Even on the phone, Roseanne Barr sounds cold.I don’t mean cold as in heartless. I mean cold as in what the hell am I doing in this country and why are there ice storms in April? The ghastly “spring” temps have been murder on her sciatica. Or, as the comedian recently tweeted, with fingers too numb for capitals and apostrophes: “im freezing my fallopian tubes off in canada!”“I asked, ‘Is it going to be cold when I tour?’” Barr tells me, on the line between standup gigs in frigid Burlington and Ottawa this week. “And everybody was like, ‘No, spring is a wonderful time in Canada.’”Not that she’s complaining. Even if the weather gods picked a wretched time to inflict misery on her joints and back, Roseanne Burrrr is feeling the cross-border love. The biggest star on U.S. television right now is crisscrossing the province like a 16th-century fur trader, bringing her observational humour to outposts — she’ll perform at the Rose Theatre Brampton on Sunday after a Saturday show in Kingston — that often get overlooked when comics perform live in the midst of a career renaissance.“These are shows that I’ve had booked for a long time,” she explains. “And when I started working on Roseanne, I kind of had to move them. So I needed to make them up.”Last month’s revival of Roseanne, the groundbreaking ABC sitcom that originally ran between 1988 and 1997, landed like an atomic bomb even insiders never saw coming. More than 25 million watched the premiere. A month later, Barr has the No. 1 show on network television, an army of new and old fans, and the grudging respect of an industry that often does not know what to make of her.“I live a real life,” says Barr, who tends to the land on a macadamia farm in Hawaii, replete with livestock, beehives and visiting grandkids. “I guess a lot of (celebrities), they don’t live in ...
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