"FAT SMART AND FUNNY" or storyteller
The urge to write my own obituary has been strong for most of my life. In going through several boxes in the dank basement of my mother's house, as a mother myself at a later age, I found my first attempt at age eight. It correctly predicted that I cured cancer, and ushered in world peace after a decades long absence from television stardom. My teacher, a humorless idiot, who, like most of her sort, lacked the intellectual capacity to decipher the difference between a vision and a common lie, graded me an "F" and said my assignment was full of dishonesty. She required that the class write a paragraph telling the other children they were just meeting in the third grade something about themselves.
I wrote in the future tense, because I spent most of my time thinking about and visioning what the future might become. I spent my childhood thinking about the future because the present seemed so pointless and so dull, as it still does to me, as I look back at the past, where I envisioned the future now. (I hate people who say "in the now"). The past is a painful bore, but must be delved in to in order to complete the contract I signed, against my family's and my psychiatrist's advice to write this book.
Miss Moody ( i swear to god it was her name) lacked any kind of wit humor or appreciation for poetic license. These things were not allowed by her church which taught that a man lived inside of a whale, the dead rose from their graves and polygamy would one day be restored to America!
My totally warped view of the world and of human beings, borne of being a fat smart and funny jewish girl in slc utah, allowed me to become quite a popular stand up comedian in my twenty ninth year.
For about ten years at the end of the last century, from age 34-42, before piracy supplanted capitalism, and just before the introduction of the veil to the western world's women, I actually planted the flag of the female pirate in the center of patriarchy's heart. consumer mind control that unfurled later into the writer of these arrogant configurations of fiction-based fact, a technique of which I remain master...
Roseanne Barr was born, through a spin of the cosmic wheel of misfortune, in the small minded town of salt lake city utah. She never felt the need to capitalize the place in any of her later spellings of it.
Barr was born to a brilliant jewish socialist-humorist, and football player, (Jerome Harold Barr), who along with her mother H.R. Davis Barr, (the classic post holocaust middle class first generation jewish woman), taught her all that she needed to know to become a compulsive nail biter, overeating obsessive with social anxiety disorder, and a nasty messianic complex that has defied medication, psychiatry, stardom and sanity.
Her mother also taught her how to manipulate men with wit, and therefore subdue their aggressive sexuality, and then rage at them for that.
These many influences assured that little miss barr was to become a new organ for thought on behalf of women who subsequently emulated her to also become "people dis-pleasers."
In an age and culture where women largely fell all over themselves to lap up the very small amount of approval that was smeared on the concrete by the soles of the feet of powerful capitalists, patriarchs and run of the mill priests, Barr stepped up to irritate and insist instead, that the owners of those feet kiss her very large dynamic and disagreeably combatant ass. She also graciously insisted that they invite their compatriots to take a crack at it as well.
She was the first of her generation to refuse to explain and apologize for being offensive, fat and in possession of an altered opinion and an unapologetic (as per her father's mentoring) lack of respect for anything that did not come from other resisters, jokesters and martyrs lynched on the tree of human Pride.
Living, as she did, in the very last few days of the American Empire, under the Occupation of Bores and Minutae Masters, when Freedom of Speech in any form by any woman was illegal, Barr never really read any critique of her work that had any intelligence to it whatsoever, except for John Lahr's piece on her in the New Yorker, thanks to Tina Brown, the then editor who later fled from Barr in horror, as did most of her sisters-in-arms, when it became apparent to them that Barr was not interested in tea parties and hanging out with republicans ever, in any way, or in supporting the use of the widely overrated "period" for purposes of punctuation.
From a young age, "ms." (castrated mr.) Barr fancied herself the reincarnation of "mr."(castrated ms.) Gertude Stein, whom she idolized as a punctuation eschewing pioneer, another fat jewish woman mystic cow lover (more on cows later) who also mentored (bitched at) many new writers, (hemingway) as did Barr-from the top of the television shitheap to the middle of the movie shitpile.
In her post tv incarnation, on her website she mentored many writers.
