452. The Loudest Woman in Comedy | Roseanne Barr

This episode features an in-depth conversation with comedian Roseanne Barr, focusing on her career, the nature of comedy, and her experiences in Hollywood and with cancel culture.

1. Comedy as a Tool for Truth: Roseanne Barr views comedy as a crucial medium for expressing truth and challenging societal norms.
2. Impact of Cancel Culture: Roseanne discusses her personal experiences with cancel culture and its impact on her career and personal life.
3. Class Struggle in Hollywood: Insights into the difficulties faced by performers from different class backgrounds in Hollywood.
4. Comedic Renaissance in Austin: The move of many comedians to Austin, Texas, for greater creative freedom, influenced by Joe Rogan.
5. Role of Comedians: The discussion underscores the role of comedians as societal commentators who can provoke thought and laughter through their unique insights.

1: Introduction to Roseanne Barr

Jordan B. Peterson introduces Roseanne Barr, discussing her impact on comedy and her recent projects. Roseanne talks about her role in "Mister Burcham" and her views on comedy's power.

• Jordan B. Peterson: "Hello, everybody. I got the opportunity today to talk to Roseanne Barr."

2: Comedy and Society

They explore how comedy can address deep truths and societal issues, with Roseanne sharing her thoughts on the current state of comedy and its evolution.

• Roseanne Barr: "It's just so fun to be part of something that is so on the line and purposely offensive."

3: Experiences with Cancel Culture

Roseanne shares her experiences and challenges with cancel culture in Hollywood, reflecting on how it has affected her personally and professionally.

• Roseanne Barr: "Her experience with cancel culture and class discrimination, or difficulty in making class adjustment, let's say, in Hollywood."

4: Austin's Comedy Scene

Discussion on the burgeoning comedy scene in Austin, Texas, and its impact on her career and comedic expression.

• Roseanne Barr: "Her more recent experiences on the comedy scene in Austin, which is a real up and coming comedy renaissance city."

5: The Role of Comedians

The conversation concludes with a discussion on the broader role of comedians in society, touching on themes of freedom, expression, and the unique ability to challenge societal norms.

• Roseanne Barr: "You just maybe need to just hold up a mirror."

1. Embrace Humor in Daily Conversations: Use humor to open up discussions and address difficult topics in a lighter, more engaging way.
2. Challenge Cultural Norms: Don't shy away from using comedy or satire to question and critique societal norms and cultural practices.
3. Support Free Speech in Art: Advocate for and support platforms that allow artists to express themselves without fear of censorship.
4. Acknowledge and Discuss Class Differences: Use personal and public platforms to discuss and highlight class issues within society.
5. Stay Informed on Cultural Shifts: Keep up with cultural trends and shifts, especially in entertainment, to understand broader societal changes.

Dr. Jordan Peterson sits down with actor, standup comedian, and podcaster Roseanne Barr. They discuss her recent voice acting role on the new show Mr. Birchum, how humor shines a light on and disperses darkness, the rarity and hardships of being a female comic, her overnight success in Hollywood, and what really matters in living a good (and humorous) life.
Roseanne Barr is an American podcaster, writer, producer, actor, and standup comic. She was awarded both an Emmy and a Golden Globe for her hit show “Roseanne” which ran for nine seasons. She has written two books, ran for president once, and recently taken up podcasting with her son, as well as a voice acting role in the DW+ show Mr. Birchum.

People

Jordan B. Peterson, Roseanne Barr

Companies

Daily Wire

Books

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Guest Name(s):

Roseanne Barr

Content Warnings:

None

Jordan B. Peterson
Hello, everybody. I got the opportunity today to talk to Roseanne Barr. We talked about her recent work with the Daily Wire plus crew on Mister Burcham. She plays a high school principal near retirement in that show. And then we talked a fair bit about comedy as such, and exactly what a comedian does, what it's like to hit the mark so precisely that you can tell the truth in a manner that also opens people up and brings that unconscious joy that's associated with spontaneous laughter, trying to nail down exactly what that means.

It's part of this broader phenomenon that we see where so many people that are making their mark on pop culture are comedians, former and present. Rogan, of course, springs to mind. Russell. Russell Brand, many, many people. Dave Rubin, Steven Crowder, Theo Vaughn.

There's so many comedians that have made a name for themselves as, as interviewers. We talked about that a fair bit. Her experience with cancel culture and class discrimination, or difficulty in making class adjustment, let's say, in Hollywood. Her more recent experiences on the comedy scene in Austin, which is a real up and coming comedy renaissance city, in no small part as a consequence of Joe Rogan's enterprises there. So join us for what proved to be a very interesting and enlightening conversation.

Let's start by talking about Mister Burcham. You're working with the Daily Wire plus crew. Yeah. And so how's that going? Oh, it's just been a blast.

Roseanne Barr
It's just been so fun. I like their process. I like the people. I love Adam Carolla and the other comics. It's just been so fun to be part of something that is so on the line and purposely offensive, it's just great to offend, you know?

And I think for an audience that likes that sort of thing, you know, it's great accepting. And for people who really want to think and rearrange furniture in their mind, it's fun to be a part of that. The problem with rearranging furniture in your mind is the snakes and the spiders tend to crawl out from underneath. Isn't that true? It's definitely the case.

Jordan B. Peterson
So tell everybody about Mister Bertram, because there'll be lots of people watching and listening who don't know about it. Well, it's a 30 year dream of Adam Carolla to portray this character. I guess it's based on a real life teacher of his, a shop teacher, and who was, as I understand it. I hope I'm not misspeaking it for Adam, but he was very influential to Adam and he had a different approach to teaching. It was unconventional and some people would probably, right now, people would be up in arms about the way he taught, but he not only taught, but reached people and, you know, challenge them to do their best.

Roseanne Barr
So that's kind of what is so great about the cartoon, because it shows a teacher that cares in an unconventional way and actually moves students to think and do their best work. And the. And he's up against, like, you and I and people who are thinkers up against this huge force of, you know. Yeah, evil. The collective.

You know, the collective. That's what I just call it now that has, you know, their fascist definitions of everything where people must obey, must bow, must repeat, must parrot. And so in all of that, there's this one gifted teacher who wants to do it his way. And he is, of course, under scrutiny by all the collective. And I play the principal who's about two weeks from retirement and doesn't give a damn, just wants to get the retirement and is trying to do what she has to do.

And it's kind of is a veteran. And so she's kind of on Mister Bertram's side, but she has to obey the prodigals. And this the one character, oh, my gosh, I'm blank on his name, but is played by Tyler Fisher. I'm so sorry, Tyler. But he plays like.

Jordan B. Peterson
He plays Carponzi. Yeah. And he's really a lib. He's a real, like, pronoun type, you know, guy that is all that. And he's trying to get Mister Bircham fire, you know, using the rules that Mister Bertram doesn't follow.

Roseanne Barr
And so my character is, like, trying to protect Mister Bertram and trying to protect her retirement. So the best comedies, animated or otherwise, often have a very sharp and biting satirical edge. But underneath a certain amount of heart and genuine human connection, this was something that was very marked about the Simpsons, for example, because it was completely satirical, but at least for the 13 1st seasons. And there were some stellar shows after that, too. Really, what made the series so remarkable was the fact that you actually ended up identifying with and liking the characters, despite their manifold flaws.

Jordan B. Peterson
Do you ever watch the trailer park before? Have you ever seen that? Oh, yes. I love that show. It's just.

Okay, so why do you love the trailer park? Because I also love the trailer park boys, which I'm very sad to say, but I'm like a super fan, and it has the same quality. Right. I mean, the characters are completely reprehensible most of the time, but there's a connection. They have a connection underneath that's genuine and that gives the show, it's not just, it's not just cynical and it is genuinely funny.

And so what, what is it you like about the trailer park boys? Well, I like just that it's absurdist. It's so, it's so based in reality that it's absurd, which is like what reality is right now. It's just so absurd. It's hard to write jokes when you're in the middle of, you know, just absurdia because you can hardly top how ridiculous and absurd everything is.

Roseanne Barr
You just maybe need to just hold up a mirror. And that's what I like about it, because I had so many people in my life who are just like the trailer park boys. Maybe they don't. I think the trailer park boys have a lot of insight that the people like that. They do have a lot of insight, but, you know, I think that it speaks greatly to class consciousness, which is what fascinates me more than anything else about, you know, american culture and, you know, the, you know, Canada and the UK and, you know, I guess the west.

The fact that everybody is kind of blind to the fact that we live in such a class based culture, it's like the last thing that anybody ever notices or talks about. But it's just so present in that show and it's just so hilarious. All the things that come with that whole working class thing, which I just love it. One of the things that always struck me, the town I grew up in, the town I'm in right now, because I'm up in northern Alberta, is a working class town, and I suppose climbed the class ladder after I left Fairview. But one of the things I really missed as that happened was humor.

