Michelle Wolf Defends Sam Bee, Bill Maher from Roseanne Comparisons

Michelle Wolf knows what it’s like to take heat for making a joke about another woman. So the host of Netflix’s The Break was uniquely positioned this week to discuss why Roseanne Barr’s racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett should not be equated with Samantha Bee’s use of the word “cunt” to describe Ivanka Trump.

Just as she used a segment about sports in last week’s premiere to comment on her dust-up with Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Wolf turned a segment this week ostensibly about “internet goofs” to dig into the Roseanne saga.

“It’s not a joke,” Wolf said of Barr’s message. “It’s barely a tweet. And her excuse for tweeting it was bad. You’ve got to get better at one of those, Roseanne.”

Like Jimmy Kimmel did earlier in the week, Wolf also went after ABC for putting the Roseanne reboot on TV in the first place given the creator and star’s problematic history. “Kudos to ABC,” she said. “It takes a lot of courage to fire someone after they’ve been openly racist for the thousandth time.”

Then, Wolf took the supposed “double standard” that people have saying Barr has faced when “despicable people like Bill Maher and Sam Bee and me” get away with making so-called “offensive” jokes, like comparing Donald Trump to an orangutan.

“And you’re right, it is a double standard,” she said. “So let’s even the playing field. How about we enslave all white people for a couple of hundred years and then even after they’re not slaves anymore still hold them down in society and devalue their existence by comparing them to animals, never apologize, never really make it right and after that there will be no more double standards and everyone will get fired for everything they say?!”

Not only should people not compare black people to apes, as Barr did, but Wolf said we also shouldn’t be comparing Trump to apes. “Because that’s rude to apes!”