Roseanne Barr and John Goodman on the set of the now canceled “Roseanne” reboot. Photo courtesy of ABC.
We’re more than 500 days into President Donald Trump’s reign and it’s official: America has lost its sense of humor.
Angry mobs are calling for the heads of comedians, journalists and other celebrities. Sometimes the heads roll. Sides have been drawn, our great national conversation has ended and woe be unto the commentator who trespasses another tribe’s boundaries, for the advertising boycott surely cometh.
The separate controversies involving comedians Roseanne Barr and Samantha Bee in recent weeks provided ample evidence that when it comes to tolerating free speech in America, the first impulse of both conservatives and liberals in the Trump era is the same.
Shut it down.
Consider Barr’s dizzying descent these past few weeks. The eponymous star of “Roseanne,” the hit comedy sitcom that ran from 1988 to 1997, had spectacularly clawed her way back to the top with ABC’s March reboot of the series, featuring most of the original cast. The reboot’s premier episode attracted 20 million viewers, and ABC quickly green-lit a second season.
The reboot was controversial from the start, thanks to Barr’s support for Trump, both in real life and her role as the sitcom’s titular character. Barr’s work on the series’ first run transformed her into a liberal working-class icon, and some fans and critics saw her support for Trump as a betrayal. Still, millions of viewers remained on board for the reboot’s six-episode run.
Then Barr screwed up. Already renowned for her bizarre and conspiratorial posts on social media, she issued a tweet declaring President Barack Obama’s former aide Valerie Jarrett, who is African-American, to be the progeny of the Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes. The twittersphere exploded, with the majority of the tweets condemning Barr as a racist. Within hours, ABC fired Barr and canceled “Roseanne,” throwing the entire cast and crew out of work.
“It was a tough week for the line,” Bill Maher joked grimly on “Real Time” on HBO. “You know the line? The one that comedians sometimes cross.”
Ivanka Trump posted this photo on Twitter and was immediately criticized for her father’s controversial policies regarding undocumented immigrant families.
Indeed, it was a tough week for the line. Hours after Barr’s firing made headlines, Samantha Bee, on her TBS comedy show “Full Frontal,” found out the hard way that you still can’t say the c-word on TV, even if it’s cable.
Bee undoubtedly knew this coarse term referring to female genitalia is verboten before she called Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter who also officially serves as one of his White House advisers, a “feckless c-word” on her program. Unfortunately, she ignored her own instincts.
Bee was riffing off of a Sunday morning photo Ivanka had posted of herself and her cherubic toddler on Twitter, even as ICE agents under orders from her father have been breaking up undocumented immigrant families. The federal government currently can’t account for the whereabouts of 1500 undocumented children who’ve been separated from their parents and placed with sponsors.
It was the perfect opportunity to contrast a seemingly elite and out-of-touch Ivanka with the stark reality of her father’s immigration policies, but the only thing anyone heard was the c-word, especially conservatives still smarting from the cancellation of “Roseanne.” Bee’s proposed punishment came down from the commander-in-chief himself: Shut it down.
“Why aren’t they firing no-talent Samantha Bee for the horrible language used on her low ratings show?” Trump tweeted. “A total double standard but that’s O.K., we are Winning, and will be doing so for a long time to come!”
Trump, who once told Howard Stern it was OK to refer to Ivanka as a “piece of ass,” didn’t defend his daughter’s dignity. Our foul-mouthed fearless leader doesn’t give a fig about offensive language, he practically campaigned on his right to use it, and he’s continued to use it while in office. For Trump, who celebrated the successful reboot of “Roseanne” as if it were his own creation, the attack on Bee was, as usual, all about him.
You shut down my TV show, I’ll shut down yours.
Shut it all down.
Samantha Bee and the crew of “Full Frontal,” her Emmy-winning comedy show on TBS. Photo courtesy of TBS.
So far, TBS has not taken the president’s advice; Bee and “Full Frontal” remain on the air. Bee has apologized for her transgression several times, in the process offering one of best explanations for why the c-word remains taboo in public discourse.
“A lot of women have heard that word at the worst moment of their lives,” Bee said. “I don’t want to inflict more pain on them.”
Every man who’s ever called a woman the c-word in anger knows Bee is telling the truth. I’ve gotten in heated arguments with people on Facebook who claim it’s a perfectly fine term commonly used by the English to denigrate both women and men. Bee claims she’s been trying to repossess the term on her show, to remove its sting as a sexist pejorative. Good luck with that.
