Roseanne Barr suggests in her new stand-up special that ABC executives are hypocrites for employing stars who have worn blackface while firing her for alleged racism.
The hit reboot of Barr’s sitcom “Roseanne” was canceled by the network in 2018 after she posted an allegedly racist tweet about former President Barack Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett.
And in the new special, “Roseanne Bar: Cancel This!,” Barr jokes that she suggested to ABC bosses that she could keep her job if she apologized — on “shows you’ve got on the ABC channel… where [the hosts have] been in blackface.”
On the Fox Nation special, Barr claims she wrote the tweet — in which she Jarret seemed as if she were the offspring of a union between “[the] muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes” — because she believed she thought Jarret was white.
Barr said she added, “I’ll tell you what, just put me on the ‘Jimmy Kimmel Show’ and on “The View” and a lot of your other shows you’ve got on the ABC channel, you know, where people they’ve been in blackface and everything, I’ll go on there and surely, they’ll understand my mistake.”
She added, “Because surely, they didn’t get fired for that s**t. And they’ll understand when people do something really stupid.”
Kimmel has apologized for impersonating NBA player Karl Malone in blackface in the 1990s. The “View” co-host Joy Behar has denied wearing blackface as part of a Halloween costume, saying the look was “an homage.”
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Both Kimmel and Behar are Democrats, which, presumably, is why Barr believes they were treated more harshly than she was.
She recently told the L.A. Times of returning to the stand-up stage, “At first it was terrifying. I was really afraid because I didn’t know how people were going to respond. I was afraid to even go outside for a while [after the Jarret scandal.]”
She added that friends in the stand-up world had invited her “on stage to do five or 10 minutes” at comedy clubs on the West Coast.
“That helped,” she said, “And it got easier and easier. People showed me so much love. I was kind of overwhelmed by that.”
ABC relaunched the show without Barr as “The Connors.”
She has also blamed the cancellation of the show on anti-Semitism and the actions of co-star Sarah Gilbert.
ABC didn’t respond to our request for comment.