Jordan B. Peterson
I mean, the people I grew up with here, basically all we did to amuse ourselves was to engage in competitive bouts of humor. And so, and that was ridiculously fun. It was a way of gaining status, too, because the funniest people had the most status and also, obviously, the people that could take a joke. And in working class jobs, you need to be able to take a joke, that's for sure. Well, everyone does all the time in life.

But, you know, among the intellectual class, frequently, especially among the posers, there's an absolute lack of humor. And that's very annoying. It is absolutely true. It's very dull and, and pretentious. And, you know, one of the things, too, that I've really learned, I think you can, you can tell people who are dangerous because they hate comedians and they hate automobiles.

Roseanne Barr
I never thought about the automobile. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the same. It's the same. So I think it's that private, personal mobility and freedom that, you know, I mean, car culture was always a working class culture.

Jordan B. Peterson
And the thing about a car is you can go every, anywhere you want, whenever you want with no restrictions or very limited restrictions and no one can tell you otherwise. Plus, it's super private. Or it wasn't until you had onstar and all these bloody things that monitor you 100% of the time while you're driving now. But like, cars, to me, really signify freedom. And, well, comedy is the same way because you get to say whatever you want as long as it's funny.

Had a good friend of mine once up in northern Alberta. His rule was you could say anything you wanted as long as it was funny or true. And funny and true, man, that really tops the charts if you can pull that off. That's what my family, too, was. Of course, it was a dysfunctional family.

Roseanne Barr
And, you know, like everybody's, I guess everybody has an element of that, but we could say whatever we couldn't ever. We weren't allowed to say we were angry or that something was wrong. We weren't ever allowed to whine, as it was called, but we could tell a joke expressing dissatisfaction or anger or rage or anything, and it would be, you know, it would be accepted. Everybody loved it. We'd laugh it off.

And that is like how we communicated the darker parts of our psyches, you know, and it was okay. But if you would tell a joke and it would bomb and front of my dad, then he, you know, then you get slapped. So I kind of got robotized into being a comedian because it was a way to express and to survive all of this stuff. So, you know, I learned it that way, but it was kind of like that in all my friends house, too. If you were snappy with your wit, your parents appreciated it, even though they wanted to, you know, beat the hell out of you sometimes.

Jordan B. Peterson
Yeah. Well, the thing about, the thing about discussing dark things with humor is that it has two advantages, I think. And the first is you get to shine a light on the thing that's dark, but more importantly, you get to show that you can stand seeing it, and also that you can sort of, you can transcend it at the same time is really what you're doing when you laugh it off. So you're showing that there's something there that's negative and maybe even that's causing suffering. But at the same time, you're indicating everybody's willingness to look at it and also to rise above it.

And so that's a pretty damn good deal. And this is why I think media. Power over us, right? I always thought that comedy was, I mean, I do feel it's a gift. And a lot of us comics, when we're drunk and sitting there talking to each other seriously, which we do.

Roseanne Barr
When we're drunk and drinking and stuff and getting serious about comedy, which we do. But it's probably really boring to non comedians. But we talk about what a kind of a holy thing it is to be a comedian, to have the power of naming, you know, being able to name something and then to dispel its power over us. But more important than anything, the way I look at it, and I always bring it up, is to laugh. Power to scorn.

They cannot survive that. And so we look at it as like, oh, it is a holy calling in a kind of a working class way of telling the king or the emperor, hey, you're naked as hell, buddy. Yeah. Well, there's two things there you point out that I think are really interesting. I had never thought about that relationship between comedy and the power to name.

Jordan B. Peterson
So that's what God grants Adam in the story of Adam and Eve. Right? He's supposed to. God. In fact, God brings everything in front of Adam to see what he'll name them.

And it's interesting because naming something actually has that real tight alliance with wit. It's really hard to coin a word or a phrase, right. You have to hit the target dead center before you can come up with a new phrase that will spread. That happens very rarely. That's real mark of precise aim.

And you're absolutely right. Precise aim is so much a part of it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. And then the scorn issue, that's also dead relevant.

Well, I think this is partly why you can tell the tyrants, because of their attitude towards comedians, is that it's the people who don't want to be unmasked, and especially who don't want to be unmasked in relationship to the fact that all their vaunted compassion is nothing but a play for power. They're the ones that detest comedians and have absolutely no sense of humor. That's a very dangerous thing in a person, to have no sense of humor. And so what does that mean if you have no sense of humor? Well, they have no sense of humor watching comedy.

Roseanne Barr
I've always been a comedy fan, and so was my father. He wanted to be a comic, too, and I think he made me one. But the content of the humor they like, because everybody laughs at something eventually. But the content and politics of the humor they like is something that I've studied as a comic for a long time. And it is kind of by class.

The way I look at it, it's very much by class and it's also by sex and, you know, it's also by, you know, a few other factors, but in my mind. But these people, they will laugh, but we always say they laugh downward. They laugh at, yeah, yeah, yeah. They're, quote, lesser, like less. They're less.

I always call it academia. They're less, you know, you know, the riff raff or whatever, but, and sometimes they'll laugh upward and sometimes they'll laugh laterally, but it's very subdued. But the thing they will never do is laugh at themselves. Right. Right.

And they really despise anything that puts them as the joke. You know, I got fired because I made fun of the Obama administration and their policies in the Middle east, even though they tried to say it was about something else. But that is what my tweet was about that got me fired and my work of a lifetime stolen everything they did to me and also misrepresenting what I meant and not allowing me the chance to explain or anything, just deadheading me. But he is, he and those leftists around him. Leftists don't have a sense of humor at all, but they definitely don't want to be made fun of at all.

And they resent it. They get so angry because the one thing I always say about fascists, two things they despise dialogue and humor, conversation and actual dialogue about an idea. They despise that any kind of humor that includes any discussion, class or that kind of thing, you know, and it. Might be easy to just toss all of your discipline to the side for the summer, but a life of greatness doesn't happen by taking the easy route. The Hallow app offers an incredible range of guided meditations and prayers that are designed to help you deepen your spirituality and strengthen your connection to God.

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jordan for an exclusive three month trial. That's hallow.com jordan. Well, it might, maybe it's harder on the Democrats to have working class humorists go after them because in principle, they're supposed to be advocates for the working class. And so if it's working class humor, which does tend, in my experience, to be very self denigrating. Right.

Jordan B. Peterson
And I do think that's a real mark of character. It's one of the things I really like about british humor, and I think canadian humor's got that edge, too, is that the Brits are very, very good at laughing at themselves. The Monty Python troupe was unbelievably good at that because their humor was all unbelievably good. And it made the comedy in some ways timeless, too, because it wasn't focused exactly on the political or actually very rarely on the political. And so it's very strange to see some of the jokes from the 1970s, many of the skits that the Monty Python troupe pulled off in the 1970s are still funny as hell.

And still, you know, I talked to John Cleese at one point and he told me they were planning to do a Broadway revitalization of the life of Brian, you know, and they wanted, they wanted to cut out. You remember, there's one section with the little cabal of left wing radicals that the movie centers around. One of them, I can't remember, the comedian is, decides that he's a woman about halfway through the movie and which is. Yeah, yeah, it's very. Oh, yeah, it's very funny.

It's ridiculously funny. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, and so they obviously, in some spectacular way, foreshadowed all this trans nonsense that's been coming down the pipeline. But they were very resistant, the people who were going to produce it were very resistant to continuing to include that in the Broadway revival. I don't know if that ever did get sorted out because Cleese was not happy about it.

But that's also a testament to their satirical brilliance to have managed something. It's 40 years ago now that still hits the target viciously enough to be of concern to the woke dimwits today. I mean, and it's so interesting because in the movie, in the life of Brian, the. The desire of this character to be a woman is actually treated with a fair bit of. Is it dignity?

Well, it is. It's satirical dignity, so there's nothing about it that would offend anyone who had the least iota of sense. Quite the contrary. It's very, very hilarious. But it is a good example of that inability to laugh.

Roseanne Barr
It's worth it. So long. It's definite. I watched it recently, again, I think after I talked to Cleese, I was curious about it, maybe before, because I want to, you know, pop it back up in my mind, but it. It's aged very well.

Jordan B. Peterson
I would say it's probably more relevant today than it was when they released it. That's fantastic. Yeah, yeah, well, comedy does that. Yeah, well, it's. It's, it's.

It zeroes in so tightly on radical leftist nonsense. And, you know, that was a problem in the seventies, but it was nowhere near as much of a problem in the seventies as it is now. So it's unwary, uncharted territory. We are. We are.

Roseanne Barr
I think they have it all nailed down. So it's just so great down here in Austin, which is a blue city. And, you know, I was nervous to come down here. My daughter and son were with me and a friend. We went to the comedy club, and, you know, I'd had a few drinks, and I was pretty loose.

