Testing the Waters

2510678

Roseanne Barr figures that come January, George W. Bush could heat up the competition for her new show space at the Sahara.

“He should try stand-up at the Sahara,” she muses, riffing on Bush’s post-presidential options.

Would she let him be her opening act?

“He could probably sell enough for his own show. It seems like he’s trying to do stand-up. He’s always trying to tell a joke, but he doesn’t time it right. He always, like, sneers and guffaws all together.”

She’s running with this now. “He telegraphs the punch line way to soon and he’s bombing … Iraq! Har, har.

“That’s good. I might have to steal that for the radio.”

This is the current state of the union in Roseanneworld, to borrow the name of her Web site. Last year, Barr introduced the Strip to more political-leaning material in a 14-week run at New York-New York. Now she’s back at the Sahara for an extended run that will continue at least until June.

“I’m just trying to make people laugh, and if I do real good, maybe think. Laugh and think,” she says.

The 55-year-old comedian is deep into daily blogging — heavy on Hillary Clinton fervor this week — and is testing the waters of talk or Internet radio as her next frontier. Last week, she and boyfriend Johnny Argent finished up an exploratory week on Air America Radio, borrowing the studios of a local station.

The ideal scenario, she says, would be to do radio by day and stand-up at night, perhaps taking summers off at her house in Hawaii with her children and grandchildren.

Either way, the cross-pollination is showing its influence onstage. “It has been really cool to mix the media,” Barr says. To “say something on the radio and then change it up for the written piece on the blog and then change it up again for the joke.”

She has decided to push a bit of the radio high-wire act into her stage show. “I’m going to give myself the space to really talk to people off the top of my head and ad-lib in this show. That’s the greatest feeling,” she says. “It’s better than writing or telling jokes or anything. It took a long time to get back the feeling of confidence that I could do it.”

Las Vegas has marked the highs and lows of Barr’s turbulent career. Back in 1986, it was a stand-up Cinderella story when the “Domestic Goddess” played Caesars Palace as an opening act for Julio Iglesias. “It really has been like living in the world’s coolest fairy tale,” a Review-Journal story of the day quoted the comedian, who started working clubs in the Denver area while still a waitress.

Her fortunes changed when she met Louie Anderson, who encouraged her to try out at The Comedy Store in Los Angeles. The rest was history, including showroom co-billing with Anderson at the Desert Inn in 1987 and the “Roseanne” sitcom the following year.

In 1990, she and then-husband Tom Arnold played the Las Vegas Hilton at the peak of the TV show’s popularity. But the backlash began when the comedian did a segment imagining herself 10 years in the future, as a washed-up lounge singer straight from rehab.

“They didn’t like that act. I got banned from Vegas,” she says. “I had to give back a quarter of a million dollars in cash. It didn’t sell any tickets. … I had to give back the money and got banned and couldn’t get booked.”

She still had the sitcom and ended up taking a long break from stand-up; 14 years, by her calculations.

In November 2001, Barr and Anderson reunited at the MGM Grand. But Anderson had become a Las Vegas staple by this time, while Barr says she “wasn’t really ready, and it was right after 9/11 and I was doing all these political jokes. I kind of got in trouble and banned again. … They said they’d never have me back after that. I always get banned, and then I have to work my way back in,” she adds with a laugh.

She was still trying to find her way back to television with a cooking show and reality show in 2003. “Once you do TV, you get so used to it,” she says. “And then one day I was like — I guess after a couple of bad experiences — just going, ‘What are you doing?’

“I don’t like guys in suits to tell me what I can’t do. And stand-up, I don’t have to answer to anybody. It’s awesome,” she says. “Why have you been beatin’ your head against the wall?”

Barr says she got her comic mojo back during the 2004 election season, touring colleges with agitator Michael Moore to campaign for John Kerry. The college crowds “saw me as, like, their mom. I just hooked in to that whole new fan base. To hear them go crazy after I’d been banned in Vegas, it was just awesome. They gave me back my spark and my confidence.”

Now she figures age is on her side. “All these great comics older than me said it takes 30 years to make a good stand-up comic. I’m hitting the 30-year mark now,” she says. “I’m back to where I was, kind of, but I’m better now. I’m better and more seasoned, got my confidence back, my chops.

“I think I’ve worked it out now, how I can do it and not be banned,” she ventures of her new gig. “I think this old age (stuff) is working in my favor. When you’re an old woman, you can really be a big old bitch. You can fart and people think it’s kind of cute. You can be grumpy and old, and you’re just grumpy and old.”

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com or (702) 383-0288.