In her early days as a stand-up comic, Roseanne Barr had a signature closing line in her act: “People say to me, ‘You’re not very feminine.’ Well, they can suck my dick.”1
That in a nutshell is the star of the hugely successful television show Roseanne. Still, it is a tough nut to crack. In her study on women comedians, Joanne Gilbert devoted five pages to debating whether or not Barr’s humor was feminist. Nor was Professor Gilbert alone in taking a crack at critiquing Barr. The significance of her career has been explored in numerous scholarly articles that highlight such elements as “feminist resistance in popular culture,” the “dialectical vision” through which “her radicalism is distributed over the two axes of class and gender,” the “growing strain of feminist literary theory [which] suggests that humor and comedy may be valuable as empowering ‘feminist tools,’” and as “an example of a woman exploiting the image meant to confine her.”2
While all of the journals in which these scholarly critiques appeared are in the collections of university libraries, Barr’s own books are in very few of those libraries. In the nonacademic world her books have been similarly devalued, as seen in the fact that used copies are currently available for one cent (plus shipping and handling). Clearly there is a disconnection between scholarly interest and public interest in Barr. The reasons for that gap become clear when viewed through the lens of her 2012 bid for the presidency.
For starters, it’s significant that the reasons were clear to Barr herself. Nine years before her candidacy she told an interviewer, “I made up my mind when I got into show business that I was always going to be honest and wouldn’t try to hide anything. . . . I’m a comic. I’m not the fucking president.” She knew that to be president one had to keep mum on some thoughts and express others less than honestly to pander to public opinion. Hence when candidate Barr was asked in a 2012 interview what percentage of their income the wealthiest Americans should be taxed, she answered, “I think we should have a fair tax. I think that all of this stuff is a big dialog that we need to have.”3 No mainstream candidate could have dodged the question better. After all, who’s against fair taxes? To the extent that Barr was indeed serious in her quest for the presidency, her answer was the same bunk derided by those previous fringe candidates who, unlike this comedian, ran clown campaigns.
“Roseanne Barr is running for President—and it’s no joke,” commenced an Associated Press report that appeared in newspapers nationwide.4 The unnamed journalist who wrote that lead line was following in the footsteps of those who, in the (misperceived) absence of humor in comedian Dick Gregory’s 1968 presidential bid, filled in their own punch lines. This reporter was one of a chorus of colleagues who vied for laughs when Barr revealed she was serious in her candidacy. “Raising the Barr of Election Insanity” punfully headlined a report in West Virginia’s Charleston Gazette. Though less snappy, Fort Lauderdale’s Sun Sentinel more presciently pointed to post-1968 changes in nomination rules when it told readers, “The joke may be on Florida voters. Roseanne Barr, the comedian and 1990s sitcom star, will be one of twelve presidential candidates on the November ballot, thanks to Florida’s weakened ballot access rules.”5
For her part, however, Barr did not so closely follow in the footsteps of Gregory’s campaign. Sharpening our focus on the nation’s changing political landscape in 2012, Barr merged Gregory’s serious campaign with the satiric presidential campaign of Will Rogers. She echoed Rogers’s antibunk platform when she cited as one plank of her platform, “Outlaw—how do we say this politely?—outlaw bull. Yes, that’s it. Outlaw bull.”6 But as seen in the “bull” that wafted from Barr’s answer about taxes, she wanted it both ways. Here too her campaign resembled that of Rogers in that, to the degree both sought to present themselves as candidates, call it bull or call it bunk, but it was swept under the rug just as it was with mainstream candidates.
Barr was well aware of the contradiction (and, quite likely, so too was Rogers). When, as with mainstream candidates in this era, she published a book shortly before her 2012 campaign, she alluded to such inconsistencies in its introduction. “I reserve the right as a comic,” she declared, “. . . to say things that should probably not be taken literally enough to make a nut job like you (you know who you are) feel justified in attacking me.”7 In this respect she was following in the footsteps of Gracie Allen, who took a swipe at voter baloney when she declared, “The Surprise Party is conceived and desecrated . . . upon the principle that everybody is just as good as anybody else, even though they aren’t quite as smart.”8 But by replacing daffy with daring, Barr paved Allen’s path with the added power women had wrested in the decades that followed Allen’s 1940 campaign. “I’m the only serious comedian in this race,” Barr declared—something Allen would not have said—and she went on to explain, “What I really want [is that] both parties be more responsive and compassionate to the American people’s needs. I’m running to make that point.”9 Running to make a point is different, and more doable, than running to get elected. And more difficult than running for laughs.
