For the next several years, I spent a lot of time with Roseanne trying to craft a standup act that wasn’t just about raising her family and growing up poor, but about what it was like to now be rich and mega-famous. It always felt odd to me, as a twenty-two-year-old guy without a ton of life experience, to be writing jokes for an ass-kicking middle-aged woman who happened to have multiple personalities. I used to force her to sit with me and tell me her life story, so I could try to get in her head. The depth of her experience and imagination was astonishing.
This was all happening at the absolute height of Roseanne mania, with the national anthem scandal, and the very public divorce from Tom Arnold, and the number-one show on television, year after year after year. Many people only remember the drama that surrounded her at that time, but I believe that Roseanne was one of the most influential shows ever on television. Because it reflected the real lives of working-class people and their daily dramas. Because it managed to be riotously funny while also exploring the deep truths about how people were living in America at the time, and still are today. It took an enormous amount of courage and madness to make that happen.
Judd Apatow: How much stand-up are you doing now?
Roseanne Barr: None.
Judd: None?
Roseanne: I’m writing jokes. I write about fifty jokes a day for nothing.
Judd: Do you get onstage at all?
Roseanne: No. I have horrible stage fright—you know, how you go through the bipolar stage fright thing? Then you go on drugs to get over the stage fright and perform but then you’re not funny at all.
Judd: Were you always scared when you did stand-up, to the point where you felt like you needed to be medicated?
Roseanne: No, it was only after The Roseanne Show that it felt like that. I’d go on and I’d want to do edgy material and the audience would be like, “Where’s Dan?” I was like, Where’s a gun so I can blow my fucking brains out all over this stage?
Judd: Is that the worst part of success—that it defines who you are and what you do? If you succeed in one area, people think you should stay in that area.
Roseanne: They don’t even know who I am. They think I’m Roseanne Conner. It’s like, “You’re not a writer. You’re not even a comedian. You’re Roseanne.” And then I was like, This is freaky because I can’t get another job ever. And I wanted to work.
Judd: It’s like Archie Bunker going on tour as a stand-up.
Roseanne: I’m going to do whatever it takes and I’m not going to let them—I’m not going to let this not make me funny—so I suffered the indignities. I see other comics going through the same shit. Once you make it, it’s, like, well, you’re not like hungry or whatever. What the fuck am I supposed to talk about now? My maid?
Judd: I think about that, too. Did I have a different point of view when I was broke? I don’t think I did. I mean, obviously a lot has happened but I don’t know if my point of view about things changed.
Roseanne: Define broke.
Judd: Well, I shared an apartment with Adam Sandler and the rent was four hundred and twenty-five dollars a month and I was just trying to make enough money to eat and go to the Improv.
Roseanne: How old were you then?
Judd: Twenty-two, twenty-three.
Roseanne: What did you guys do to make each other laugh—or were you just depressed all the time?
Judd: It was very different because Sandler—it was clear that he was going to be a big star from the second you met him. It was fun because he had the charisma of a worldwide comedy star but he had no outlet for it, so his outlet would just be hanging out with you at Red Lobster. He had all that power and energy, and he would try to be that funny with you all day long because he had no one else to do it with.
Roseanne: Oh, shit. That’s what’s worth it all. That’s what I miss: There are no comics to hang with and make each other laugh. I miss that a lot.
Judd: I went to the Comedy Cellar in New York recently. You go there and there’s this group of people working hard, making each other laugh, hanging out all night long and—you know, when you have kids and a life, it becomes hard to say, “Honey, I’m going to go hang out at a club for a few hours….”
Roseanne: That’s why you need to have a screening room. That’s what I used to do, but then I couldn’t do it anymore because I had to home-school my kid. So I had no life.
Judd: How did that work, homeschooling?
Roseanne: Argh.
Judd: Leslie and I always talk about that. Wouldn’t it just be easier? School ruins everything. You’re stuck in their schedule. The schedule doesn’t make sense because the kids have to get up too early. They’re too tired. They have too much homework. They have no life. Was homeschooling better?
Roseanne: It was a fucking ball. I’d be like, “We’re going to Paris and we’re going to go to the Louvre to study art,” you know. We did awesome shit like that.
Judd: But it’s a full-time job.
Roseanne: Yeah. But I had two tutors because I can’t fucking read. I’m blind.
Judd: How old is your youngest?
Roseanne: He’s eighteen and he graduates, please Lord, in three weeks.
Judd: And he’s homeschooled?
Roseanne: No, he was. He went back to school in eighth grade because he got over the hyperactive stuff. He was so hyper, they wanted to put him on drugs.
Judd: He just pulled out of it? Some kids get over it.
Roseanne: The thing is, they’ve got so much focus it’s like they’re not focused. I have it, too. I’m so focused but I have my choice of a thousand things that I’m interested in—you know, too many options. I try to do too many things at once.
Judd: And then you melt down and get nothing done. It’s just that your brain is trying so hard getting so much done and then you realize you’re not getting anything done. I actually was diagnosed a few years ago with obsessive-compulsive thinking. That’s probably from childhood trauma—from being hypervigilant. But I think it makes you a good producer and performer and writer. The thing that ruined your life makes you good at your work. And then you get rewarded at work, so you don’t bother to fix it in your life.
Roseanne: That’s exactly right.
Judd: So what did you do about that?
Roseanne: Things happened to me that—you know, I got pregnant with my son and I had to have a fifth baby. But let’s talk about the obsessive-compulsive thing for a minute. I was told when I was a girl that every Jewish woman has to have five children to replace three-fifths of our people that were killed. That’s how I was raised.
Judd: Wow.
Roseanne: In an apartment building with survivors from concentration camps. So I had trauma because I couldn’t even talk.
Judd: Parents don’t realize that when they teach you about the Holocaust too early, it ruins you for life.
Roseanne: It ruined me for life. I remember the exact moment well—I was like three and they had the TV on and they were of course enjoying the Eichmann trial. When they weren’t talking about Eichmann, they were talking about babies on meat hooks. They used to say it in front of me. I was so horrified by the world but I looked at the TV and it showed the piles of bodies, and I was like, I don’t want to be on this fucking planet. This ain’t for me. Fuck it. And I went in the bathroom, in my grandma’s house. There was this black button on the door, and I turned it. I had to stretch real hard to turn that lock. So then they were all like, “She’s locked herself in the bathroom,” and then it was like all this screaming. I was never—the only time they talked to me was to tell me that the Nazis used to shoot little girls right through the head in front of their parents. That’s how they talked to me. Other than that, it was like, “Pick that up.” They were all traumatized. Everyone was traumatized.