Roseanne: Angry, Vulnerable Under Mask of Irreverence

Smith, David Bruce

Roseanne: Angry, Vulnerable Under Mask of Irreverence Roseanne: My Life as a Woman by Roseanne Barr Harper & Row, 1989. 202 pp., $18.95 Reviewed by David Bruce Smith Comedienne Roseanne Barr,...

...Roseanne writes few words about the present...
...David Bruce Smith is director of communications for the Charles E. Smith Companies and a freelance writer...
...No longer wishing to speak in academic language, or even in a feminist language, because it all seemed dead to me, I began to speak as a working-class woman who is a mother, a woman who no longer believed in change, progress, growth, or hope...
...She felt "like I was always the designated heathen....At Christmas pageants I...would sing the little song about the dreidl, and then tell about why Jews don't believe in Jesus...a very nice and civil way of excluding me by 'including.'" Just as the reader begins to respond to Barr's mesmerizing honesty, she halts the emotional momentum by inserting literary distractions, such as poetry, dreams, flash forwards and dietary advice...
...I started doing it more and more, testing it out....Like the guy who told me: "Do you know anybody that is married...and wants to fool around with somebody else that is married...and'have sex a lot and go to special places and be taken care of...
...Accused of being insane, Ro-seanne believes that if she were ever "nuts" it was not in the hospital but later...
...This man said, "Bring me one of these, honey...
...Los Angeles, the "Tonight Show," national recognition and good fortune followed...
...Barr and her friends conducted seminars about racism, anti-Semitism and pornography, and she recalls that "I began to want to speak about what was between, beneath, hidden...
...she read Virginia Woolf, Betty Friedan and Nancy Friday...
...She quickly made friends and discussed ideas incessantly with them...
...Within a few years, the marriage had become unsatisfying...
...I had found my voice...
...It was a period of reacting to the hippie environment of 1971...
...Then in 1980, while Barr and her family were living in Denver, she discovered the Woman to Woman Bookshop...
...Her desire to stress the angry, more outrageous aspects of her personality may stem from a childhood in Mormon Salt Lake City, which had little liking for Jews...
...I turned around and I said, "Don't call me honey, you f—in' pig...
...During high school, Barr was hit by an automobile, which caused a year's institutionalization in the Utah state hospital...
...Later she realized that "my self-hate was only a matter of being a minority within a majority...
...Women came there to talk about ERA, religion, gender, feminism and other issues...
...Because of this prejudice, Barr was often afraid: "I was the only Jew at my school, and so very paranoid...
...It was because of [these men] that I knew there was a place for me in comedy...
...This material usually seems inappropriate and gimmicky...
...If only she knew that people care about her and will accept the whole package that is Roseanne...
...In this book, she reveals that behind what the public sees is someone kind, vulnerable and inno-' vative...
...A deftness in repartee emerged when she learned to counter sassy men with comedy: One day something just snapped and I talked back to [the men at the bar...
...An interfaith marriage followed because she was weary of "feeling like such a freak...
...Encouraged by her friends at the bar and the bookstore, she entered talent contests at local comedy places...
...Barr spoke with them about growing up Jewish in Salt Lake City...
...Her parents seldom defended themselves against persistent anti-Semitism...
...she defines being "nuts" as thinking freely and clearly...
...You came [to Bobbe's] for tea, refuge, conversation, warmth, a game of gin rummy;...came for a bagel, or soup, or to steal quarters out of her purse....I loved my grandmother more than any other human being because she never lied, never told you what you wanted to hear, never compromised...
...and I go, "Well, only your wife...
...Her father, confused by the community's disapproval of his religion, expressed his anti-Mormon rage by staging raucous comedy routines with his family...
...So the precocious Roseanne lavished her love on her grandmother ("Bobbe...
...Barr was reminded often by the community that she was unacceptable because of her religion and to this she attributes recurring nightmares and panic attacks filled with Auschwitz-like terrors and, often, annihilation...
...It was old and musty, but it had shelves of books by women writers and held discussion groups...
...her mother, in contrast, was stoic and withdrawn...
...This was the language that all the women on the street spoke...
...She records but does not resolve her rage...
...He just started laughing—good thing that he started laughing is all I can say or else I would not have done anything else again in my whole life...
...202 pp., $18.95 Reviewed by David Bruce Smith Comedienne Roseanne Barr, star of the TV series, Roseanne, wants to be seen as rough and irreverent, a mask that allows her a great deal of freedom within her style of comedy...
...Within a short time, the unconventional Barr as comedienne-saying-whatever-she-wants-in-the-guise-of-a-housewife was a success...
...Her book is endearing because it is honest in its images, but it is also frustrating because it doesn't tell us what's really bugging her...
...That same year she began working as a cocktail waitress...
...Afterwards Barr left for Colorado...
...With hollow brusqueness and a medley of literary tricks, she tries to mute these qualities, but the harder she tries to irritate the reader, the more endearing she becomes...
...There the Jewish girl "with great sexual fantasies that fear would not allow to become flesh" immersed herself in parties, sex and endless cigarettes...
...So I owe him a thanks whoever he is...
...I do not choose to live [in the world called Normal] ...because it is just too damn boring and since I subsequently and clear-headedly have chosen to attempt to think freely, I choose to remain nuts...I can go back to Normalsville and am often dragged back there for people who require constant clarification...
...I always felt the onslaught of the Nazis was very close...

Vol. 15 • June 1990 • No. 3


 
Developed by
Kanda Sofware
  Kanda Software, Inc.