Stand-up comedian turned actor Roseanne Barr relaunched her stand-up career on Monday, but the jokes are mostly familiar right-wing rhetoric she would find unthinkably cliché in her heyday.
Barr launched her special on Fox News streaming platform Fox Nation which should tell people a lot.
If not, then its unsubtle title—Roseanne Barr: Cancel This!—should fill in the blanks.
So what sorts of things is former working class hero Barr using comedy to tackle nowadays? Gender identity—the thing conservatives are hyperfocused on lately.
You can watch a brief clip here:
\u201cConservative \u201ccomedians\u201d like Roseanne Barr and Jim Breuer only yell about vaccines, pronouns, and getting canceled.\n\nThe only thing funny about them is how repetitive and unoriginal their \u201cjokes\u201d are.\nhttps://t.co/KOihUts3Ur\u201d— Gabe Sanchez \uea00 (@Gabe Sanchez \uea00) 1676146345
Her "my pronouns are kiss/my/a**" joke was criticized as being regurgitated from Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz.
The rest of her set is reminiscent of the stuff people's QAnon supporting, MAGA friends, family and elected officials shout on Fox News and social media.
Stuff like:
"[Kids today] have no concept of reality! They’ve been living in a bubble forever!"
What other complaints are lodged about "kids"?
"Asking questions that have nothing to do with the real world: what is my gender, Mom? What is my gender?"
"Your gender is ‘Get a job,’ that’s your gender!”
And:
"What is a woman? They don’t know that? That one they’re asking all the time."
“I’ll tell you what a woman is. A woman is me!”
In a nod to her domestic goddess jokes from the 1980s which centered on the downside of being a wife and mother, Barr added:
“A woman is someone who cleans up everybody else’s s**t! That’s what a woman is!"
"A woman is somebody whose boobs hang down to her knees with a prolapsed uterus from giving birth to five ungrateful little privileged f**ks who’ve never had to work for anything in their whole damn lives!"
That portion of her set ended with the joke about pronouns featured in the clip above.
Barr appeared on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show to promote the special.
She claimed:
"[Liberals are] fascist and Nazi—they do experiments on captive populations."
"No different and it’s disgusting."
"And then we’re supposed to see that as progressive? It’s not. It’s anything but.”
Barr added:
"I’m not going to let them have the last word, not on me."
"I’ll be fighting in my Depends…I don’t care, I’m never gonna give up."
"They’re not gonna get me.”
Barr didn't provide context for her comments or proof of her claims.
Twitter had quite a lot to say about Barr's return to stand-up.
\u201cRoseanne has been a right wing nutbag for awhile now... any humor she once had has transformed into hate... and that just ain't funny..\u201d— Dan Skinner (@Dan Skinner) 1676397552
@beardedcrank/Twitter
\u201cThe Roseanne standup deeply pathetic.\n\nEven for a burnt-out Q Anon paranoid lunatic, it\u2019s got zero energy. You can tell that even the audience is disappointed.\n\n\u201c\u2018Mom, what are my pronouns?\u2019 Your pronouns are: Get a job!\u201d\n\nIt got, like, two chuckles, and that was the promo clip!\u201d— Peter Wolf (@Peter Wolf) 1676226799
@Eve6/Twitter
\u201cthe original Roseanne series was so good, so funny, so unlike anything else in its honest depiction of working class families in middle America. watching Roseanne herself devolve into a tired, derivative, hack is such a bummer.\u201d— caleb hearon (@caleb hearon) 1676152135
@Brocklesnitch/Twitter
\u201c@bennyjohnson Did she forget to bring the jokes?\u201d— Benny Johnson (@Benny Johnson) 1676048682
\u201c@bennyjohnson https://t.co/wpZJq8dQ2k\u201d— Benny Johnson (@Benny Johnson) 1676048682
It's hard to remember Barr was once a trailblazing progressive who brought the lives of the working poor to American TV screens for the first time since the 1970s with Roseanne.
But her transformation mirrors that of many of her poor, White fans who embraced Republican politicians—despite their fiscal actions almost exclusively benefiting the wealthy—because the GOP hates, attacks and scapegoats everyone they do.