Roseanne Barr, who described herself as ethnically Russian, Polish and Lithuanian Jewish in her autobiography (Roseanne: My Life as a Woman, New York 1989, Harper and Row), has staged a comedic comeback on the documentary channel of America’s most-viewed television personality, Tucker Carlson.
Barr said she was blackballed, or “canceled,” by Hollywood after she tweeted disparaging remarks about Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett in 2018. Barr wrote of Jarrett: “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=v.” Jarrett then claimed she was a “person of color” because she had Persian ancestry, and that the “ape” reference was therefore racist. Barr countered she thought Jarrett was white, and that the charge of racism was purely political, stemming from Barr’s support for the policies of then-president Donald Trump. The American television network ABC promptly canceled Barr’s revamped “Roseanne” series and removed all references to it from their website.
Barr is no stranger to controversy. She parodied the American national anthem at a nationally-televised baseball game in 1990, which then-president George H. W. Bush called “disgraceful.” Her first series “Roseanne” ran from 1988 to 1997, outliving the bush presidency, and was updated by ABC in 2018 with most of the same members of the cast, albeit 20 years older.