About one year after her public humiliation and dismissal by ABC from her own sitcom, and a short visit to the holy land, where she mused about making Aliyah (she’s very pro-Israel), Roseanne Barr, 67, is back on the US comedy circuit, where on Saturday night she will have a set at Penn’s Peak, in Jim Thorpe, PA.
“I got the fire back in my belly,” Barr told the Pocono Record, recalling her performances in the Poconos and the Borscht Belt areas decades ago.
“I can’t wait to get out there, see people laugh. I love stand-up because nobody’s telling me what to say, what not to say. I don’t have to explain myself to them, defend myself. I am just making jokes. I think I’m a really good joke writer. I have 280 jokes, that you can tell anywhere, to any audience,” Barr said.
Asked how her bitter experience of the past year has affected her and her comedy, Barr said, “I got this whiskey flask. It says on it: ‘May the bridges I burn light the way.’ That’s kinda how I think. Comedy has to burn something down or it’s not funny. Comedy has to sting. It has to make people laugh when they don’t want to laugh.”
Whoosh…
Before the most recent blaze Barr has set to her career—the 2018 tweet about Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett—she started several bridge fires: in July 1990, when she maligned “The Star-Spangled Banner” with a screeching, off-key performance before a Padres and Reds game, which she concluded with an obscene tugging at her clothes; in July 2009 she posed as Adolf Hitler for front of Heeb magazine, with the title “That Oven Feelin'”; in 2012, she tweeted the home address of the parents of Florida shooter George Zimmerman, and was sued and acquitted; and in March 2018, she tweeted an accusation that a survivor of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida had been seen giving the Nazi salute.