My friends were there, and one of them wanted me to come on stage, and my daughter, you know, my daughters are liberal, and, oh, my God. So she goes, mama, don't go on. It's a blue city. They're gonna hate you. And I went, I'm going on.

I just was brave enough. Whatever. I was in the mood. Cause my friends were there. Well, so I go on, and I just.

It was just fantastic that I think a lot of it's because it's Austin, because there's a different kind of a blue city, but. And they're young, but they loved it. I was shocked. My daughter was shocked. And it got me to move here because this smart comedy audience is never woke.

They're never woke, you know, and they want to be challenged. They want to laugh at ridiculousness, and they want to laugh at themselves, you know, and they want to hold their beliefs and their ideas up to the light and examine it. They're not cowed into silence like so many of the blue thing just cowed into silence because it is so huge. How are you going to fight it? It's so huge.

It's everywhere. It's a monolith. And, you know, they want to dictate everything we think, do and say, and they think they're justified to do it. And they have no idea that they're fascists. They have no idea.

Jordan B. Peterson
I found on my tours that the most enthusiastic audiences are in the most liberal cities. That's what it was. I was shocked. Well, I also think you said that people are censoring themselves and they don't even know it. And so in the, let's say when I've gone to Portland, Portland's a good example because I have very enthusiastic crowds in Portland and large crowds.

That's been the case for all the left wing cities that I visited, even Berlin. We did a show in Berlin that was in the middle of the communist district. The Berliners regarded that as a provocation. The real lefties. I didn't bloody well know that the theater was in the, the middle of a communist district, essentially.

I probably wouldn't have rented it if I would have known that. I'm amazed they rented it to me. We had a fair number of protesters, but the response was very enthusiastic. And it's a large part of it. It's just, it's relief on people's part.

You know, they don't even know that they're under this weight of continual lying, having this censor, they think, no. And so then they go somewhere where that isn't happening, and it's like, oh, freedom, you know, and so, and so that's a relief. And that puts everybody in, well, the sort of mood that you're in when you're around people that you can actually talk to and think with, well, it's. Great down here, Joe's comedy club, because it's dedicated to freedom of speech and, you know, for comics so that we can do our best work. Yeah.

Roseanne Barr
And that feeling of freedom is why comics from all over the country are moving here to Austin to be able to work. Yeah. Yeah. And it's just great because it feels like a comedy renaissance, you know? Exactly.

You know, we can't, we can't challenge ourselves more. And there was a, there's, it had been such a long time where, you know, the world of comedy premises was decreasing, decreasing, getting tighter and tighter because there's just so many things that you couldn't say. You'd be attacked and run out of town, you know, but this is just a real free and freeing feeling, and it's just wonderful to look out and see people of all shapes, colors, sizes, ages, laughing together at just the ridiculous absurdity of it all. It's just, it feels like, it feels like revolution. Like we've always dreamed of.

A revolution for free thoughts, free ideas, free people. It's just wonderful. When I go on stage there, I always say, I always thank Joe for, you know, creating the place for comics to have free speech. And then I say, my goal is to get 86 the hell out of here, you know, to go so far, you know, because, you know, comics, we, we like to get in trouble. Well, the thing is, the funniest things you can possibly say are right on the ragged edge of disaster, right?

Jordan B. Peterson
You want to push it right? Absolutely. You want to push it right to the point of no return. And if you can dangle there, that's hilarious. You want people to be thinking, I can't bloody well believe she said that.

And it was so perfect. Right? Now, if you go too far, well, then it's trashy or, or genuinely offensive or cheap, but it's a very, very, very delicate line to walk. I always get the crazy thing. She's crazy.

Roseanne Barr
Well, I've said for my whole career, you know, that mental health issues. So it is kind of funny that they kind of, like, they're saying she has so many mentally, mental health issues that she's completely mentally healthy, challenged. Well, yeah, that's why I'm a comic. Yeah. Well, the thing is about, the thing is that pure crazy isn't funny.

Jordan B. Peterson
Like, it's just sad. I've been to comedy shows where comedy shows where the people, and these are usually, you know, very early career comedy shows, let's say, where people come on stage and really do nothing but confess their sins, let's say, sexual and otherwise. And that is not funny. That's just sad. And so anything that I don't think anything that's funny is ever reflective of mental illness.

I don't think those two things go together at all. I mean, you can say crazy things. No, if it's funny, if it's funny, it's sane, and it doesn't really matter, you know? And the thing about comedy, too, that's so interesting is that it operates at this profoundly unconscious level. You know, one of the things I noticed about having little kids is that even before they could speak, they had really good senses of humor that was associated with play.

And so comedy humor is so deep that it's there before words. So that's really something. And then everyone laughs in an audience before they think, right, if you have to. So that's what makes comedy reflective of you. Well, you said it was holy in some sense, and it is because you're talking directly to someone before their filters are up.

And, no, if you laugh, the laugh catches you. It's not something you do. It's something that happens to you. And so if it's faked or forced, you can tell because the laughter isn't genuine. It's also not any fun.

It's so interesting. It's such a mystery. I've never been able to figure out how it is that something as sophisticated as a sense of humor can develop, say, before even language. And it's definitely something that bonds people together. Right.

Because one of the ways that you bond with your little kids is with jokes and games and even peek a boo is a joke. It's. Right, I'm gone. I'm here. Babies will laugh, like, mad about that.

They laugh with repetition. That's disrupted in a surprising way. It's very, very interesting. And, well, the, one of the great joys, I have ten grandkids, so one of the great joys is, you know, trying to see how young you can get them to laugh. Me, I mean, I just love to see where is it, where they find the funny?

Roseanne Barr
I love to watch where is, where is someone finding the funny? And, yeah, no kidding, they fought. It seems, like, universal that you find it in the, you know, reflexive body issues, like farting and stuff like that, or belching. Kids love that. I'm a huge star to my grandkids in the comedy department for all that kind of thing, but, you know, and.

Jordan B. Peterson
Well, it was something I really enjoyed about having little kids because I kept that sort of tradition that I grew up in of competitive comedy alive in the house. And so that's. So I was always, oh, it's so fun. And my kids both have great senses of humor. Like, I don't think my daughter, Mikayla, I don't think she ever says anything that isn't a joke.

And so, and that's where she's most comfortable. I mean, it took my, took my wife quite a while to realize this. She probably only said this to me about ten years ago. She came up to me and she said, you know, I think everything Michaela says is a joke. And I thought, yeah, that's exactly right.

I'm glad that you got that. And so, and because there's always an edge to it, you know, and, and it's a, it's a challenge, too, in some ways, when you, when you speak and play like that, because the challenge is to see if the people that you're interacting with can, well, can tolerate that and can understand it and can appreciate it. It's a lovely thing to be able to speak about serious things with that comedic edge. I mean, that's, that's a real art, man, to transmute suffering into joy. That's for sure.

Roseanne Barr
I said that last night. It's so funny. They wanted me to come down because they were having an open mic night and they had a young woman and she has a disease. I can't remember the name, but she's in a wheelchair doing comedy. It's like an Ms kind of a disease.

Jordan B. Peterson
Yeah, yeah. And she's beautiful girl, young student, and she did just a great set. She did just a few minutes. But so they, I'm kind of like the comedy grandma and I, you know, I'm, they all roast the people, but I don't want to do that because I said, oh, I'm just, I'm too famous and rich and good looking to do that, you know, so I have to do the grandma thing. Plus, I love to mentor the young ones.

Roseanne Barr
And so I said to her, you know, you are so lovely and people really love you. They love your comedy because you have the essence of comedy. In YouTube, we all see that you have reached down into that pool of pain that you obviously have lived through in your life and brought out beauty and joy, and that is people, and that's the essence of comedy. And you are going to be a huge star. Starting a business can be tough, but thanks to Shopify, running your online storefront is easier than ever.

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Jordan B. Peterson
Yeah, yeah. Well, one of the things I noticed, like my daughter was extremely ill when she was a kid. She had terrible juvenile arthritis, and she had her hip replaced when she was 16 and her ankle replaced when she was 17. It was really bad. She was in, like, excruciating pain for about 15 years, which is really quite a long time.

And she has talked about that publicly. And I've been at some of the events, they haven't been taped, some of the events where she spoke about what happened to her. And she's able to make her stories of that period of time, often screamingly funny. And that's actually a real indication of recovery. Right.

It isn't that you can just talk about it without emotion. It's that you can, what would you can say, you see? Is it the absurdity? I guess it's the absurdity. It's something like that.

But that is, that's a real art form, to be able to take those excruciating moments and to make them into something that's shareable and that enables everybody to rise above the pain at the same time. And, you know, what is that? Trying to think of the word that, it used to be medieval, where you would, where they would talk about transforming tin into alchemy. Yes, that's what it is. Yeah, right.

