Almost five years after ABC canceled her comedy following her tirade of racist and anti-semitic tweets, Roseanne Barr is returning with the stand-up special Roseanne Barr: Cancel This!, premiering Monday on Fox Nation.
The special debuts the same day on the streaming service as a documentary on her career, Who Is Roseanne Barr?
Barr lost her television show, Roseanne, in May 2018. One of the tweets she posted that day called former President Barack Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett an offspring of the “Muslim Brotherhood & Planet of the Apes.”
Barr followed up with an apology but it was too late: ABC canned her hours later.
Barr comes across as sanguine about the experience, which she blamed on taking the drug Ambien. She told the Los Angeles Times, “I’ve survived. I’ve come out on the other side of it, finally. But it was a witch-burning. And it was terrifying. It was. I would die many times. I guess you would call it the dark night of the soul. I felt like the devil himself was coming against me to try to tear me apart, to punish me for believing in God.”
“Oh my God, they just hated me so badly,” she continued. “I had never known that they hated me like that. They hate me because I have talent, because I have an opinion. Even though Roseanne became their No. 1 show, they’d rather not have a No. 1 show. During the initial call, I told them I thought [Jarrett] was White. I said I would go on my show and explain it. They wouldn’t let me. They decided I was a liar in my apology.”
Barr’s latest comeback special was filmed at the Cullen Theater in Houston, Texas. She had a brief 2019 tour with Andrew Dice Clay, but has largely stayed silent after that.
“Has anyone else here been fired recently?” she asked as the starting point.
That led to a defiant statement.
“I’m not going to let rich, privileged a— win!”
