During a podcast interview with comedian Theo Von, Roseanne Barr recently said, “Nobody died in the Holocaust, either. That’s the truth.” As if a casual Holocaust denial wasn’t horrific enough for the Jewish actor and comedian, she immediately escalated her rhetoric: “It should happen. Six million Jews should die right now ‘cause they cause all the problems in the world. But it never happened.”
Barr is no stranger to controversy. She incurred Americans’ wrath with a wretched “interpretation” of the national anthem. She got herself kicked off the reboot of her own eponymous sitcom with a racist tweet about former White House adviser Valerie Jarrett. She championed problematic COVID-19 conspiracy theories during the pandemic. But her Holocaust comment might be the most abominable move she has ever made.
What is particularly upsetting about Barr’s latest bout of nonsense is that among those who perished during the Holocaust were her own Jewish Lithuanian family members.
In 1942, Nazis invaded their shtetl, forced Barr’s relatives and their fellow villagers to dig holes and lie down in them, then buried them alive with bulldozers. Barr knows the truth, not only about her relatives but about the Holocaust as a whole. Her grandmother – who escaped the fate suffered by the rest of the family, emigrating to America on a music scholarship – shared the grim story, as Barr’s sister Geraldine noted in her memoir.
Barr’s childhood neighbors included many Jewish refugees who recounted similar horrors over weekly Shabbat dinners. Still, it’s hard to tell what Barr was doing in her conversation with Von: flat-out lying or just lying to herself.
Holocaust denial is unconscionable. All reasonable people know this. Issuing a call for new violence against Jews, however, is a grievous, unpardonable sin. What was Barr thinking?
Antisemitism is on the rise and increasingly dangerous
We are living in an increasingly dangerous and antisemitic era:
Anti-Defamation League:Antisemitism is surging across US. Biden just took a historic step to fight it.
Antisemitic violence is growing, and the devil also seems to have a dreadful number of advocates. Pundits have touted the “Great Replacement Theory” in conversation with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., has coupled the same rhetoric with new twists on long-standing antisemitic tropes such as Jewish space lasers.
Hatred is in the ascendant, and the last thing it needs is another high-profile advocate like Barr.
As soon as Barr finished her remarks on Von’s podcast, he pointed out that the comedian is Jewish, perhaps to suggest that her identity gave her license to say what she said. Barr used that license to crack an antisemitic joke: “If Jews were not controlling Hollywood,” she said, “all you’d have was (expletive) fishing shows.”
Independent of everything else she said, the line might have been a little bit funny. In context, it just seemed sad.
Having a microphone comes with an obligation
We need comedians to be provocative. They have to be able to use sensitive subjects as fodder for humor. A decade ago, in a debate about rape jokes with writer Lindy West, Barr contended that without the freedom to offend, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, George Carlin and Bill Hicks would never have made such powerful marks on American culture. She had a point.
Comedians perform a range of social functions. They expose our biases and reveal contradictions in accepted cultural narrative. They help us confront uncomfortable subjects by cloaking them in laughter and help us all heal from collective trauma.
For those reasons, we need to grant comedians a longer linguistic leash. Comedy, as Steve Martin joked more than 40 years ago, is not pretty, and it doesn’t have to be presentable to be effective.
In the debate with Barr, however, West argued that when it comes to comedy, there’s a difference between “less constrained” and “unconstrained.” Comedians have microphones. Their voices are amplified, and the privilege of being heard over the rest of us comes with an obligation to use that power well.
We must teach Holocaust history:As antisemitism rises, Holocaust education is a deeply personal topic for me
Just as doctors take the Hippocratic oath, comedians should swear to do no harm when making serious subjects funny. Barr’s comments would clearly violate that oath. They entrench long-standing lies about the extent of violence during the Holocaust. They suggest that Jews are part of hidden cabals controlling the world for their own enrichment.
Even if we give Barr the benefit of the doubt – if we assume that she didn’t literally mean that 6 million Jews ought to be murdered in 2023 – her comments still offer cover for further hate speech and violence, allowing bigots to cite a prominent Jew in support of their antisemitic behavior and ideals.
We live in a time when democracy is becoming fragile and the cruel intentions of our fellow citizens are becoming clearer, their violence bolder. Barr is well acquainted with the possible tragic effects of calls for extermination.
Sadly, instead of targeting those dehumanizing forces with her comedy, she’s joining their effort with despicable rhetoric.
Steven Gimbel is professor of philosophy and affiliate of the Jewish Studies program at Gettysburg College. Gwydion Suilebhan is executive director of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and project director of the New Play Exchange for the National New Play Network.