Absolutely. Alchemy. And watch, you know, you were talking about laughter before, and for comics, well, we love to get people to where they can't stop laughing. They wanted to laugh. And the other thing is, you know, when you were in school and you weren't supposed to laugh, but something made you laugh, that's the best thing to watch from the stage when you see people going through that, and then you just push on until people, we always say, like, when the head goes back and there's an intake of breath, that's what you're killing, because you actually are killing them in a way, but it's a good kind of kill.

You know what? I used to go work out with a couple of friends of mine in Boston, and one of the games we would play was to tell a joke when people were bench pressing, because, well, when you laugh, you lose all your muscular force. And that's really interesting, too, eh? Because it, and I've been trying to figure that out as a psychologist. It's like, obviously, laughter is associated with play, and play is the opposite of power and aggression.

Play is truly the opposite of power. That took me, like, four decades to figure out that play is the antithesis of power. And it's so interesting that when people laugh, they go, yeah, it's a very good thing to know, you know, especially in your relationships, because if you're playing with your children or you're playing with your wife, then you know that you're not being a tyrant. And you can do almost anything in a spirit of play. I mean, it's hard when you're suffering, that's for sure.

It's hard to transmute real pain into play. But if you're doing anything perfectly, you're doing it in play. And it's so interesting to see that when you make people laugh, they lose all their muscular force. You know, they collapse into laughter. They dissolve into laughter, and it takes them over.

And so, and they do that. They do that. You know, sometimes if we're getting real spiritual with it and we say it's that universal ha. It's the expression of, you know, the ha. Because you're a meditator, you know, it's, it's the, you know, intake.

Roseanne Barr
Inhale and the exhale. So it's like the exhale and the letting go of, you know, secrets almost. Yeah. Right. Ghosts and devils.

Right, right. It's really powerful. And it's interesting to have people do that communally, too, because what that means, this is something that's profound, too. And it is really something that Joe Rogan is managing to foster this again in Austin, because it also takes a lot of trust to laugh jointly at a joke. Right.

Jordan B. Peterson
Because especially if the joke is off key or pushing the limits, the fact that youll laugh with others means that a situation of trust has been established in the room. Right. And ive spent some time thinking about trust. I actually think that the only true natural resource is trust, that if people trust each other, they can make the desert bloom, you know? That's right.

Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely the case. And, and comedy is a, comedy is a endeavor that's predicated on a tremendous amount of trust. Right.

Because the, the audience has to trust the comedian, and the comedian has to trust the audience. I mean, one of the things I've learned to do, you tell me what, you tell me about this for you. Before I go out on stage, I always remind myself that the people that are in the audience, this might be easier for me. I think it's more true for my audience for a variety of reasons. They're on my side, and as long as I'm grateful that they're there and I'm communicating honestly, everybody is aiming at the same thing.

Now, I know in a comedy situation it's more complex because there's going to be cynics in the audience more. But, like, what, what's your attitude to your audience? Do you think, like, how do you, how do you, how do you conceive of your audience? And how did you learn that? Well, you know, I've been a comic for almost 40 years.

Roseanne Barr
So you learn it by trial and error and by going in front of different kinds of audiences and trying the same thing to see how it will work in front of this specific group until it works. Works everywhere. So, you know, you, it's trial and error, but it's so many other things. Like, you know, that you could tell a joke, and if you don't do the right rhythm of the joke or have the right inflection, it won't work. So it's like so many things that are combined in it.

But I think, I think that what I've learned is when the audience knows or trusts that you are having fun and that you're enjoying it and, yeah. That you have gratitude that they've come there to see you and they love you, and then you can't help but love them back, you know? I mean, already you love them because they're your fans and they keep you alive, you know? And there is a tethering between me and my fans. And I suppose every other comment might have that same view.

I don't know. But it's a tethering to reality and to the best in humankind. They want, they want, you know how Virginia Woolf said that the job of the writer is to put the severed parts together? Right? I think she wrote that in three guineas, but one of my favorite books.

But anyway, I always think of comedy like that because we're putting the severed parts together that other people may not see. And that's mostly what we do, things that seem disparate. But then when you really look at them under a microscope there, they're very connected. And people are like, oh, yeah, right, right. That's an insight.

Jordan B. Peterson
Yeah, yeah. That drawing of connection. Yeah. And once you do that and they, they appreciate that, it's well thought. Yeah, definitely.

Roseanne Barr
And then they're, they're kind of like, well, I thought that way, too. There's that, too. Right? Yeah. Think that way, too.

But I, I couldn't say it or it didn't occur to me in that way. But you gave words to something that was, like, vague and spinning around in my head. You, you gave me the building blocks for that. So, you know, thank you. Love, it's just really a lot of love.

And, you know, it's such a great positive energy thing to be able to affect that and to watch it. People don't. People don't. Often, I don't hear them talk a lot about being on stage. I mean, we talk about some stuff like, you know, doing a great set or killing or, you know, having a good one or bombing or whatever, but don't talk about that relationship that you're building, this beautiful relationship.

It is so spiritual to watch people get it, to be the person in the arena. That's fun. Yeah. Yeah, that's so fun. Well, so my tour manager was a stand up comedian for a long time, John O'Connell, and.

Jordan B. Peterson
And he toured with stand up comedians professionally as well as a manager. And there's a lot of similarity between what I do and what stand up comedians do. And one of the similarities that I've really started to understand is I've talked to a variety of comedians. Jimmy Carr really helped me think this through, because he's thought a lot about what he does and is able to articulate it well. You know, Carr said that, and I know many comedians do this, and maybe you do this when you're preparing a set, is that, you know, he'll go.

When he's preparing new material, he goes to smaller clubs and tries out his new material, and some of the jokes land and others don't, and he just collects the jokes that land, and so. And I thought that was so interesting, because stand up comedy looks like it's a monologue, but it's got that dialogical element in the initial practice, because, like, he helped me understand that you could be a comedian by telling a lot of jokes and seeing which ones people laughed at and then just collecting those, and you don't need much of a hit rate. Right. If you need to generate 90 minutes worth of material and you have 5 hours of jokes, you can just get rid of the 80% that aren't any good. The audience will tell you what's funny.

And one of the things I love about the lectures that I do, which are spontaneous. So I'm always watching people, you know, in the audience, I'm always talking to someone, and I want to see them. I want to see their eyes light up. I want to see them be struck by something, right. I want to give words to something they already know but can't say.

And people have told me that a lot, that they like my lectures because I say things they know to be true but haven't been able to articulate. And certainly comedians do that well. They do that all the time, and it is great, because often, if I can make a point that's, that has that characteristic, but is also funny, I mean, that's a real, that's a, that's a blast. If you can manage to pull that. Off, it's a real blast, too.

Roseanne Barr
And when you're writing your set, you know, because I do 90 minutes, but you do it in groups, you know, you do your jokes in groups to build on an idea that culminates. You know, it's like little group are probably five to seven minutes. And you start at one premise with a joke, and then the next joke is that kind of built on that previous premise, and it goes a little bit deeper, and then the next goes deeper, and then by the fifth part of the bit, you've blown up the whole premise and showed that it was bullshit all along. That's what I like to do. And it's like, turn everything on its head from its head.

I can't really explain it, but that's my favorite part because it's like, oh, she went, we thought she was going to go left, but she went right. I mean, I'm not talking politically. We thought she was going here, but the whole time she was taking us here. I love that misdirection stuff because that gets the biggest laughs because they thought they were getting set up for something completely different. I like to remove their expectations, where they go.

Where they go. Oh, yeah, I've heard this before, you know. Yeah. And I. By virtue of the fact that I've always been one of few women in comedy, that's been a plus for me.

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The best part is it doesn't cost you a penny out of pocket. Just text Jordan to 989898. That's Jordan to 989898. Today. You mentioned earlier, you mentioned earlier that you have thought through comedy from the perspective.

Jordan B. Peterson
I think you said age and sex. What else? But. So talk a little bit more about being a female in the comedy industry because most comedians are mentioned. Like, my experience has been that, like, truly comical, stand up comedian females are very rare.

Roseanne Barr
Yeah, it's too hard. It's so hard. But, you know, one thing I found out, probably because I have five kids, you know, that's one of my good jokes. I say, you know, I have five children. I used to be kind of pro life.

Jordan B. Peterson
Yeah, that's a good joke. But my friends are all comics. But, you know, all these guys, I always ask people because I'm nosy. I'm nosy, nosy old jewish woman. And so I'll ask.

Roseanne Barr
And they, they always have a funny mom. So much part of it. Oh, yeah. You know, so they. That's interesting.

Jordan B. Peterson
You know, my mother, my mother just died. She died this week. And one of the great memories I have of my mother is, and this is something I always knew about her, is I could always make her laugh. And so that was a big basis of our relationship. I could always make mum laugh by teasing her.

