Stream It or Skip It: ‘Roseanne Barr: Cancel This!’ on FOX Nation, at 70 She’s Pro-Weed, Pro-LGBTQ, Anti-Vax, Anti-Woke

Almost five years after ABC fired her and killed off her titular sitcom character for posting offensive Tweets, Roseanne Barr has re-emerged on FOX Nation with her first stand-up comedy special in some 17 years. It’s also a first for FOX Nation, getting into the original comedy special business. So what will Roseanne have to say for herself now that she has a platform that won’t cancel her?

ROSEANNE BARR: CANCEL THIS!: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Roseanne Barr became an overnight star in the mid-1980s by declaring herself a “domestic goddess,” and parlayed her point of view into a top-ranked sitcom at ABC by the end of the ’80s. Roseanne also earned multiple Emmys, Golden Globes and the prestigious Peabody Award.

Three decades later, ABC convinced Barr and the cast to reunite for a revival, which was short-lived, at least for Roseanne’s character. After Barr Tweeted about Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, comparing her to the Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes, the network fast-forwarded past the apology stage, fired Barr, and canceled Roseanne. ABC soon thereafter killed off her character and spun off her surviving TV family that fall as The Conners. Its fifth season is currently airing.

She has written multiple books, starred in her own reality series on Lifetime about growing a nut farm in Hawaii (Roseanne’s Nuts), allowed Comedy Central to roast her in 2012, and served as a celebrity judge on NBC’s Last Comic Standing. But seeing her put on a stand-up comedy special is special, indeed. She waited 14 years after her third HBO special before releasing her fourth, in 2006. And this is her first hour recording since then.

What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: Ironically or not, seeing or hearing Roseanne in 2023 feels like seeing and hearing Madonna at this year’s Grammys. She was shocking in the 1980s and made many of us awe her then, but what does she have to contribute to our cultural conversation now, especially if she’s not leaning into our nostalgic fondness for her? What are we even looking at here?

Memorable Jokes: In terms of bits, her most structured set pieces come in the second half, wherein: Barr describes why she has an F-it list instead of a Bucket List, and what she’s no longer putting up with in her later years; a crowd work section where she invites audience members to ask her advice so she can show off her allegedly psychic abilities; and a final piece where she reads suicide letters she has written to her family and her haters.

Our Take: Usually, when a comedian puts out a new special alongside a documentary, the doc helps put the comic’s latest performance into context, helps put us as viewers and fans in the proper frame of mind to appreciate just what they’ve set out to do here. That’s not the case with FOX Nation. Instead, Who Is Roseanne Barr? clocks in at only 20 minutes, and mostly serves to elevate FOX News personalities and regular guests as their voices center the discussion on Barr’s past and legacy.

As for Barr’s new hour of stand-up, it’s… Well… Fine. OK Boomer stuff, once you remember she’s now 70 and has largely existed out of the public eye for the past five years.

So much has changed since then; even more since she last performed an hour for HBO. And now, for FOX Nation, the platform opens her special with a warning that it “contains strong language,” and Barr jokes about negotiating an F-word limit, while also promising she’s “gonna get ‘em all tonight” by offending everyone. And yet her targets are narrowly focused. Barr gets hoots and hollers for calling her daughters “libtards” and cheers for saying she moved to Texas “because it’s a red state and I love that.” Of her ABC dismissal, she wonders if the network hoped she’d apologize to ”the baby-blood drinking Democrat community.” You want more direct QAnon references? She’s got ’em, joking that the Q actually stood for quarantine. She jokes about catching COVID four times already, and blames it, in part, on quitting smoking. Preferring to appeal to the anti-vaccine crowd, Barr claims she was right to distrust the government for pushing pandemic vaccines, and suggests women afraid of their bodily rights after Roe being overturned should chill out. Why? “You’re never gonna get pregnant. you got the vax!” If that’s not anti-feminist enough for you, just wait ’til you hear what Roseanne has to say about “these MeToo whores,” joking that they got what they deserved for going to a producer’s room late at night. She later challenges the men to man up and tell their women to shut up and make them a sandwich. She probably couldn’t be any more anachronistic if she tried.

Can I find some brighter spots to point out? Sure. While Barr takes a typical Boomer tack of calling today’s kids privileged and soft, she also does pause for at least a moment to ponder how her children specifically look at her now as if she’s worth more to them dead than alive. It’s a funny idea worth developing, but it barely lands with her Houston audience.

Similarly, Barr had some amusing ideas, five years after the fact, of how she could’ve made good for her 2018 Tweets and stayed in ABC’s good graces.

And from growing up Jewish in Utah, chastised by her own parents for her weight, then moving to Hawaii post-Hollywood, and having multiple siblings come out as gay, there’s plenty of stories we may not have even heard just yet that could be mined for material.

And yet, her timing and pacing is all off, even when the material is on point, making her seem like just any old grandmother complaining about kids these days rather than a comedian or even a storyteller. A pronoun joke, “my pronouns are kiss my ass,” is beyond tired at this point. No amount of denim clothing or blonde pigtails can dress this up any fresher.

As a comedy special, it’s a bit slight on comedy or feeling special. Barr doesn’t move around at all, stuck standing behind the microphone stand, not even taking the mic out. She’s too busy using tissues and handkerchiefs to blot her runny nose.

In her promo for the special, Barr has said “we can’t let them kill comedy.” And yet most of what she has to offer up as comedy in 2023 simply dies on the vine.

Our Call: SKIP IT. If you want to truly enjoy Roseanne as a comedian talking about things that matter, then go look up old episodes of her ABC sitcom on streaming, currently available on Peacock.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.