with Rosie Barrf is now piss
Roseanne Barr says losing her television show is nothing compared to being labelled a racist “over one tweet”
You burn one cross and everyone thinks your in the Klan. #crocodile_tears
Good riddance. And, Sarah Gilbert must have needed a project/money REALLY REALLY badly to have totally forgotten the toxic production environment they all bitched about when the original series was running ….
https://twitter.com/schwarz/status/1001553951005831171
“White trash” is a term used to denigrate working class people. Throwing it around says more about you than the person you intended to insult.
As someone noted on Twitter- though I can’t find it now- Roseanne was the prefect incarnation of the Trump voter. On the one hand, we have the character of Roseanne Conner who is a working-class person and we’re told voted for Trump due to economic anxiety, just like all the think pieces on Trump voters we’ve gotten over the last year and a half tell us. Then there is the real Roseanne Barr who is at least financially secure, if not wealthy, who voted for Trump because she’s a racist jackass who has spent decades stewing in a conspiratorial broth which is what the average Trump voter is in reality.
Jeremy Schaffer @28: “….which is what the average Trump voter is in reality.”
.
From Ed Brayton’s blog:
“White Bigotry and Authoritarianism Go Hand in Hand” http://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/2018/05/30/white-bigotry-and-authoritarianism-go-hand-in-hand/ “Well, duh, that’s exactly what MAGA means!”
The bigot is currently trying to blame those evil chemicals, Roseanne Barr blames racist tweet on sleeping pills: “Disgraced comedian says ‘egregious’[†] statements were result of , and is scheduled to appear on podcast The Joe Rogan Experience on Friday”. (Apparently, Ambien (zolpidem) is something Rogan is blithering on about.)
† I opted to not set this in , since in the pedantic modern sense, she is correct (“Outstandingly bad; shocking“). However, I also presume her usage is an attempt to deflect from her long-standing documented racism and bigotry.
In poopyhead’s current Political Madness All the Time thread, Lynna points out the makers of Ambien (Sanofi) have replied, “While all pharmaceutical treatments have side effects, racism is not a known side effect of any Sanofi medication.”
re 31:
they did say “it might reduce inhibition” as possible side-effect of sleep deprivation.
I actually appreciate the reduction of inhibition let her display her inherent racism, on which her Trumpism, and “sitcom”, is based. Her costar laments that the show was singular in portraying the lives of poor WHITE people, to add to the common portrayal of impoverished POCs. Adding that the racism was not supposed to be highlighted the way Barrf encouraged.
Initially, I allowed the show in hopes it would be a vehicle to mock the lower class Trump supporters, displaying their misconceptions and gullibility to be taken by the conman. uh oh, what a mistake.
She was trying to champion the “cause”, not mock it in the least. *sigh*
?
(This is cross-posted from the Pervert Justice blog here at FtB, Racism Not Among Known Side-Effects…)
And the wingnuts are frothing, How the right is defending Roseanne Barr’s racist tweets:
I know, I know, please, please, none of her decade’s-worth of twitterings were racist because, um, ah, err… yeah, they didn’t say they were racist. So they weren’t. QED
microraptor @22:
I remember that, also (though I was in high school and college during the 1980s). And, at the time, I remember, in discussions with friends in college, realizing that male comedians were allowed to be as sleazy, crude, trashy, foul-mouthed, and assholish as they wanted and that was just part of the act. For a comedienne to embrace the same schtick, however, was, for some reason, wrong. Probably because she didn’t have a dick.
This does not excuse her behaviour over the past twenty or so years, but pointing out her crude night-club routines overlooks the even cruder night-club routines, by men, during the same era.
Maybe she and Kanye can cry on each other’s shoulders.
microraptor @22
Her stand-up act wasn’t particularly out of line for the time. Other female comics were doing raunchy or otherwise “vulgar” acts around the same time (Bette Midler had been doing her act for several years by the time Barr started), and crudity was just generally part of the landscape. Her original TV show was surprisingly progressive in many ways, and, like I said, one of the relatively few shows at the time to focus on a working-class family and portray them positively (this was the time of “The Cosby Show” and “Married…With Children”).
I’m not sure what happened to her after the end of her show. Maybe she just feels freer to let her inner bigoted asshole flag fly. Maybe she’s one of the “9/11 changed everything” idiots. But I still find it sad.