In fact, I think the last thing I said to her when she was in the hospital, I was giving her hell about being in the hospital because my father was ill and so we were worried about him. And then she ended up in the hospital and I gave her a rough time. And, you know, that made her laugh. And so that's interesting. And I didn't, I didn't, I haven't heard anyone say that that relationship of comedy with mother is so particularly important.

But that was definitely the case in my household. It was my mum that I could really make laugh. I wonder. I wonder why that is exactly form of. It's obviously a form of play, but I wonder why it would be sex linked like that.

Well, I want to hear more about your experiences as a female comedian. Comedian. It's hard life on the road, eh? So that's part of the. I didn't, well, I didn't go on the road too much until I was older.

Roseanne Barr
I didn't come up like a normal comedian because I had so many kids. But I did go on tour for 18 weeks with Julio Iglesias as his opening act. There was the beginning of my bigger career and, yeah, that was so difficult. Oh, my God, it was so hard to live through that. But when I started comedy, it was 1980, and they didn't like women.

They didn't, you know, nobody liked women too much then. If they do now, I don't think they do. But anyway, they really didn't like funny women, and they didn't like women comedy, and they didn't like women's comedy. They didn't like women's anything to do with it because it was so all about men, you know, it was all men. And it was very.

It was fraternal and very collegiate, and I was not any of those things. But they didn't like me. And that was like the first time I got de platformed, or whatever we're calling it, censored. They didn't like me and so they refused to let me work there at the comedy club in Denver. And.

But I wanted to do it, and so I had to go to these alternative places to do comedy. Like, I would go to punk clubs and I'd end up in wash pit with no microphone doing comedy. That's why my voice is so loud, because I learned that there just telling. Telling jokes in a mosh pit. I mean, I can't believe it sometimes, but I mean, I learned so much.

I go to biker bars, I'd go to jazz clubs, I go to unitarian church lesbian lunches, and, you know, to 20 people and, you know, small groups. And it made me way better. It made me fearless, it made me, I bet, more determined. It made me better because it made me fearless and, you know, fighting to keep my head above water until finally some man comics from La came and they. They saw me and they went to the club that had censored me and said, you really should let that girl.

That's what they called me. You should let that girl on. She's really funny. And they pressured the club to let me back in. And so they did because I had these really strong male comics who were well known, who were traveling through Colorado, through Denver, advocate for me.

So had I not had that, I don't know what would have happened, but they kind of treated me like a nice sister, you know, they were very brotherly to me. And once that happened, I kind of took off. And that was only a matter of about four years. Then I went to Hollywood, and I had one of those overnight things that happened. I was there one night and I got all these breaks and ended up on the Tonight show.

And my first time on the Tonight Show, Julio Iglesias was a guest and picked me to go on tour with him, and I got my tv show from that. So it was really a matter of one night. So why did Iglesias decide that a comedy show was a good way to open his, his. Well, everybody had a comic opening for him back then, and, you know, I was housewife jokes and his fans were, you know, women, and he thought it would be a good idea, and it was. It was a blast.

Oh, my gosh, it was so fun. I had not ever really been in front of big crowds before because I had just been in Denver, but, like, to play the Astrodome in front of 50,000 people as just, you know, a stand up comic, it's just, it was overwhelming and fantastic to stand there on stage in front of that many people and hear the laughter coming down off the walls like is raining down from heaven.

It was just wonderful. And we did that all through the United States. And so that made me more efficient as a comic, you know, and more excited and more efficient. What do you mean? What do you mean by more efficient?

Oh, oh, to be able to, as Mitzi Shore called it, who's the mother of all of us, stand up comic, really, from the comedy store in LA. She would always say, your job is to deliver the mail. You were up there for two minutes and you didn't deliver the mail. You're fumbering and humpering and you weren't delivering the mail. She always say that, you know, and so the efficiency of set up, punchline next.

You know, just the efficiency, rhythm of no fat, no, no long premise with extra words, no edit to go. And, you know, I had famous comic friends who they befriended and mentored me. Like, you know, I met Rodney Dangerfield and he chose me to play his wife. He never had done that. Oh, yeah.

And, you know, Bob Hope, even, and Phyllis Diller and Dick Gregory, Richard Pryor, all these people I could name that I love so much would sit around and speak with me about comedy, and they taught me about removing the fat. Even an extra word is making you less efficient because you want to say the least amount of words and the perfect amount of rhythm with the right inflection and expression. And that's a lot of stuff, for sure. That's a lot of editing. It's like that guy spinning in the air and then, boom, you got to come in at the right time.

Yeah, be laughing really hard for a long time, and that screws up your punchline. And so you kind of get mad, like, shut up, I'm trying to deliver the punchline and you're laughing, but then you go, hey, they're supposed to. That's what you're here for. Just, you know, you're going to have to chill. So you have to figure out, how am I going to navigate this to get the best punch line?

Because I know it's a good punchline and I want a huge lap. I don't just, you know. Cause I monitor the laughs. We all do. Like, oh, I'm only getting a six when it should have been an eight.

You know, you're just. The thing about. My boyfriend is a musician, too. We always talk about music, and comedy is just a great way of being in the now. You're so in the now, you know, you're not thinking about yesterday, tomorrow, nothing, even a minute ago.

You just have to be in the now to deliver the mail, you know, deliver the punch, deliver the art. Yeah, well, so you're touching there on a lot of motifs with regard to the sacredness, let's say, of comedy as well. It's like we have to separate the wheat from the chaff, so you have to be efficient. I love Mitch Hedberg for that reason, because he could just deliver, like, God. Amazing, amazing ability to just deliver nonstop short jokes and often so perfect.

Jordan B. Peterson
So. And then you talked about plate spinning. One of the things I really find fun about lecturing, and I think this is one of the things that makes my lectures akin to a comedic act, is that I like to bring five or six stories that I haven't told together and then to see if I can weave them so that right near the end of the lecture, they all come together and make the same point. We call that callback so that, you know, when you build the story and you get to where you. You're reminding them that you were talking about that before and, you know, make the relationship come together, those are the most fun when a callback will occur to you and you, because you will get the biggest laugh and applause on callbacks.

Roseanne Barr
It's the most fun thing. That one. You just feel like it's a gift from God. And I feel like, I do feel like so much of it is a God saying, you know, because I always tell people when we're getting real spiritual with stuff, I'm like, well, God, God wrote me some great jokes today because, you know, they do come in like that. I will, you know, I'll be sitting there writing, writing, writing, and it's just crap, you know, three pages of crap.

And there's a certain feeling, physical feeling, like suspended animation is what it feels like. And the top of my head actually opens in some way, and God inserts an idea in there, and it's, it's my best jokes. I don't, it doesn't feel like I'm doing it because I, it just is a whole other thing that's, that's like when you're in the wave, you're in the channel, you're in the groove, you know? Yeah. Like a lot of musicians.

Yeah. When they're playing jazz musicians, you know, it's just, the phrase comes in, but God put these, he'll just lay these jokes in there. And that's why I always say God's the funniest comic of all, because look what he does in the world. It's all hilarious. His sense of relationship and the way people live that they don't see it is the funniest thing in the world to me, how funny he is.

Like, I'm trying to think of how to illustrate that it'll come to me, but it's not right now, but I get my best jokes. Just, they just, it's like a download. Well, there's, and it's interesting, though, too, because you said that that often happens when you've written, you know, three pages of, of second rate material. To get those moments, you have to put in that counterproductive work, too. I mean, when I'm writing, like, I throw away 80%, 90% of what I write.

Jordan B. Peterson
And that's often painful because, well, when I was finishing up my last book, which was only a week ago, like, I was cutting half chapters that took me a whole month to write. It's like. But it doesn't matter, right? Because the fundamental issue is that you conserve that wheat and you get rid of the chaff. And the more that you get rid of that second rate, the better you have, the better what's left over is.

And, you know, the other thing that's kind of sacred about the comedic act is that you said that you're in the moment, is that you really have to pay attention to the audience and not be afraid of them, because then you can feel where everyone is. Like you're having a conversation with someone because you are, when you're on stage, even if it's a monologue, the audience has to be along for the ride. And that's where you can capitalize on. Timing is something I'm not great at. Like, I can't really tell jokes.

I can be funny on stage, but it has to be spontaneous. I've never really learned the art of telling a joke that I already knew. It isn't a skill that I've managed to develop, but I can see the connection with the comedic world by watching comedians pay attention to the audience. And because timing is everything, right? You have to be dancing with the audience and they have to be in that zone.

And lecture is exactly the same way. You know, you want to make sure that the words are landing exactly when they should and that you're. It's been hard for me also to learn because I'm often lecturing about serious things and I'll throw in a joke. It's been hard for me to learn to take the time to let the audience have a bit of a breather around the joke, you know, and to. And not to rush ahead.

