Comedian, actress, and nut farmer Roseanne Barr slammed the conditions that led to her being exiled from Hollywood in a new Reelz documentary, “Roseanne: Kicked Out of Hollywood”.
Barr was fired from her namesake show “Roseanne” after it was brought back after a 20 year hiatus in the late 2010s.
She made an insensitive tweet about Valerie Jarrett, who is a former Obama aide, and was later removed from the show as a result. Jarrett is black, and Barr compared her to a character from “Planet of the Apes” though Barr maintains she did not know Jarrett was black and was under the influence of Ambien at the time.
“Everyone was begging me to give up my Twitter. Everyone,” said Barr, who is Jewish. “My kids were trying to lock me out, but I wouldn’t because it’s like I just couldn’t.”
The 69-year-old comedian suggested that self censorship for the sake of political correctness is not in her nature.
“I’m a g*ddamn American and I’m not going to do it,” said Barr. “I’m a comic. I’m a bad girl. I’m too rock and roll. I’m going to say f**k it and f**k you until I take my last breath.”
Barr previously explained that ABC producers frequently called her and asked her to remove tweets the network found insensitive to Democrats.
“Any tweet that was not ‘I love Hillary Clinton,’ I got a call for,” Barr said. “I removed it every time they called,” she added, “and they called frequently.”
She described the effort to force her out of Hollywood, change the name of her show, and kill the fictional Roseanne character with a drug overdose as “intellectual witch-burning” fueled by “arrogance and ignorance.”
“Witch-burning is what it is,” said Barr. “All of the press of the United States, and the world and how they interpreted my tweet without any knowledge of the fact that I was sending it to a journalist in Iran about what was happening to the people in Iran.”
“We were under such terrible censorship and it’s just terrible and frightening,” said Barr.
The documentary featuring Barr will air Sunday, April 24 on Reelz.
