Jerry Seinfeld: Roseanne Barr dead before final act

Jerry Seinfeld says Roseanne self-destructed in a "fresh" way. Photo / AP

By Isaac Stanley-Becker

There is an alternate universe in which Roseanne Barr, the actress and conservative provocateur, actually put down the bullhorn of social media. After all, she had promised to do so.

She wrote last month, in since-deleted messages, that she was "leaving Twitter" — penance for racist posts that brought a premature end to her revived ABC sitcom, Roseanne. But in this universe, Barr returned to her favourite platform with a vengeance.

Her Twitter lapse lends strange support to the estimation of Jerry Seinfeld, known for an eponymous sitcom of his own, that her downward spiral was of her own making and needed no momentum from ABC's abrupt goodbye.

"I don't see why it was necessary to fire her," said the co-creator and star of the television sitcom Seinfeld in an interview with Entertainment Tonight.

He deployed macabre language in an apparent reference to her self-destructive internet behaviour, adding, "Why would you murder someone who's committing suicide?" Resurrecting her old Twitter personality, Barr used her page to defend President Donald Trump, who had called her to congratulate her on her show's ratings and wove her firing into a tale of his own victimisation. She spreads conspiracy theories about former President Barack Obama.

And she generally stirs the pot of outrage. Particularly ripe for retweets by the television star are posts that reinterpret her slur against Valerie Jarrett — the reason that ABC had nixed her show — as poor word choice rather than racism. Their messages of support crowd her profile: "we r the army of truth," she wrote last week.

The old Barr is back, but Seinfeld sees no reason that her real-life persona should get in the way of the fictionalised version that made Roseanne a hit. He said that ABC should find a new actress for Barr's part in the planned spinoff, The Conners, and "there's other funny women that could do that part".

Seinfeld is no stranger to controversy over issues of representation and entertainment. When his NBC show ended in 1998, the Los Angeles Times observed that the finale was a "non-event" for many African-Americans because the black community was not represented in the show.

"Observers said that the lack of Seinfeld fever among blacks is mainly attributable to the almost total absence of minority characters on the New York-based sitcom," the Los Angeles Times staff reported.

In an interview many years later, Seinfeld responded: "It really pisses me off. People think [comedy] is the Census or something, it's gotta represent the actual pie chart of America."

Whether he found dark comedy in Barr's downfall, he did not say.

"I never saw somebody end their entire career with one button push. That was fresh."