NOT SO FUNNY

TV Legend Exposes MAGA Sitcom Star’s ‘Malicious’ Behavior

The powerful showrunner revealed why his former boss “hated” the show’s writers.

Chuck Lorre, the comedy writer who created iconic sitcoms like The Big Bang Theory and Two and a Half Men, is revealing new details about how badly Roseanne Barr behaved on the set of Roseanne.

“There was malice,” he said, adding that it was “absolute.”

Lorre wrote on Roseanne for two years early in his career. The hit sitcom starred Barr as Roseanne Conner, a working-class mother raising three kids with her husband in suburban Illinois.

It originally ran from 1988 through 1997 and was rebooted in 2018. The reboot lasted about two months before racist tweets surfaced in which Barr compared Valerie Jarrett, an Iranian-African American former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, to the offspring of the “Muslim Brotherhood & Planet of the Apes.”

ABC canceled the reboot and launched a spinoff called The Conners without Barr. Since then, Barr has gone full MAGA, but according to Lorre, she was causing trouble long before her Trumpy turn.

Lorre said the root of the problem was that Barr “hated that there were writers” who worked on her show.

She “fundamentally hated that other people wrote words that she would say,” he continued. “The premise of writer and actor—she was a stand-up comedian. She made herself a superstar based on her words, her writing, and it transitioned to a television show where you can’t do it alone. It’s impossible. That transition was not going to happen. So there was this built-in animosity between Rosie and the writing staff, any writing staff. Didn’t matter if I was on it, it was the premise of other people putting words in a stand-up comedian’s mouth.”

“There are very few comics that can do that,” he added.

Still, he said he put up with the turbulent atmosphere and the “60, 70″ hour workweeks because he needed the money. After what he said were 15 to 20 years of “poverty,” Lorre was clinging to a stable income, one that let him deal with health issues without worrying about depleting his bank account.

“I was not going to go back,” he said. “Under no circumstances was I going to go back to scrambling to pay the rent, scrambling to take your kid to a doctor if they had an earache.”

Barr claimed she fired Lorre from Roseanne in a 2011 blog post. She also insulted his character and his comedy.

“I fired Chuck Lorre for being a big drunk on my show,” Barr wrote, according to Deadline. “And he went on to become one of TV’s most successful writers (about d--k jokes).”

The Big Bang Theory’s Jim Parsons and Two and a Half Men’s Jon Cryer won Emmys for their roles on those shows—but despite numerous nominations, Lorre has never won a competitive Emmy for his work.

In addition to going after Barr, Lorre drew the ire of Donald Trump’s White House this past week after he delivered a blistering speech in which he called the president a “bloated orange piece of s--t.”

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Dana Herrnstadt Editorial Intern, Obsessed

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