Barr was well qualified to make that point. Married in her late teens to a man who struggled with alcoholism, the two of them struggled for the next sixteen years to provide for their growing family. Living in a trailer home, she worked at a variety of minimum-wage jobs, all the while becoming imbued with feminist views very much in the discourse back then, in the 1970s and 1980s. Highly extroverted, she began to speak out. Yet she could not escape the feeling that feminist leaders needed to be, to borrow from her 2012 campaign statement, “more responsive and compassionate” to the needs of women struggling—with or without husbands pitching in—to meet the needs of their families or simply make ends meet. Out of that dual perspective emerged the ironic, working-class wit who went on to national acclaim when, for nine television seasons, she portrayed the wife of a construction worker on Roseanne.
Upon announcing her intention to seek the Green Party’s nomination for president, Barr encountered that which distinguishes candidates viewed as fringe from candidates viewed as third party. To those who believed she was running for laughs or who laughed at her for running, she was a fringe candidate; to those who took her candidacy seriously, she was a third party candidate. And it was precisely that debatable distinction that resulted in the Green Party’s rejection of Barr as its nominee. “There is a small cohort [at the Green Party convention] that will confess, either in an apologetic whisper or in a cranky diatribe, that it’s a blessing Roseanne canceled her planned appearance,” the Washington Post reported. “Roseanne Barr, who placed second behind Massachusetts physician Jill Stein in the Green Party’s nomination process, is exactly what party members do not need here. Not when they are trying to be taken seriously.”10
After being rebuffed by the Green Party, Barr, with her characteristic wit, mocked both the left-wing Green Party and the right-wing movement known as the Tea Party by declaring she’d run as a candidate of the self-created Green Tea Party.11 Ultimately, however, she received the nomination of the Peace and Freedom Party, the briefly beleaguered parent of the Freedom and Peace Party that ran away from home in 1968 to nominate Dick Gregory.
Swerving along the line that distinguishes third party from fringe, the Peace and Freedom Party had previously nominated little known candidates, such as a machinist named Herbert G. Lewin in 1988, and well-known candidates when it could, such as Eldridge Cleaver in 1968, the famed pediatrician turned antiwar activist Benjamin Spock in 1972, and consumer advocate Ralph Nader in 2008. Eight years earlier Nader had been the nominee of the Green Party in an election where his candidacy may have tipped the balance to George W. Bush over the Democratic Party’s nominee, Al Gore. The Peace and Freedom Party again opted for a Green Party retread in 2012, this time seeking visibility even at the risk of ridicule by nominating Barr.
And visibility it got. Not only did newspapers scramble for the kind of clever headlines cited above, so too was there a scramble by television interviewers, knowing what a draw Barr would be by virtue of never knowing what wisecrack would come from her Hollywood Walk of Fame brain. Aiming for voters most likely to have been fans of Roseanne, Barr tossed her interview bouquet to Sean Hannity on Fox News. But hold on to your hats, those who oppose Fox News; Hannity demonstrated that he can indeed conduct an interview that is fair and balanced—and cuts to the core. As in these excerpts:
Hannity: I watched you years ago when you did standup. . . . Should I take—is this to be taken seriously or do you really want to be elected president of the United States?
Barr: Yes. I’m very, very serious. . . .
Hannity: All right. I wasn’t sure who to expect tonight, because I know you’re very funny, you’re a comedian, an actress. And I’ve been following your campaign on the periphery. . . . You say you want to be taken seriously. You’ve thought about these issues, laying out your ideas. How can people do that, though? I’ll put up on the screen just three of your tweets. . . . One says most billionaires are violent pedophiles. . . . How do you get taken seriously when you call billionaires pedophiles? . . .
Barr: I like to get people talking. I am a provocateur, and I do like getting on Twitter and riling people up. You know what, after a while some sane dialogue and sane conclusions come out of that kind of thing. . . . And a lot of people have also said that I’m letting the billionaires off easy. . . .
Hannity: Let me be honest with you. You’re too smart to be saying some of these things, if you’re serious, that you want to be taken seriously and want to run for the presidency.12
No clearer demonstration can be found of a fringe candidate amplifying voices often otherwise barely heard than the fact that even Hannity, a highly successful political commentator with his conservative ear to the ground, failed to give credence in 2012 to claims that resonated with those of a 2016 candidate who would win the presidency. In that next election Donald Trump made claims as outrageous as Barr’s claim about billionaires having a predilection for pedophilia—as, for example, Trump’s assertion that President Obama was the founder of the terrorist group known as the Islamic State (ISIS).13 And Trump justified such claims as Barr did, on the basis of what unnamed people had ostensibly told him. When fueling the demonstrably false conspiracy theory that Obama was not born in the United States, Trump asserted, “You know, some people say that was not his birth certificate,” echoing Barr’s “a lot of people have also said that I’m letting the billionaires off easy.”14 Many Americans likewise did not view as disqualifying outrageous campaign pledges such as forcing Mexico to pay for the construction of a giant wall along its entire two-thousand-mile border with the United States, nor did they view as disqualifying the degree of rage in Trump’s pledge to fight terrorism by attacking the families of terrorists.15 Barr herself noted these similarities when she declared in 2018, “Trump totally stole my act.”16
In 2012, however, most Americans clearly viewed Barr’s candidacy as fringe when, in “My Platform for President USA,” she echoed the rage of Jonathon Sharkey in pledging, “The people must have justice, and so I want to reinstate and enshrine the Blessed and Holy Guillotine, a fast and painless execution of Justice and of execution.”17 That Barr often made ridiculous campaign pledges while insisting she was a serious candidate reflects the mix of connections and disconnections between her and her TV persona on Roseanne.
