First, Jerry Seinfeld refuses to hug Kesha. Now he’s defending Roseanne Barr, of all people.
Remember how Roseanne Barr got fired for her racist tweets?
Seinfeld thinks that canning her was overkill.
In an interview with Entertainment Tonight, Jerry Seinfeld defends Roseanne Barr, which has left a lot of people scratching their heads and others outraged.
“I didn’t see why it was necessary to fire her,” Seinfeld said.
Seinfeld then hits his interviewer with a very peculiar analogy.
“Why would you murder someone who’s committing suicide?” Seinfeld asks.
The suggestion seems to be that Roseanne was killing her own show or career and that ABC should have “let the market decide” when her show would end.
That perspective is both devoid of moral judgment and, quite frankly, seems to be willfully ignoring broader PR and business concerns for ABC and for Disney.
Mostly, Seinfeld sounds bewildered at how quickly Roseanne sabotaged her own career and her own show.
“But I never saw someone ruin their entire career with one button push,” Seinfeld muses.
ABC greenlit a Roseanne spinoff, The Connors. This will give 200 people, including the cast, jobs for at least another season.
(We would point out that some of those crew members may have missed other job opportunities since they were already on Roseanne, so this is very welcome news)
Jerry Seinfeld has opinions about that, too.
“I think they should get another Roseanne.” Seinfeld suggests.
Recasting someone for that famous titular role would be a bizarre choice, especially since the character’s name is also the actor’s name.
“They brought Dan Conner back,” Seinfeld points out.
Seinfeld mentions that the character’s resurrection is somewhat famous, pointing out that “he was dead and they brought him back.”
For that reason, he believes, a simple recasting wouldn’t be a stretch of the imagination.
“So,” Seinfeld asks, with Dan’s resurrection in mind. “Why can’t we get another Roseanne?”
For one thing, Barr would probably have to sign off on that.
Seinfeld argues: “There’s other funny women that could do that part.”
Sure. But … what, some wonder, would be the point of making an awkward situation more awkward?
“You need,” Seinfeld insists. “To get the comic in there.”
“I hate to see a comic lose a job,” he laments.
A pity that he doesn’t reserve some of that hate for dehumanizing racism.
Twitter saw Seinfeld’s comments and responded by excoriating him.
One person tweeted: “Please f–k off Jerry, thank you!”
Short and to the point. Not terribly sweet, though.
Another tried to explain: “Hello. Disney is an international company. By Keeping her they’re saying the agree with her views. Think about the repercussions this could have on Disney around the world. They had no choice.”
Very reasonable.
Another tweeted: “well Curb > Seinfeld so yea.”
That is referring to Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Another settled for a gentle burn: “Seinfeld, didn’t his show get cancelled?”
To clarify, Roseanne has years of history of being explicitly racist on Twitter. We don’t mean “edgy” humor. We mean sincere tweets about combatting “Jewish mind-control.”
Roseanne has also expressed the belief that Donald Trump is conducting secret arrests of non-existent Illuminati pedophile rings. She routinely shares fringe-right conspiracy theories on social media.
So, while one particular tweet became the focus of viewers’ ire, Roseanne hardly ended her career with a single button-push.
Instead, it was death of a thousand cuts, and that tweet, if you’ll allow mixed metaphors, was the final straw.
