One of the challenging things about Roseanne Barr, at least over the past few years, has been working out whether or not she has a genuine mental illness (and is thus being exploited by morally bankrupt media types) or if, in fact, she’s simply just a spectacularly shit human.
Unfortunately, Barr’s latest media outing – a bizarre, sycophantic, shouty interview from renowned whinging Pom Piers Morgan – does nothing to solve the question. But first the brief background.
Morgan had Barr on overnight because, once again, the former comedian turned sitcom star has hit the headlines for saying things that, well, in the cold light of day look more ‘stupid rant’ than ‘funny’. Which, unless you’re Donald Trump, can’t be put down to a deliberate career choice.
In Barr’s case, at the end of last month she appeared on fellow comedian Theo Von’s podcast, where, among many other wildly outlandish statements, she sarcastically claimed that Joe Biden had definitely won the 2020 presidential election over Trump. Barr, in case you’ve missed it, is a trenchant ‘election denier’, and so, to underscore her sarcasm, she also pretended to be a Holocaust denier. Which is never a good idea….
“[Biden got 81 million votes in 36 districts]. That is the truth, and nobody died in the Holocaust either. That’s the truth. It should happen, six million Jews should die right now because they cause all the problems in the world but it never happened,” Barr said.
In Barr’s ‘funny defence’, she also told Von that Hollywood was “full of Jews” and that Americans should be grateful because if that wasn’t the case, “all you’d have is f***ing fishing shows”. But unfortunately for Barr, while sections of the left did indeed try to misuse the statements to make out Barr was genuinely anti-Semitic (it was clearly satirical and Barr is, in fact, Jewish), it still went down like a lead balloon within the Jewish community.
Jonathan Greenblatt from the Anti-Defamation League lead the charge: “Sarcasm or not, Roseanne Barr’s comments about Jews and the Holocaust are reprehensible and irresponsible.”
And speaking of that, enter Piers Morgan, who was obviously hopeful he might wring a bit more out of the fortnight-old controversy. Morgan also apparently mistakenly believed he had an ‘ally and friend’ in Roseanne Barr, who, like himself, has repeatedly been ‘silenced and cancelled’ for her views… (we’ll let the fact Morgan has his own television show, and Barr her own publicist for a national tour fly through to the keeper).
In any event, things didn’t go quite as planned for Morgan, because after mumbling through Morgan’s introduction, Barr started shouting almost from the outset, a strategy that continued intermittently (and randomly?) throughout her deeply uncomfortable 15-minute appearance.
What set Barr off, apparently, was the opening question from Morgan, which was nothing if not probing and insightful: “Have we gone mad in the world?” he asked.
Barr began by railing about people not being able to take a joke, because “they’re fed bullshit 24/7 over the media….” followed by Barr yelling “I’m about to go crazy sitting here on the earphone hearing the stuff you all are saying about the Ukraine. I’m about to have a heart attack but I’m not even gonna go into it.”
And then half a second later, Barr did indeed ‘go into it’.
“I’m from the Ukraine,” she claimed. “There’s a large amount of Nazis in the Ukraine. They actually killed my whole family. I’m from the Ukraine. And they marched my entire family, grandmothers, great grandparents, 10 siblings, out into the forest and buried them alive in the Ukraine.”
Barr was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and her maternal family is from Hungary/Lithuania. Her father’s family is from… well not Ukraine, but Russia. But as a supporter of the invasion of Ukraine, you can probably understand how Barr might mistake the two countries. Moving on….
She also railed about being the “wrong type of Jew“, and how the US state department supports the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel… which the US state department explicitly does not support. And at the risk of spoiling the rest of Barr’s punchlines, she does actually settle into some gags, which are chuckleworthy… even if what’s she’s saying is offensive, and makes her sound completely unhinged.
“Check it out Piers. The people that are saying everything’s offensive are walking down the street swinging their penises in people’s face, dressed, those are the people who say shit’s offensive. The fucken, you know what I mean, Jesus, hey, hello. I say, women, this is my advice to today’s woman: ‘Keep your penis in your pants. Especially when children are around, women.’”
Right. Okay then. Barr also had some news for her “libtard” relatives, including her children (after she was asked by Morgan another incredible prober, “the most difficult question on earth… what is a woman?”).
Barr: “How much do I weigh? [laughs]. A woman is me. A woman is somebody whose breasts hang down to her stomach, and who has a prolapsed uterus from giving birth to five ungrateful little bastards who have never had to work for a thing in their goddam life. That’s what a woman is.”
Which sounds more like the Roseanne we all remember… albeit with a few conservative hate-talking points thrown in for good measure. You can enjoy the rest of the video below. Or not.
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