Comedian Roseanne Barr recently opened up about how her faith has influenced her life as she navigated the pitfalls of working in the entertainment industry.
“Since I was 3 years old […], I’ve had a conversation going with God,” Barr, who grew up in a Jewish home in Utah, said during an interview on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, an excerpt of which was posted by Carlson on X last Saturday.
“I wrote it in my book. You know how little kids have an imaginary friend? Well, mine was God.”
Barr, who claimed she began her conversation with God while studying and being raised as an Orthodox Jew, explained how she used to ask God why He didn’t do more to alleviate human suffering. She discussed how He gave her the sense that it was her responsibility to help others.
“I said, ‘How come you could solve every problem on Earth? All you got to do is just wiggle your little finger and you can stop all these problems. Why can’t you do that? All you have to do is wiggle your finger,'” she recalled. “Because I was suffering.”
“And He said to me, ‘Because I don’t have fingers, Roseanne. Oh, but you do!'” she continued. “And He said, ‘And you should be very proud of that opposable thumb that I put on that hand of yours because now you can really get busy helping a lot of people and trying to make things right.'”
Barr suggested that she believed God was answering her directly, adding that He never pushed her to attack others because of their religion.
“He told me all the time, ‘Go over here and do this, and go over there and do that. Just trust me on this,'” she said. “And I did that my whole life, with the exception of the few marriages that really [expletive] me up. But then I got rid of those guys and continued on the path I was supposed to go on.”
Carlson asked whether she ever asked God for guidance regarding her failed marriages, to which she replied by claiming she failed to listen to His advice and insisted that “it wasn’t God’s fault.”
Barr later discussed how her poverty-stricken family sold three-dimensional images of Jesus to their Mexican neighbors after they received their welfare payments.
She said the images they sold were stored in their house and depicted Jesus “with His arms out, so nice and blonde and everything,” but that the image would morph to showing Him on the cross, which she remembered was disturbing and “added to my [post-traumatic stress disorder].”
Barr told Carlson that God gave her a “unique perspective” with her unusual childhood and that she felt she “was always a stranger in a strange land,” which is a principle she applied to her time in show business.
She likened the entertainment business to the Israelites’ slavery in Egypt, noting that many who get involved in that world have no desire to leave it.
“Once you’re in that bubble — the bubble of show business or whatever bubble it is, your little secret society or club — you don’t never come out,” she asserted. “You’ve got to walk out like Egypt, like the Jews in Egypt. If you’re not going to leave Egypt, you’re never going to know what’s beyond it, you know?”
Barr later suggested that the end of the world is fast approaching, indicated by what she characterized as an encroaching tyranny in once-free nations like the United States.
“I just invite people to pray with me and pray themselves in their own words,” she said. “Not by rote, not by prayers they’ve already heard, but in their own words … because I know we do have the power of spirit together to make this all stop and change it. I know we can do it. I just wish other people would know that, too.”
Barr, an outspoken supporter of former President Donald Trump, has taken flak for some of her past com
ments and behavior, including tweeting that former President Barack Obama’s adviser Valerie Jarrett has connections to the Muslim Brotherhood and that she looks like a character from “Planet of the Apes.”
The 2018 tweet led to the cancellation of her network show “Roseanne.” Barr maintained that she apologized to Jarrett for the tweet, which she admitted was in bad taste and written under the influence of sleeping pills.
In her memoir, Roseanne: My Life as a Woman, the comedian talked of growing up in Salt Lake City, Utah, to a Jewish family that also attended the Mormon church.
