Wanda Sykes has revealed she won’t be retuning to Roseanne after a busy Tuesday morning consisting of an apology from Roseanne Barr following a horrific “bad joke” about former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett.
I will not be returning to @RoseanneOnABC.
— Wanda Sykes (@iamwandasykes) May 29, 2018
“I will not be returning to [Roseanne],” Sykes, a consulting producer for the ABC sitcom, wrote on Twitter on Tuesday.
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Sykes’ exit follows the departure of showrunner Whitney Cummings, who announced earlier this month she wouldn’t be returning for the reboot’s upcoming season.
It’s unclear if Sykes’ decision to leave the show is related to Barr’s Twitter outburst and the backlash against her that followed. Sykes’ tweet came less than two hours after Barr’s apology.
Barr apologized Tuesday for suggesting that Jarrett is a product of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Planet of the Apes, calling her comments a “bad joke.”
“I apologize. I am now leaving Twitter,” Barr wrote on Twitter Tuesday morning. A few minutes later, she tweeted, “I apologize to Valerie Jarrett and to all Americans. I am truly sorry for making a bad joke about her politics and her looks. I should have known better. Forgive me-my joke was in bad taste.”
“muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=[Valerie Jarrett],” Barr tweeted earlier in response to a post about Jarrett.
The initial tweet causing backlash was sent in the early hours of Tuesday morning. Barr has since deleted the tweet.
Jarrett, who is African-American with no ties to the Sunni Muslim organization known as the Muslim Brotherhood, was one of the most senior and long-term presences in the Obama White House.
Earlier this month, it was revealed by one of Roseanne‘s showrunners and executive producers, Bruce Helford, that his co-showrunner, Cummings, wouldn’t be returning for season 11 of the rebooted comedy series.
“I think Whitney is going to be too busy,” Helford told The Hollywood Reporter. “Whitney is always a member of the family of the show but she’s got so much going on. I don’t know how she had time to work on the show in the first place. I don’t think she’ll be able to join us in the capacity she was joining us in this first season.”
Earlier this year, Cummings told THR that she felt as thought she had to be the “PC police” behind the scenes.
“I was the ‘you can’t say that anymore’ and ‘now this is the word we use’ one,” said Cummings, who was still in grade school when Roseanne originally bowed. “And they were like, ‘Yeah, but that’s not how people in this town at this age in this income bracket talk.’ And I learned, it’s not about what we would say, it’s about what they would say.”
Sykes was slated to stay on as a writer on the show, with Helford telling THR that she and writer Norm MacDonald would be back, while the show would simultaneously bring in new voices to diversify the writers’ room. It’s now apparent that Sykes will not be returning.