Roseanne Barr
Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. You know, taking a drink of your coke. You know, we all have. We all have learned those little things to let them catch up to you, let them catch their breath, reset their brain, because especially if you've taken them to, into new territory, they need a little rest, you know, and so do you. But it's just the greatest thing.

It's. I'm so. I'm so thankful that I was given a gift there. I do consider that I was given a great. I was given a wonderful.

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Jordan B. Peterson
Yeah, well, the only thing I can really compare it to is a great musical performance. Yeah, right. And that, that's got that same, what would you say, magic that pulls the crowd in and that there's a tremendous amount of attention that goes along with that, too. The, the great musicians. This is what I, one of the things I love about listening to Billie Holiday, for example, because everybody, every single word she sings is attended to.

Like every word is a little work of art. You know, she's got that intense attention. And I've been curious, too, about why so many people who are successful on YouTube were comedians, but I think it's because of their ability. Well, first of all, a sense of humor helps in your, if you're an interviewer, say, but I suspect that what it really has to do with is the ability of comedians to pay attention. Yeah, right.

Because you're nowhere if you can't be funny unless you're paying attention. You have to be, as you said, right in the moment. You have to see what's the right next thing to say to keep the conversation flowing, to throw in something from left field but not to left field. So, yeah, it's the plate spinning thing. Yeah, right.

Roseanne Barr
You have to be, you know, when you get real meta with it, it's like, well, you're kind of in the past, the present and the future all in the same now, right. Because you have to think about how am I going to follow this up? And especially for in my shows, people, they, they like to heckle me in a friendly way or just start talking for some reason, you know, because it is like a conversation. And you know, I love it, too. And for some reason, that's when I really love it because I love when my brain is working on three or four channels at once.

All comics love that because like I was so sharp and, you know, you're, you're telling your friends I was on it. I, you know, I did, you know, when we're bragging to each other, you know, or explaining to each other. But, yeah, it's a heightened, heightened awareness thing. And I don't know, you're just. If you're funny in life, you're even funnier on stage because you got the stress and the pressure of I better be good, you know, and it propels you.

But.

Jordan B. Peterson
How did you cope with. How, how do you cope? And did you cope with jokes that aren't. That don't work? I mean, part of the reason I think I've had a hard time telling jokes on stage is because I get self conscious.

If halfway through the joke I get self conscious, that's really the problem. And then of course, it doesn't work because I screw up the timing. But there are few things more awkward than making a joke that isn't funny. And you said you played in some pretty rough places and obviously you exposed yourself to enough of that to. But I'm curious about why you were able to tolerate that to begin with because it's actually pretty painful to tell a joke that doesn't work, especially if you know it's funny and you just screwed it up.

So what do you think it was that impelled you to get through those bouts of self consciousness that paralyze most people to the point where they won't? People are terrified of public speaking, much less doing stand up comedy. So why, how and why did you persevere through that? Yeah, I wonder that myself sometimes. But it was because it was such as, I think it's because it was such a self.

Roseanne Barr
It was such a survival mechanism in my family and my childhood and it was a self defense mechanism for me to survive a lot of crazy and painful things that it, in a way, I'm friends with Mike Tyson and it's a lot like boxing. I always talked about. We always compared when we talked about it. It's so much jousting. It's mental jousting to be on stage and to stay in control of one woman with no props, with no orchestra, with no video.

Just stay in control of a 5000 seat room just with your boys because it's a lot of mental jousting and. Well, they're not going to defeat me, not after what I went through as a kid. I'm not going to let them defeat me because I can't be defeated. Right. So that's an attitude of challenge rather than fear.

Yeah, it's like, no, they're not. You know, it's like I always feel somehow it's a God thing to me and it's like the devil ain't getting me. I'll take the devil down. That's why I'm on stage, and he isn't going to get me. And so that's what I do.

And when I screw up, then I just, you know, feel bad and embarrassed, but I go home and I, I go, you know, I'm going to make it better. I never feel defeated. I don't allow myself to feel defeated because comedy is a living thing, and you can always get better. You can. Nobody can stop you from getting better.

You can always. And I'm not going to let them stop me. I'm going to just keep getting better. No matter what they tried to do to stop me. They're not going to till I have my last breath, I'm going to be saying, fuck you.

Because that's how I feel. You know, they're not going to stop me unless they gag me. I mean, there's things they can do to me. I guess they've done enough. But, you know, I, I respect and I respect and believe in and live for the truth, and comedy is truth.

And, you know, you're trying to tell the truth to people to make the world better. You're not trying to make light of people suffering. You're trying to get at power and bring it down and make it so. It feels like I'm. I guess I feel like a, you know, a warrior.

A word warrior. And, you know, for me, it's also, like, for all the people who were told to shut up, I'm. They're there with me, too. You know, I see it so. I see it so deeply like that because, you know, jeez, it is like that, you know?

Jordan B. Peterson
Yeah, well, it is. Well, I especially. I think that's especially the case if you're a comedian who's popular among the working class, you know, because working class people, the sensible ones, and I think most working class people over about 40 are pretty damn sensible. That doesn't necessarily mean they're particularly articulate. And people can be wise without being articulate.

And then if you're a working class comedian, then you have the, as you pointed out, you have the opportunity and the privilege of articulating that. And that is a big deal. And it is something that's going to make people love you, because people like to have the words at hand to say what they know to be true. And it is a very peculiar thing. I love the idea.

Roseanne Barr
On my show, I've probably written 120,000 jokes. And part of the joy of it is. When I was on my tv show was, I would think, oh, here's something that some fat lady or some fat guy is going to say at the water fountain at work. Right, right. So it's like arming people who may have suffered or failed.

Jordan B. Peterson
Yeah, right. Felt, you know, marginalized. Here's a little bit of something for you. Because when I'd watched comedians as a kid with my dad on Ed Sullivan and hear Richard Pryor people, man, I felt like I was being gifted, especially prior, but, you know, all of them, really. But I loved Richard Pryor.

Roseanne Barr
He is my idol and became a friend, which was a wonderful part of being a comic. But, you know, to get, I got what he was doing as just a little tiny girl. I saw the implications of everything he was doing. I knew. I knew that he had gone.

I knew that he was inside a stereotype kicking down the walls from the inside. I knew that. And I said, I can do that. I can do that. My friend Michael malice, I don't know if you know who he is.

Jordan B. Peterson
Oh, yeah, yeah. I know Michael. He's a. Yeah, he's very, Michael's very funny. He's very funny.

Roseanne Barr
And he told me, he goes, God, with you, it's pathological. He always tells me, you're, you're funny is pathological. You can't turn it off, you know, well, like in private. And, you know, I. It is pathological.

But, you know, when I'm in the mood for it. But I'm a crusader, and a lot of us are, you know, Richard was. Well, tell me a bit more about Roseanne and how that started up and why it was. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell me about the show and why it was that it turned into such a smash hit.

Jordan B. Peterson
What do you think you did? Right? I mean, first of all, it was very unlikely, right? You said you had these weird coincidences happened to you when you went off to Hollywood, and it all came together pretty quickly. So how did you, like, what did you say yes to and why did you make it work?

How did you make it work? Oh, my gosh. That one's real. You know, I have, I have the story I tell normal people, you know, and the normal press people.

Roseanne Barr
I always wanted to be a comedian, and so I started at age 28 to tell jokes. But the real thing is when I was little and will watch tv and see father knows best in all these shows, I'd look around and go, the hell, this is nothing like my family. Nobody has diabetes and none of the men are fat and covered in hair, you know, it was nothing. I go, this is nothing like anything I've ever seen. Where are these people?

They're not screaming, they don't eat with their mouth open, you know, and I had it in my head since a young age, boy, I want to get on tv and have my show, and I want to do the Roseanne show where I show people that I know on tv. How come there's nobody like our family on tv? But we did have the honeymooners, I remember, right? Loved. And I also idolized Jackie Gleason.

And I loved the honeymooner so much because that was a real working class miracle, that show still, that one stood up over time, over a century. It's still brilliant. And just like a bare set and human dialogue. That guy was so great. Charlie Chaplin, all these things.

You know who I really love? Mister Bean. That guy doesn't even need language, he's so great. But, you know, so I always had the fantasy, someday I'm going to get on there and show a family of fat people that fight. It was always in my head, and I wanted to show another less perfect thing.

And it was always in my head. And so after the Julio Iglesias tour, Hollywood came knocking to do a show. And so I said, yes, I'd like to do that. And I don't know, I thought it was gonna be a lot easier than it was once I signed up and got into it, like so many people say, especially comedians. And then you see how the shit.

Jordan B. Peterson
Works, how the sausage is made. Yeah. How the sausage. It's like, what have I done right? Have I got myself into?

