Recent Interview with Roseanne

[USTVFanFromUK]

No holds barred

Her life became a freak show after her sitcom vaulted her to fame. Roseanne tells Katie Puckrik about her mistakes and her attempts to win back the public affection she squandered

Saturday January 14, 2006
The Guardian


Still game for a laugh: Roseanne Barr. Photograph: Rose M Prouser/CNN/AP

With the 1988 debut of Roseanne, Roseanne Barr barged her way into our televisions like a party crasher - uninvited and too damn loud. But this self-anointed domestic goddess radicalised the tepid sitcom scene with her original desperate housewife persona: a social saboteur whose bullets were one-liners aimed at misogynists, homophobes, politics and middle-class pretentiousness.
The funny disguised the fury that propelled Roseanne through an un-pretty early life. Raised Jewish in Mormon Utah, the high-school dropout did a brief spell in a mental hospital at age 17, reluctantly gave up a baby for adoption at 18, got married and raised three kids in a trailer while working as a cocktail waitress and picking up the odd customer for sex and money.Encouraged by the response to her wisecracks at work, Roseanne honed her hopped-up hausfrau routine in Midwestern comedy clubs. After five years, her six-minute act landed her in LA's prestigious Comedy Store, where she killed. Her Johnny Carson appearances made her safe for sitcom, and the Roseanne show was a triple-wide trailer-size hit, running for nine seasons. Soon enough, the show behind the show became the draw, with the tabloids seizing on her volatile antics: the mass staff firings, the parental sexual abuse allegations, the plastic surgery, the coked-up courtship of Tom Arnold, the spectacular mangling of the national anthem.
After Roseanne finished in 1997, her Midas touch tarnished with three failed projects: a daytime talk show, a reality show and a cooking show all stank up her CV. But the grit that got this working-class heroine from trailer to Hollywood never left her, and in the past few years Roseanne has quietly been born again - as a stand-up. Michael Moore became Roseanne's unexpected creative midwife during the 2004 presidential campaign, inviting her to join his controversial tour of university campuses across the US. Now she's bringing her act to Britain with two low-key appearances at the Leicester Comedy Festival.

At her TV production facility near LA airport, I meet with an almost unrecognisably slimmer and blonder Roseanne, accompanied by Buck, her 10-yearold son by her third ex-husband. The 53-year-old's look combines Sporty and Baby Spice with her hot pink hoodie, matching pink shades and Hello Kitty sun visor.

"I don't shake hands," she announces flatly when I extend mine in greeting. Buck gleefully qualifies, "She's afraid of germs!" So I just wave, sit and we begin to talk.

You were touring with Michael Moore?

Yeah, I went on a college tour which was great for my stand-up, and it reignited all my passion - I was like, "God this is awesome!" You get up in front of 7,000 smart kids and make 'em laugh. It was just fantastic.

Did he approach you?

Yeah, he asked me to come, because I'm from Salt Lake City, Utah, and they're extremely right-wing there and were trying to keep him out. So I went on a fake pro-George Bush thing: "I'm glad Bush vetoed the ban on assault weapons because you never know when God's gonna call on you to kill an abortion doctor." First the audience didn't know where I was going, but it went in a ripple and it exploded. Then Michael's like, "We're going to Iowa - do you wanna come?" So we just got on the plane and kept going.

Did you have a meeting of the minds?

Yeah. He's just a regular Midwestern guy who happens to have extremely strong political opinions, like his whole family. They're like Quakers. I'm all like, hey, we're gonna go on this private plane and drink, and his brother-in-law's like, "The Moore family doesn't drink." I'm like, "What?! What kind of dysfunctional family is this?" Me and my boyfriend John would go back to the hotel and have a few drinks there.

Tell me about your boyfriend. Were you looking for a new man in your life?

[Explosively] HELL no! NO! I had given up. I knew I had bad taste, I knew I hated 'em all. I'm a total relationship failure. I'm a huge baby. I can't quite care about somebody else, I can only care about myself. I can't do that girl thing - I'm over it. But John was no work. He's probably the smartest person I ever met. I'm real happy. And my son loves him.

What's in your stand-up now?

After 9/11, I was like, "This is really the end of the world." Every ****in' freak on earth has got a nuclear weapon in their basement. In my act I talk about the end of the world coming. It's happening in July and the only safe places will be Canada, Hershey Pennsylvania and Tom Cruise's spaceship.

How do you know this?

It's in the Bible.

Are you religious?

I've belonged to every religion there is. They're all a bunch of crap. But I like Kabbalah for the meditation. But anyway, coming back to comedy was scary - I had already gone through a huge negative thing when I screwed up the Star Spangled Banner. The president said I was a disgrace, I got death threats, I couldn't leave my house, I had to hire 24-hour bodyguards for years. I had stage fright for about 14 years after that.

What about the reality show you did a couple years back, The Real Roseanne?

One thing I learned is fake reality sucks, too. They had me doing stuff on that show I would never do in real life, like get out of bed, and shower, and talk to people. It was all staged. They hired actors and told me they were producers just to try to make me mad and scream at people, 'cause that's who they wanted me to be. But that is a construct from tabloids - I'm not that person any more.

You not only comment on the excesses of America, but you've lived them.

Oh, I've totally lived them.

You've had a lot of surgery ...

Well, I haven't for 14 years but people are fixated on that. It's not like I'm Cher. I'm not gonna do it again. But yeah, I went through a real crazy "woo-hoo!" having my head completely turned around. You lose your balance when you get that famous and that rich - and I was probably the least prepared to handle that than anyone on earth. I came from pretty working-class poverty, and it was so overnight.

British people are fascinated by the American obsession with physical perfection.

Well, it's so funny, because the fatter we get, the more we want "our stars" to be skinny. 'Course I think we're being drugged by Starbucks and stuff like that - hormones in our coffee so that we really only care about things that don't matter. Like sharing our germ-infested sex fluids with other members of the human race.

So, um, Starbucks is to blame?

It's all to blame. Drugs. The diet industry. One of the better things about the world ending is that the diet industry will be going up in flames along with everything else. And also all the really thin women that do yoga and have no body fat, when the food supply dries up, they'll be dead within two weeks. And me, thanks to my large body mass, will be stepping over their skeletal remains and the silicone tit bags and the collagen lips and the pitiful little puddles of Botox as I make my way to Canada to find more food. So I'm trying to get fatter to hump up for Armageddon, which is coming. When my son Buck watches the Roseanne show, he says, "Did you know you were that fat?" I had Buck when I was 44, and like I tell him, "I'm so sorry that you got an old bag for a mom." I have to invent games to play with him that require little or no energy, so I don't have to move at all. Like he jumps off stuff, and I hold up a sign like in the Olympics: 8.5 - and I'm just laying in bed, watching forensic shows.

Forensic shows?

Oh yeah. I like crazy people and the crazy things they do. And all the worst serial killer crazies are from the UK. The Fred West guy and his wife - that whole story - that's crazier than the United States. I have to say you guys are a little crazier. I like the whole study of what makes somebody crazy and what makes somebody sane and where the line is. Like how mental is it to be dropping bombs on people that you don't ever think of as people? That's pretty serial killer. Getting to where you're a serial killer and holding office. I like the way Bush just denies everything real. That's pretty fantastic - more than just cruising for people on the highway, you know?

· Roseanne plays Leicester Comedy Festival, Feb 10 & 11. Call 0116 233 3111 for tickets

[Dumballa]

post
I hope I can catch her at some point during her tour.