COMEDY REVIEW : Roseanne Live: Icon of the Spit-Curl Set : Stand-up: In her first theater dates since exploding into TV stardom, Barr’s fans have a chance to see new act. It isn’t always pretty, but it connects.

Roseanne Barr is one of the great improbables of late 20th-Century American culture, a figure who might have leaped out of the “Donahue” show into American pop consciousness with the provocative theme “When Bad Artists Do Good Things.”

Many of the crowd of 3,700 who caught Barr’s new act here at the Circle Star Theater on Thursday may not have known that before she was America’s No. 1 sitcom mom, she was a stand-up comedian who catapulted out of the clubs into prime time, where by necessity she cleaned up her act without altering its essential appeal to those numberless women who have to fight out their existence amid squabbling kids, weary if not loutish husbands, meager incomes or an ongoing holocaust of advertisements designed to belittle their lack of fashion.

Barr is using her three-night stand to break in some new material and to introduce her new husband, comedian Tom Arnold. The theater--located on the San Mateo peninsula about 15 miles south of San Francisco--is a fairly popular stop for mainstream artists on national tours. B.B. King is playing next week with Bobby Bland; Diana Ross, the Beach Boys and Glenn Yarbrough and the Limelighters are upcoming acts.

Barr’s audience says as much about her as does her choice of material, or how she delivers it. Slightly more than half were women, as you’d expect. Many of them overweight, with upswept hairdos, spit curls, and wearing sequined pullover tops, their concession to formality. Strictly working class. The men, too, were blue-collar types, brave and willing, but somewhat ill at ease and a watchful reflexive step behind their girlfriends’ or wives’ impulses. They all cheered Roseanne’s entrance with a standing ovation.

Clearly she’s become an icon.

The first and briefest part of her act consisted of what she termed her “golden oldies,” material she’d worked up over the relatively few years she spent in the clubs. For imagery, conciseness, language and rhythm, it was the best part of her program--material she’d polished to durability in the raucous, smoky trenches of club life (on her husband’s perpetually asking her to find things misplaced: “Like they think the uterus is a tracking device”).

The second part of the program consisted in a solo turn by Arnold, a congenial, beefy young man with neck-length hair, whose most notable feature in the course of the evening was an eagerness to please his new wife by popping on stage with a bouquet of roses and a plate of chicken wings. Otherwise, he’s a very ordinary and somewhat uncertain comedian.

“I’m a body builder,” he told us. “These are the same pants I had in high school, only 8 inches lower,” and “See what I look like? If a guy looks better than me, he’s gay.”

Arnold had the wisdom to get off as soon as Roseanne was ready with the second part of her act, in which she played “Rosie With a Z,” a showbiz parody of the calculated celebrity comeback, wearing a truly gaudy outfit: a full length splotchy black-and-white coat, a mustard-colored pullover with sequined chest design, leopard skin pants and boots. She also sings some standard showbiz champion songs, such as “I Am Woman” and “People,” execrably off key and sometimes screechily, to the mock sanctimonious accompaniment of pianist Steve Moore. In an oddly masochistic exchange, she asked him what he did for Christmas, and he replied by calling her indifferent, fat and tone deaf.

In this, and a following stand-up segment in which she returns to describe herself in the multiple personalities of a woman in the course of a menstrual month, she was probing but unfocused. Once she steps beyond domestic issues and the topic of having to deal with men, her observations aren’t very sharp (though unlike Arsenio Hall, for example, she’s refreshingly free of the showbiz commandment that thou shalt not speak ill of another celebrity). When she says “I still believe what the world desperately needs is love sweet love,” you can’t quite make out whether she’s reaching for a message or parodying celebrity sanctimoniousness--or waiting to take credit for whatever side the audience decides to set down its approbation.

Her finale, in which she sings--badly of course--”My Way” with an Elvis impersonator named Michael Cooper, suggests that the whole thing is a sendup, which may in the end be a self-defense, the way sarcasm is a preemptive defense against ridicule. There’s a strong element of self-hate in Roseanne’s act that runs parallel to her stalwart feminist assertions and their rebellious vulgarity and tastelessness (a number of people walked out of her show). That may be one of the reasons she distances her audience in her references to it as “white nerds” and “Joe-nobodies.” This was a crowd that was part Nathanael West and part John Waters, the kind of lonely crowd that looks to evangelists to alleviate the darkness that surrounds it.

Roseanne Barr is not an artistically accomplished show-biz pro, not even as a mock amateur ironist, the way Martin Mull is. In all the reports we hear of her tantrums and her attempts to shape a public image, we can feel her distress under the awesome pressure celebrity confers on the unwary. Too, she may sense the appalling hunger she touches in an audience that responds to her the way it responds to no one else. Her act seems an acknowledgement and an attempt at intimacy, and a warning not to get too close.