Roseanne Barr
And just trying to keep your head above water where they're trying to drag your feet down. Well, it's a production mill, eh? So, I mean, it's a. It's a funny thing for a comedian to do a sitcom, because those aren't the same thing. They're really not the same thing.

Jordan B. Peterson
And you could see very funny people become less and less funny as their sitcoms progress, partly because I think they just get exhausted. It's like, well, there's only so many golden eggs the goose can lay, and then there's so many people that you have to please, too, which, whereas when you're on the stage, well, you have to please yourself and your audience. But there isn't that your group of 40 people, even if they're on your side, I don't know how. It's got to be very difficult to do comedy collaboratively. So, yeah, I tried it and, you know, I worked out a system that kind of followed along with being a mom, you know, I'll have the final word.

Roseanne Barr
You guys can play, you can put in things, but I'll have the final word. And because I could write a joke, you know, I could overwrite. They, you know, I don't want to say they had shitty jokes, but a lot of times they did, and I just snap it in because I have pathological. Pathological joke writing ability, and I cannot not do it. I cannot not correct a joke.

Jordan B. Peterson
Right, right. I can understand that. Yeah. Yeah. And I.

Roseanne Barr
So that was just part of just the whole gestalt of what I did. And that's a sign of expertise. You know, when great chess, there's as many chess possibilities in a single chess game as there are atoms in the observable universe. And so it's very. Yeah, so there's a lot.

Jordan B. Peterson
But an expert chess player can look at a board and know what to do. Like, it's a gestalt. And that expertise you're talking about with regards to jokes, that really is the sign of being an expert. You see the patterns, and if you see them, it's like seeing an obstacle in front of your path or something like that. You can't not see it.

And you said you wrote 120,000 jokes. How many of them do you think were funny? What percentage do you think were funny? Like, truly funny. All I'm talking about on my show and the jokes I've told over the years, I probably have, like, 6 hours of jokes that I've told as a stand up comic.

Roseanne Barr
And then the show, what was it, three or 410 years of 20 to 30 episodes a year? It's a lot of jokes, that's for sure. And they didn't get on the show unless they were funny, you know, how. Many jokes do you think you wrote that weren't. That weren't.

Jordan B. Peterson
That didn't make the cut because I'm trying to get at how much work you had to do to get that expertise right. 10,000. That sucked. But I keep tinkering on them, and sometimes just putting the word and in there would make them work. You know, like I said, there's so many levels of it.

Roseanne Barr
Sometimes just moving words around or saying it with a different inflection would make it work. So it's just like a tinkering a craft. It is a craft, you know, to craft those ideas into a sellable joke that you can deliver. There's so much to it. I mean, I can't even.

It'd probably be a real bore to sit and talk about that with people who weren't really. Well, it's, it's interesting to try to figure out why really pointed communication works. I mean, there isn't any more pointed communication than jokes. Absolutely, man. You got to be right on the money.

Jordan B. Peterson
And so it's definitely worth some analysis because it's hard to get it right, and it's so perfect when it is right. Just think, you know, one of the things that we've been dancing around here is the notion that the truth stated most perfectly is comedic. And isn't that amazing that what you get with the right kind of truth at the right moment is like a burst of pleasure, a release of tension. That's so amazing. And you got to kind of wonder as a consequence of that, just how far you could push that.

We talked about the fact that if you do things right, there's an intense play in that. Now, I truly believe that if you were the master of the moment, you'd be playing all the time. That's. Yeah, right. Right.

That's a good thing to aim for. My wife and I have been practicing that very hard. She had a bout of both of us. We had bouts of near fatal illnesses a couple of years ago. We had a pretty good relationship before that, but it's better now because I think we both take less for granted.

Maybe that's part of it. It put a new seriousness into our relationship, but we're trying to bring that spirit of play to every moment. And, man, you know, if you make that a game, an aim and a game, then, well, you get better at it. And that's, there isn't anything that's more fun than that. Now, you're, I was just thinking, when I ran, you know, I ran for president in 2012 on the peace and Freedom Party, which my idol Dick Gregory also ran on that party as a presidential candidate in the sixties.

Roseanne Barr
And they say had votes really been tabulated correctly, he might have actually won. But, you know, considering the fact that he wasn't on every state ballot. But that always intrigued me, so I wanted to do the same. And because we agreed on so many things, it's deep thought. Deep political thought goes into comedy, too.

But when I ran my speech, I said, I'm the only serious comedian in the race. Yeah, right. Because these other guys are just jokers, but I'm a serious comedian. And so, you know, I did it in a humorous way. But, you know, I said, you know, they just go for the laugh because that's a lot of comics too, you know, just going for, you know, a.

Jordan B. Peterson
Cheap laugh. The cheap laugh. Yeah. I guess the cheap laugh is one that's not connected to anything else, eh? Because you pointed out that in a good comedy set, you're weaving things together, and the more complex humor is going to have a story associated with it.

There's going to be interweaving across the set. I mean, some comics do more of that than others, but like Billy. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, that, he's a really good example of that. He's a real storyteller.

Bill Cosby was really good at that, too. I know it's illegal to say his. Name, but, God, he was another idol. Another idol. Well, he, I saw him in Edmonton in the mid seventies, I think, a long, long time ago, and he came out on the stage with just a stool and a cigar, and he had people laughing so hard in the audience that they were literally hyperventilating.

It was amazing things to watch. And he was a real storyteller. Right. It wasn't. I mean, there are comedians like Mitch Hedberg that are like, their stories are one joke long, and you, and Jimmy Carr does that, too.

You can pull that off. But Cosby was a real storyteller, and it was amazing thing to watch. His mastery of the stage, such a catastrophe when things blew up, when he blew things up around him, that was such a drag because on the surface, he had done so much good, and he was so funny. I mean, he was crazy. He was a crazy master of the stage.

Roseanne Barr
Well, you know, it's like there's that they say there's such a thin line between, you know, madness and talent, you know, and he's the textbook example. Yeah. Yeah. Well, his shadow got the best of him. Right.

So many comics are, have the same, you know, problems with, you know, their outlets and how they don't have a lot of self control there, but on stage, it's a master. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey, so now you're spending a fair bit of time, we talked a little bit briefly just before the podcast started. You're spending a fair bit of time in Austin, and you're going to be doing shows at Joe's, at Rogan's comedy club, eh, the mothership. I'm doing it at another place called Cap City Comedy Club, and I'm going to be there in Austin, June.

Jordan B. Peterson
How big a venue is that? I think it's, I think it's pretty small, maybe 300 seats, but it's a good place to, like, work it, you know? And, you know, you always try. It takes about a year to get a whole new hour. Right, right.

Roseanne Barr
And then you have to tool it, and so it's. It's at the point to take it to an audience, and I'm kind of excited about it. I haven't done a 90 minutes show in Austin yet, so I do look forward. Yeah. Okay.

Jordan B. Peterson
Now, you did say that you had performed at Rogan's comedy club, though. Yeah, I. But we only do, like, 1520 minutes. Oh, I see. So you're developing a whole.

Aha. Aha. And when was the last time you did that? Oh, my gosh. I think.

Roseanne Barr
Well, I guess it was about a year and a half, huh? When I did. So what. What, now you're working on Mister Burcham? What.

Jordan B. Peterson
What do you have? What are your plans for your future? I mean, you. You've had a bumpy ride with all the cancellations. Yeah, yeah.

Roseanne Barr
I'm doing a podcast on. On, you know, I guess it's where everybody is doing podcasts. YouTube, rumble apple. You know, it's called the Roseanne Bar podcast, which I'm really getting into. I've done 49 of them now.

Jordan B. Peterson
Oh, yeah. I'm just loving that conversation with. Conversations with intelligent people and fighting the good fight, trying to wake people up, trying to say the things that aren't, that are, like, missing. I like to go to the places that are not really being talked about. And how are you picking your guests?

Roseanne Barr
I pick them by, well, mostly it's people who call and want to be on, because a lot of people are calling and wanting to be on. Flattering. And I'm like, yeah, I'd love to interview. I just had Tulsi Gabbard on, and that was a fantastic interview because she's a tough cookie. Yeah, we both are from Hawaii.

I mean, I also live in Hawaii part of the year, and to be able to talk about Hawaii and how it creates a different kind of culture and a person with a different sort of point of view than the mainland. We got to talk about that and then talk about politics, of course, you know, I'm a huge Trump supporter, and so I like to talk about that and what that means to me. It means populism and the awakening of populism, which I think that's the whole point of everything. What do you think of Trump as a comedian? I've got this.

I think he's funnier than hell. The guy has got this book that. Someone put together that and they gave me. It's a library edition, so it looks like a very professional hardcover, and it's called the collected poetry of Donald Trump. I have that.

Jordan B. Peterson
You have that book? It's hilarious. It is hilarious. It's all his tweets. Fun.