Imagine if her statement on reintroducing the guillotine were a line she delivered to her TV family. Or if she spouted to her TV family this proposal from her platform, aimed at creating a more compassionate society: “Each grandmother is responsible for at least one hundred people around her, as is normal now anyway, and she will answer to the Grandmother at the head of her district. Each District Head answers to the Tribunal Council of Matriarchs. The titular heads of the Worldwide Association of Matriarchal Tribunals will answer to the Head of the World Family, which is of course, Me.” One can easily imagine the delightful scene, pungently funny because its absurdity makes a point. Still, given that Barr said she was running for president to make a point, why did so many Americans reject such outrageous pledges by Barr but not similarly outrageous pledges made by Trump?
The answer resides in the underlying question: Was Roseanne Roseanne?
Not entirely. And never was the distinction more clear than on July 25, 1990, when Barr sang the national anthem at a baseball game between the Cincinnati Reds and the San Diego Padres. Vast numbers of Roseanne fans and other Americans were shocked by her televised performance. It was not so much her starting off too high for her vocal range, resulting in her screeching the peak of the song, as it was her appearing to have intended to botch what many consider a sacred song by grabbing her crotch at the end rather than in some way indicating she had inadvertently erred. The Roseanne on Roseanne, for all her wisecracking cynicism, would never have done that.
Keep in mind, as mentioned before, that no one was more aware of the differences between Roseanne and Roseanne than Barr herself. In a 1989 New York Times article, she summed up the public’s vision(s) of her, from her emergence as a stand-up comic through to her television show:
At first, I think, I stood for . . . ordinary folks living ordinary lives in quiet desperation in trailer parks everywhere. Shortly thereafter, I was standing for mother, giving a sort of post-feminist mud pie in the eye to the Super Mom Syndrome. Right after that I was standing for the Little Guy . . . [who] wrestled back some fair share . . . from the American collective media unconscious and liberated it for the dessert-hungry, unwashed masses, making TV a safer place—by gum!—for working Americans. I was also standing for fat people, the forgotten minority. And didn’t we have the right to live in denial, like everyone else?18
In short, Barr’s complaint was that the public saw what it wanted to see—a characteristic not limited to Americans but nevertheless so much a part of our political landscape it is akin to the Rock of Gibraltar. Let’s watch as some of our fellow citizens knock their heads against it, in the form of Roseanne/Roseanne, and see if anything gets knocked in—or out.
“Once she releases her financial records, everyone will know she is a one-percenter,” a reader of Georgia’s Augusta Chronicle commented after Barr presented her platform for president, going on to ask, “I’m wondering if she’ll willingly offer her neck to the guillotine.”19
A viewer of CNN commented online, “I cannot imagine ANYONE voting for a puke like this woman who went so far as to make a farce out of our national anthem.” Another CNN viewer more directly revealed the Roseanne/Roseanne disconnection as disqualifying with the comment, “I wouldn’t vote for Roseanne Barr if she was running for the position of being Roseanne Barr!” Another viewer, however, granted her equality with many of the mainstream presidential contenders—though still seeing the Roseanne/Roseanne one wants to see—in declaring, “Given the current crop of GOP/tea party candidates, she’d fit right in.”20
Most notable, however, was a comment among those CNN viewers that, four years later, resonated with enough voters to elect Trump: “She won’t even need the teleprompter and you will not see her bowing to any foreign leaders. Terrorists are on notice, you don’t want to mess with this lady.”21
There are, of course, considerable differences between Barr and Trump. But in terms of electability, the most significant difference resides in disconnection. Part of the reason Trump connected with so many Americans where Barr connected with so few is that he never claimed to be an average American. The widespread rejection of Barr’s candidacy amplified the fact that Americans want to know who their president really is. Unlike Barr, who dubiously said she “was always going to be honest,” Trump never made such a claim.