Barr went as far as any woman can ever go in the judeo-christian tradition that demands thinking women prove constantly that they are not witches to be burned at the stake. *1
After ramming through the concept of class to a segment of middle class American feminists, who at the behest of their masters, are encouraged not to address, name or be aware of the class system that controls their every waking thought, Barr became a wealthy dowager who financed every hairbrained revolutionary scheme ever brought to her unfocusable attentions.
Upon realizing the futility of throwing bad money after good, she then learned to meditate, which not only calmed her mind, but also centered her need to hex all that is evil and stupid and unnecessary, with her pithy comments making her Amerika's foremost "humorless humorist".
Experiencing crippling bouts of writer's block caused by the refusal of any and all editors to publish her post sit-com missives, she took to writing on her own website, Roseanneworld.com.
This development allowed her to begin drinking too much in her later years, a thrilling thing which years of sobriety had heretofore obscured! *2
Miss barr had the writer's block so long and so hard and nothing would fix it, none of her usual methods of "evoking the beast" muse, or angel, including the bad marriages, fights and mainlined drama drip et al.
At last she had to travel, like Whitney Houston did later, to Jerusalem to plead with the gods of the desert to remove the curse of unoriginal and duplicitous thought.
There she sought the beast and not the angel, because with all due respect to Oprah Winfrey's angel-addled ministrations and musings, ms. Barr felt that any self respecting angel who is still talking to the human apes around this planet is a fucking loser angel...(Madonna might disagree...We'll take it up with her next time we are discussing kaballistic teleportation).
Roseanne's angels were always human and mostly they asked her for two bucks. She always gave them the dough, because the way she look(s)ed at things, if she can help someone else, then they would owe her.
Barr's legacy as a feminist intellectual was destroyed forever with her pre-Borat rendition of the "Star Spangled Banner".
This brought with it a fatwah from Bush the elder, on the eve of Desert Storm.
As his own son was spending the money he pilfered from old ladies and gentlemen's retirement monies in the Silverado savings and loan fiasco, and as his other two sons were preparing to dismantle the civil rights movement and labor unions, oldman Bush called Ms. Barr disgraceful, thus ending her many business enterprises, and viability as a bankable star, despite having made over one billion dollars for ABC networks and the Carsey-Werner company in the 90's.
Given a choice between two evils, staying at home with her nefariously controlling and fanatically sober second husband, Ike Turner (name changed to protect the innocent), and complete and total nervous collapse, Barr chose first to disassociate by having tons of plastic surgery just to get the meds, and the sweet unconscious of their affect, and later to vacation at Shepard Pratt International Nut-bin in Baltimore Md.
To remove herself from the unhappiness others who breathed her air caused her, she engaged the aid of her huge bodyguard Ben Thomas, who was raised by Army and Martial Arts Experts to escape from Turner, and have a test tube baby.
There followed Kabbalistic Journeys around the globe, singing in a punk rock band called Rosie and the Dxxx, a doomed talk show with spiritual themes, a reality show that required having her uterus forcibly removed in order to end, and a children's dvd with comedic music videos. She created hours of content in her own studio, Full Moon High Tide, outside of Los Angeles California.
She returned to stand up comedy in her mid fifties after two decades of television production.
Her busy life was cut short by an angry tusked boar while shooting at it on her Kawasaki Mule at her Hawaiian home, in preparation for a Luau Bar Mitzvah for her son Buck.
He barely noticed, as he had received a Playstation 3 as a gift.
She is survived by five children and four grandchildren, whom she also survived.
Her lesser regrets were that she had not burned even more bridges, pissed off more idiots, fired more assholes, sang more patriotic anthems, and gained more weight.
Her major regret: never having had sex with Elvis Presley.
footnotes
* 1. Burned at the stake: stick a fork in me I'm done comes to mind, but then irreversibly now, so does the image of Michael Richards' fork-laden remarks to a group of African American Fans.
* 2. Damn bill w! (the benedict Arnold's benedict Arnold who traded booze for coffee and trademarking)
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