Oh, you have that book. That's so funny. Yeah, but I read through that and I thought, oh, man. Like, he's definitely underappreciated as a comedian because, like, he's very pointed. Like, very, very pointed.

But that's a hilarious collection. It's ridiculously funny. And I know that's part of the reason he connects with working class audiences, because he's got that vicious wit. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Roseanne Barr
He's just hilarious. And people love it. That's what I appreciate most about him, is how funny he is. And when they don't like you, like, when they don't like me, and they start writing your jokes up as if they're serious, that's serious, too. Just to be part of that or read it or watch it, it's like, how arrogant they are.

That'd be like, you know, remember Henny Youngman's joke? Take my wife, please remember. So that'd be like, if the press would go, Henny Youngman is trying to traffic his wife. You know, they write it as a joke, as if it's a serious thing because they don't, like, we get humor. Well, it's also one of the real dangers about being funny and telling jokes, because a really good joke taken out of context looks, often looks very dark and bad.

Jordan B. Peterson
Right. It has to be, because it's, it's something that only works in the moment. You have to set it up properly. It's very context dependent. And so it's very easy for someone who wants to savage someone's reputation to take a joke out of context and to use it as a bludgeon.

And so it's one of those, that's. What happened to me. But, you know, they had been trying to do that to me since I first walked into Hollywood, because I thought it was like, how dare she, who didn't go to Harvard, has no degree. How dare she reach people? Right, right.

Roseanne Barr
It was so, the class issue was always so hard. When you asked me about Hollywood, it was always that. Right, right. Well, and, you know, Trump, Trump has faced that, too. I mean, he's always been.

Jordan B. Peterson
My, my impression is that he's always been an outsider to the elites, you know? And I also think that's part of the reason that he's attractive to working class people is, you know, it's partly because they look at Trump, they look at an Ivy League educated, what do you call them, academic individual, and think, well, that's outside of my realm of possibility. But what Trump represents is something that I could conceivably have. So there's an american dream variant there, and I think that's realistic. And I know Trump is also good when he's talking to military people, for example.

And that's a hard thing. That's typically a very hard thing for politicians to pull off. Imagine he can probably do that because he's had a fair bit of experience with working class people on the construction side of his life, which is also. A difficult thing to manage from the hip and from the heart. Yeah.

Roseanne Barr
He doesn't filter it through, you know, a bunch of horseshit and lies like they do. They don't mean anything they say, and everyone knows it. And everyone got used to, oh, politicians, we don't believe anything. We just, you know, we think we vote for the lesser of two evils. You know, they guys, 2% less evil than the other guy, so we'll vote for him.

We know they're all lying. They're all full of it. But Trump was a shock to the system of that because he's like, we can do better and we can use, you know, everything at our disposal to make things better and make it better for our people. Nobody'd ever heard anything like that since Kennedy. And it's a shock to that system of, you know, that big boat they don't want rocked.

And of course, I was so excited because I love rocking that boat, you know, and it was very plain spoken. It wasn't in that academic, removed, insulated ivory tower voice that tells us what's good for us. You know, it was like, you know what? You guys are our servants, okay? Yeah.

You are our public servants, and you're no good at the servant business. That's one of my best. Where I go, you suck at the servant business and you ought to be fired. You're like this kind of servant that comes into work and steals our spoons. You ought to be in jail.

And, you know, it's just a turning. They call it the fourth turning. You know, what I was going to say is the most exciting thing for me recently, in the last. Well, you know, the last few years, maybe 20 off and on. But I also.

I'd love to talk about the Bible, and I sort of. I'm a jew, you know, so I sort of teach Sunday school in a way. But how funny the Bible is, you know, if you look at it correctly and read it, right. It's hilarious. Like I say, God's the funniest comic.

It's just hilarious how God turns things out. But I like to talk about the humor in the Taurus stories and make them funny because they are so funny and they are. So. Give me an example. Give me an example.

Well, my favorite example is when we left Egypt and, you know, the people who left slavery, the Israelites there, the tribes, they, they've just, they've just been taken out and had the sea open for them. You know, they had all these great miracles. They get to the other side, dry and alive and the first thing they do is start bitching about. Right. Yeah, absolutely.

Jordan B. Peterson
Complaining and whining. Yeah. Wishing that at least in Egypt we had fresh fish. That's hilarious. Yeah, yeah.

That's for sure. That is hilarious. Hey, what's the matter? They didn't have graves in Egypt. Yeah.

Roseanne Barr
To bring us out here in the desert to bury us. You know, no concept of gratitude, nothing. It was all gone after these major miracles because that's kind of the nature of people. If they can't have their complaints and they're blaming. That's the nature of slavery.

I mean, yes, that's right. To leave slavery, the vestige of it, was still within the people's minds. That's why it took 40 years to. Yeah, right. That's exactly that system.

So, I mean, it's just, it's just humorous that, you know, unlike the story. Of, you know, there's, there's a scene in, there's a scene in Exodus where the Israelites are complaining about not having anything to eat and God sends them so many quail that like, there are 3ft of quail everywhere, as far as you can see. And they're literally eating so much quail that the bones are coming out their noses. Right, right. And there's a scene too in the story of Adam and Eve when after Adam and Eve fall and Adam is hiding behind a bush because he knows he's naked, God comes along and says, you know, what the hell are you doing hiding from me?

Jordan B. Peterson
And Adam says, well, you know that woman you made me? And so it's so great because he blames the woman for his trouble and his nakedness and his cowardice. And he blames God at the same time, which is also a very nice little bit of comedic twist. And pussy, those are great comedic premises, you know, that God gave us because we're supposed to see ourself in them and God, hey, maybe I can. Well, we're not supposed to say, maybe, but we're supposed to recognize that we need to change that in ourselves.

Yeah. So men should stop blaming women and God, you mean. Well, you should be accountable for what you yourself do. That's the hardest thing. It's the hardest thing for human beings to go, I have made a mistake that needs to be corrected.

Roseanne Barr
And the real hard thing for human beings is to, I've found in my life is to say I am sorry. Hardly anybody can say that. The left never says that. When they're proven wrong over and over and over. And they ruin people with the jack boot on their face.

I say the rainbow colored jack boots. Right, right. They never say, oh, we're sorry, we were wrong. They never do that. And, well, you know from Exodus that it's in the nature of the tyrant to double down in the face of error.

Jordan B. Peterson
Right. And that's how you make sure the plagues get worse when you could have just learned the first time. Oh, that's a great. That's a great one. Yeah.

Roseanne Barr
Yeah. Well, there's the other part of that, too, you know, which, which also sheds a light on refusal to admit to error, you know, because the Egypt or the Israelites, they escaped from the tyranny, but they're not in the promised land. They have to spend those years in the desert. And so lots of people will stay in the tyranny because they don't want to be in the desert because it's tyranny. Desert, promised land, not tyranny, promised land.

Jordan B. Peterson
So, you know, once you give up your idiocy, you're lost for a while. And that's painful. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's painful. Right? Yeah, yeah.

Roseanne Barr
The process of freeing your mind after you've freed your body, that's even harder. Yeah. Right, right. Well, that's exactly. That's exactly what that story reflects.

Jordan B. Peterson
Yeah. All right, we should. We should wrap this up. We've. We've gone longer than we had planned, which is exactly fine as far as I'm concerned, for everybody.

I very much enjoyed talking with you, too. I. The next time I come to Austin, maybe we could meet. I would like that. Maybe we could go to one of the comedy clubs together.

Roseanne Barr
I'd love to take you down there. Yeah, that would be fun. So I'm going to come to Austin probably in July. I think I'm going to go see Joe in July. That's the tentative plan.

All right. So, you know, let's. Let's do it. Absolutely. You know, this guy that placed Tyler Fisher, I was going to tell you, that place, Carponza, he does the best.

Jordan Peterson. Oh, no. I have your text, so I'm going to text it to you. He does you on the money. I'm going to send it to you.

It's so brilliant. Oh, that's a terrible thing to even contemplate. So. All right. So let's get together when I come down to Austin.

Jordan B. Peterson
I think that would be fun. All right. All right. And for everybody watching and listening, I'm going to continue to interview Roseanne on the daily wire side for another half an hour. I think we'll probably talk a little bit more about cancellation and.

Yeah, I think, I think we should delve into that and into how you've coped with that and, and, and what you plan to do about it in the future and what people should be done when do, when they find themselves in that situation and what you've done. So that's what we're, if you guys want to come over onto the daily wire side, everybody watching and listening. I think that's where we're going to go with that. And so thank you very much for talking with me today. It was a pleasure walking through your thoughts on comedy with you, for sure.

And I'm looking forward to meeting in person. Me, too. All right. And everybody watching and listening, thank you very much for that. And your attention is much appreciated.

The film crew here up in Fairview, Alberta, thank you for your making that possible, and we'll talk soon.