In America, when you publicly call a woman the c-word, you’re crossing the line, and there’s going to be a price to pay, even if your name is Lenny Bruce or George Carlin.
Bee has paid a price: Public humiliation. She was excoriated on social media and by the mainstream media from all sides. Several advertisers stopped supporting the show. Obviously sensing her financial livelihood was threatened, Bee wasted no time apologizing both to Ivanka and the public, saying “I crossed a line, and I deeply regret it.”
If Samantha Bee was a man, I have no doubt he would have been fired. That’s how off-limits the c-word remains.
Roseanne Barr’s photo shoot for the defunct satirical Jewish magazine Heeb in 2009 has caused some critics to brand her as an anti-Semite. For the record, Barr is Jewish.
Roseanne Barr has also apologized profusely and reportedly begged ABC executives to reverse their decision to cancel “Roseanne,” all to no avail. Barr’s defenders, including the president, claim that’s because Trump supporters are held to a harsher standard, and there may be some truth to that.
There’s no question the content of Barr’s tweet was racist. Depicting blacks as apes and monkeys has a long sordid history in the United States that stretches from slavery through Jim Crow to the Alt-Right trolls posting similar content across social media platforms in the present day.
Barr was certainly aware of this history. Michelle Wolf, another comedian who recently came under fire (from conservatives and liberals) for her performance at the White House Correspondents Dinner, had little sympathy for her fellow comedian’s lapse in judgment.
“Roseanne failed the barest-minimum-effort-for-a-white-person test,” Wolf quipped recently on “The Break,” her Netflix comedy series. “All she had to do was stay in her mansion and keep quiet online and be the kind of racist ABC was comfortable with.”
It’s understandable to me how Barr could make such an error. As an early supporter of Trump, she’s waded deep into the malignant fever swamp of racism, sexism, hatred and conspiracy that has spread across all social media despite efforts to contain it. Addled on Ambien, as she claims, she felt comfortable enough to speak in their language. As people often do on social media, she forgot the rest of the world was listening.
Now, she has paid a heavy price. But does the punishment fit the crime? Is there anything else in Barr’s large body of work that indicates she’s a virulent racist? I’ve seen scant evidence, but some critics have gone so far as to suggest ABC, which was aware of Barr’s eccentric online behavior before they hired her, should never have approved the reboot in the first place. A preemptive shutting down, so to speak.
Moreover, Barr isn’t the only person paying the price. Is it fair to collectively penalize all the members of her cast and crew as well as the show’s audience for her singular mistake?
If you’re not a Trump supporter and none of this disturbs you, it should. It’s no secret that most of the news and entertainment industry, including ABC’s executives, are vehemently opposed to Trump’s divisive rhetoric and policies. The atmosphere has become so politicized, ABC, for the first time in recent history, shut down a hit television show. It’s hard not to believe animus toward Trump—and his supporters—didn’t figure in the network’s decision.
Such is the division Trump has sewn throughout our culture in a short period of time. The gloves are now off. We’re talking at and over one another, not to each other. When that fails, we shut down the other side. We stop listening.
I am by no means immune. Having once been a lukewarm, let’s-give-him-a-chance Trump supporter, I’ve watched in abject horror as he has degraded our national discourse, playing to racist rubes on the Alt-Right, referring to undocumented immigrants as animals, calling black NFL players sons-of-bitches. My gut reaction now is to oppose anything proposed by Trump, even laudable goals such as making peace with North Korea.
It’s been tempting to get down in the gutter with him. In some of my musings on Trump in ANewsCafe.com, I’ve crossed the line, and both readers and advertisers have let the publisher know about it. Instead of taking advantage of our excellent comments section to air their grievances, they instead seek to shut my disagreeable voice down.
That’s where we are today—at each other’s throats. I’m not sure how we get past it, but attempting to eliminate every thing we personally disagree with isn’t going to get the job done.
What if ABC had let Barr do what she does best: incorporate her real-life drama, including her tortured but (I believe) sincere mea culpas, into the show? Its top-notch writers and cast would have had a field day with the material. Having learned her lesson, Barr might have emerged redeemed, a better person, a lesson we could all learn from. Imagine the ratings.
We might have had a genuine teaching moment.
