Video: Sharp Tongue in the Trenches: Roseanne Barr

Roseanne Barr's caustic humor sparks TV's newest hit

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With her roly-poly figure and truck-driver's tongue, she is hardly your standard-issue TV mom. She works at a plastics factory, berates her good- natured but usually out-of-work husband, and snaps impatiently at her three nattering kids. "Why are you so mean?" complains one tot who doesn't get her way. " 'Cause I hate kids," she replies, "and I'm not your real mom." Her idea of a high time is going out to dinner at a restaurant "that don't have a drive-through." Hearing that two friends have got divorced, she responds with resentful sarcasm: "They shoulda stuck it out in the trenches, dodgin' that shrapnel with the rest of us that believe in true love."

The course of true love takes some strange turns in Roseanne, ABC's new hit sitcom starring comedian Roseanne Barr. This blunt-spoken family may not win any awards for Wonder-bread wholesomeness, but not since The Cosby Show has a TV clan achieved such instant rapport with the American public. Since its debut in mid-October, the show has consistently finished in the Nielsen Top Ten, one week even landing in the heady No. 2 spot, behind only the indestructible Cos.

As usual with a new network hit, Roseanne has been widely hailed as a TV breakthrough. The program's honest portrayal of blue-collar family life is, indeed, unusual for network TV, though hardly unprecedented. Its forebears range from The Honeymooners and All in the Family to, more recently, the Fox network's raunchy satire Married . . . with Children. Still, the show's grungy ambience and gleeful puncturing of TV ideals of happy domesticity have made it the most daring new sitcom of the fall.

Produced by the team responsible for The Cosby Show, Roseanne presents the flip side of the impossibly perfect Huxtables. Yet the two shows have some key similarities: both were inspired by the monologues of a stand-up comic, and both depend on loosely structured, slice-of-life episodes rather than sitcom contrivances. A typical Roseanne segment might revolve around something as prosaic as a visit to a restaurant or a discussion of how to pay the bills. (Roseanne's strategy: "You pay the ones marked final notice, and you throw the rest away.") Best of all, behind the put-downs and childish taunting lies a genuinely affectionate and affecting (if sometimes cutesy) husband-wife relationship.

As Roseanne's portly life partner, John Goodman gives a performance of great humor, heart and physical grace. Barr, by contrast, is still a novice in the acting department. But the show is an unmistakable expression of her comic persona. Born in Salt Lake City to a Jewish family, Barr, 36, quit high school and moved to Colorado, married at 21 and had three children. While working as a cocktail waitress, she started appearing at Denver comedy clubs. After moving to Los Angeles in 1985, she became a regular at the Comedy Store and landed some TV guest shots, gaining a following with her caustic, straight- from-the-heartland comments on the trials of housewifehood.

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