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:
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.
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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.
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