Roseanne Barr is continuing to face backlash for her tweet about Valerie Jarrette, with the venue for her lone 2018 comedy show cancelling her performance.
Roseanne Barr has seen her hit ABC series Roseanne get canceled, watched as all traces of it was wiped from the network’s press site, saw its 2018 Emmy campaign suspended, and been dropped by her talent agency. But now she is being delivered another blow: MGM National Harbor, the venue for her only 2018 stand-up comedy show, has cancelled her Oct. 12 performance.
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“The Roseanne Barr performance at MGM National Harbor has been cancelled,” a spokesperson for the hotel, located in Maryland, told The Wrap.
Barr’s stand-up performance at the hotel was the only one listed on Ticketmaster and Live Nation’s calendars, and the actress’ website does not show any other performances for the remainder of the year, meaning that Barr will likely be forced out of the limelight for the remainder of 2018.
MGM National Harbor’s decision to cancel Barr’s show came shortly after the actress made a racially insensitive tweet in which she likened Jarrette, a former Barack Obama aid, to offspring of the “Muslim Brotherhood & Planet of the Apes.”
The tweet, which immediately drew backlash from all corners of social media, including Barr’s co-stars and those who work behind the scenes on her sitcom, was later deleted. Hours later, however, President of ABC Entertainment Channing Dungey announced in a statement that the network had canceled Roseanne.
“Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant, and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show,” the statement read.
Prior to the statement’s release, Barr had apologized on Twitter, stating that her comment about Jarrett was a “joke” that was “in bad taste,” and later added that it had been the result of late night “Ambien tweeting” on Memorial Day. However, that was not a good enough explanation for many, as a slew of fans found the tweet inexcusable, and many more considered Barr’s excuse fake, including Ambien-maker Sanofi, whose Twitter account stated “while all pharmaceutical treatments have side effects, racism is not a known side effect of any Sanofi medication.”
Dictionary.com also tweeted in response to Barr, stating that ambient, which Ambien is derived from, does not mean ‘prone to making racist comments,’ but it does mean ‘of the surrounding area or environment.’”
While some fans have rallied for Roseanne to be picked up by another network, with the most likely candidate being Fox, executive producer Dave Caplan claimed that he would be “surprised if [Barr] returned in any form.”
