Judd: I didn’t go to Hebrew school. My parents went the other way—everyone in the family became atheist. No one was religious. That was their way of dealing with the Holocaust.
Roseanne: God is dead, that’s what they said.
Judd: But I remember I went to Hebrew school once with a friend, just visiting. And they showed the Kristallnacht documentary and it definitely messes with you. That, and a fear of Russia.
Roseanne: Yeah, no shit—the Russians. I remember having dreams of black airplanes hovering over the house, and it was Russia. Russia was coming in black airplanes and they were going to kill us all. In school, we had to practice getting under the desk for air raids and shit like that. It was drilled in—that fear, was always there.
Judd: The next holocaust, the nuclear holocaust. I used to have nightmares all the time about it. I don’t know the first comedy that you were interested in, but I didn’t understand how I was processing any of that. I just knew that I liked the comedy figures who told everybody to fuck off. So I loved George Carlin and the Marx Brothers. I loved that the Marx Brothers were saying that all of the rich people and the leaders were idiots. I was obsessed with them. I bought every book. I was looking for somebody to say, “Isn’t the world crazy? This all makes no sense.”
Roseanne: I loved the Stooges. I thought they were gods. And I still do. It was fucking godly. Because it was like, you know, one’s making fun of Einstein, one’s making fun of Hitler. They’re making fun of the politics of the world. They were fucking deep thinkers, and their subject matter was deep, too.
Judd: It’s a survival mechanism, when you’re a kid, to like that stuff. When did that interest turn into being funny for you?
Roseanne: My dad was a big fan of comedy. He wanted to be a stand-up, so he made me that way. My dad loved Lenny. He also loved Lord Buckley and jazz and stuff. He was a hipster. My parents were kind of beat-nicky, you know, for Salt Lake City.
Judd: Did people in Salt Lake know you were Jewish?
Roseanne: They knew. I mean we never lied about it but it’s a real weird place. Like, when I was three, I fell and I got Bell’s palsy in my face. My mom said the first day she called the rabbi and they said a prayer for me but nothing happened. The second day she called the Mormons and they said a prayer for me and my face was healed, so my whole life was going around as a Jew who was giving talks in Mormon churches about being healed by the Mormons. That was my life.
Judd: It’s interesting that when you get older and you’ve raised kids and you’ve had your life, you look back at things that your parents did and you think, It was just so crazy—a whole other level of crazy. When my parents got divorced, my dad would never talk to me about how I was feeling. And that affects your whole life.
Roseanne: I think parents don’t know what to say and, like, Jews—it’s better to say nothing so that the kid comes and parents you.
Judd: That’s exactly it.
Roseanne: I think we know—as Jewish parents, or maybe it’s all parents, ethnic parents—that our kids are frigging way smarter than we are.
Judd: And they’re supposed to make us happy. And that makes kids insane.
Roseanne: Kind of.
Judd: That’s what makes you a comedian. I’m a big self-help freak and I read all those books and they’re always about mirroring, that when you’re with your kids, they’re supposed to see themselves. They’re not supposed to see your need. If they see your neediness then they just try to please you and they lose the sense of who they are because they’re trying to please you. And that’s what seems to create a comedian, too: How do I make other people happy?
Roseanne: Yeah, a people pleaser kind of thing. But my humor, I think, came from wanting to disarm people before they hit me. My family were hitters. And if you made them laugh, they didn’t hit you. My dad wouldn’t hit me if I got him with humor right between the eyes.
Judd: What age were you when he would hit you?
Roseanne: Always.
Judd: Even into like high school?
Roseanne: Oh, yeah. He’d walk over and smack me upside the head for whatever. I used to bite my nails a lot—I learned it from my dad, who bit his nails to where there was no fucking nail at all and he couldn’t bend his fingers and he’s like this all the time, just like anxiety, you know. And so I’d sit there biting my nails and he’d look at me and he’d go, “Stop fucking biting your fucking fingernails.”
Judd: Because he loves you.
Roseanne: I’d be like, “Well, you’re biting yours.” And then he’d laugh. But sometimes he wouldn’t. You never knew when it was coming. He’d sneak up behind you while you’re biting your nail and crack you in the back of the head so hard that your knuckles would go straight up your nose and stuff. He hit me in the head constantly. He’d hit us all in the head. And hard, too.
Judd: We can’t get our kids to do anything.
Roseanne: Maybe because we don’t hit them.
Judd: Did you go to therapy and try to fix yourself, to learn how to not do it to your kids?
Roseanne: Yeah, but by then I had already done it.
Judd: To your first few kids?
Roseanne: Yeah. So then I’d correct it. You go to each one of them and let them curse you out and say all the shit that they want to say to you. And just go, “Oh, honey, I did it and I’m sorry.” That’s hard.
Judd: And how do they do after that?
Roseanne: Thank God, they are all functional and brilliant, creative people.
Judd: Well, almost no parents do that. Own up to their mistakes.
Roseanne: It’s the hardest thing.
Judd: My mom could never do that. Well, right before she died, very briefly she said she was sorry for anything she might have done wrong. But for the most part—I once begged my mother to go to therapy and then sent her to my therapist. When she came back, I said, “How did it go?” And she said, “He told me that I’m right about everything.”
Roseanne: That’s a good one.
Judd: We have to have those conversations sometimes with our kids, where we say, you know, “We’re not perfect people. We make mistakes and we have issues.” And we try to explain what they are as they’re happening. Like, “This is my issue and maybe that’s why I did that. Sorry.”
Roseanne: Well, I took all the shit off my kids because I knew they needed to say it. I was lucky enough to be able to say it to my parents, too, and do some healing.
Judd: And it somehow got you here. That’s the hard thing, too, which is: If your childhood didn’t happen, nothing else would have happened.
Roseanne: I don’t know about that. My shrink says, “Don’t say you’re funny because of abuse; it’s in spite of.” But my whole thing is, like, I’ve had severe mental illness my whole life. A devastating, dissociative identity disorder—MPD, it used to be called. I had to heal from that, and that was like fifteen years of intense daily therapy. I look back and it’s fucking crazy. It’s nothing you can explain to people. You can’t explain to people waking up in a mental institution in Dallas, Texas, with a shrink screaming in your face, “You don’t have a penis!” I mean, it’s like, how are you going to—