The Barr Is Closed : Roseanne Has New Name and New Anger

Roseanne Barr is taking the road less traveled on her current tour, which could go by several sobriquets: the Fresh Start Tour, the Honeymoon Tour, the Wrath of Roseanne Tour.

But in taking her stand-up routine into new areas, she will be testing her fans’ loyalties. It could be too much too soon, considering she just changed her name to Roseanne Arnold after renewing her wedding vows last Sunday with Tom Arnold, whom she married in January, 1990.

Fans who have worshiped at her apron strings and slippers will be in for new and aggressive material, with only a dollop of her trusty and comfortable domestic-goddess routine.

Where Arnold--who will perform at Humphrey’s at 7 and 9 p.m. Sunday--used to trumpet the working-class mother, she now trumpets the wrath of Roseanne.

“I get to bitch about being wealthy,” she said in a conference call from Los Angeles with her husband, who is the opening act on the tour. “Before, I used to think that the rich were (expletive). Now I know they are. Now we’re on the inside looking out.”

Her darts are also aimed at men, women, sexual preferences, celebrities and fat.

“I have more balls than I ever had before,” she said. “I’m tired of taking (expletive) from the world. I have to have my say.”

She warns that this tour is “not suitable for kids under 16.”

“She’s cranked, but not bitter,” noted her husband, who is 32.

“I’m too lucky to be bitter,” said Arnold, 38. “Too damn rich, too.”

Her latest album, “I Enjoy Being a Girl,” gives a hint of where the TV star is heading. A small section is devoted to the domestic-goddess days, although this serves more as a security blanket for old fans than anything else. She even sings a few ditties.

The material is a bold step for her, as for any artist who gives up a proven commodity for the unknown.

Unfortunately, the album’s new material is not as funny as her old gags, and she treads on ground worn thin by myriad comics before her. It’s a belligerent look at life around her, Roseanne goes ballistic. She reams Arsenio Hall for all his fat jokes about her. She spoofs TV commercials. She saves some sarcasm for insensitive men.

She has become a comedian without a niche, without the soft underbelly or fragility that made her character personable and someone millions could relate to.

She is abandoning her snide, wisecracking, working-class mother persona and asking her fans to embrace a bellicose character she hasn’t really defined.

And she is abandoning her social-class anger; no longer is she the voice of the working women who cheered her response to her husband’s request for some Cheetos: “Like he can’t look under the sofa cushions himself?”

The comedienne says her public image is not fabricated--the feuding, the fighting. She is just a real woman with real complaints, she says. There’s been no PR tinkering; she’s just a person looking out for herself, doing what she wants. She didn’t gain weight to fit a stereotype.

“It’s all real. There’s no image. It’s who I am,” Arnold said.

At Humphrey’s, she won’t be singing any of her send-up tunes from the album, much less the “Star Spangled Banner.” In fact, she didn’t even want to talk about the national anthem, specifically her much-assailed rendition of the song at a Padre double-header last July.

She made that pointedly clear with a few choice words early in the interview.

(Ironically, NBC ran a “Saturday Night Live” rerun with Arnold as guest host last week, in which she made several references to San Diego and the national anthem. She also talked about the incident Tuesday morning in a telephone interview on KGB-FM.)

In The Times interview, she refused to discuss how she felt about facing the hometown folks she had angered.

“I don’t give a (expletive) what they think,” she explained.

That topic disposed of, however, Arnold’s candor and frankness returned, as is her custom. Maybe too much her custom.

Her monthlong tour opened Thursday in Seattle; Humphrey’s is the fourth of four West Coast shows before she moves on to the Northeast, winding up July 25 in Montreal.

“It will be the first time we’ve been on the road together sober,” Roseanne Arnold said, referring to her mate’s well-publicized bouts with alcohol and cocaine.

Her own compulsions were never alcohol or drugs; she turned to food and cigarettes.

“I moved my addiction to food,” Tom Arnold said, adding that he works out two hours every morning. “I eat 4,000 calories a day.”

Said his wife: “It’s a compulsion to overeat from a lot of abuse in life, more psychological than physical.”

Both of the comedians have acknowledged they were sexually abused as children.

Tom Arnold has written and collaborated with his wife for eight years. On this tour, they have scripted heavy doses of physical fitness. Between them, they have lost 125 pounds (he 80, she 45) since February.

“We work out every day,” she said. “We want to live longer, have a baby, be a good example to the kids.” She has three children from her first marriage.

“We love each other a lot and feel lucky to have each other. We’re getting over our compulsions,” she said.

The couple met in Minneapolis in 1983. (“Tom was the party monster of Minneapolis,” Arnold recalled.) They became fast friends and eating buddies who sometimes dressed like twins, but maintained a platonic relationship until Arnold separated from her husband, Bill Pentland, in 1989, while she was making the movie “She Devil” in New York with Meryl Streep. She and Tom Arnold married three days after her divorce was final.

Since their marriage, the Arnolds have moved as a pair, never far from each other’s side. Tom recently converted to Judaism, Roseanne’s faith.

Arnold began her comedy career in Denver, when she was in her late 20s and already a mother. In 1985, she left for Los Angeles and the Comedy Store. The “Tonight Show” quickly followed, and the caustic comic was headed for her eponymous television show in 1988. It became a ratings monster, jumping immediately into the Top 5 of the Nielsens, but not without much-publicized feudings and firings.

About 90% of the material on the current tour is new since “Roseanne Barr Live at Trump Castle,” an HBO special that aired in January, and the album, which came out a month earlier.

Since then, the Arnolds have been particularly prolific, writing 1 1/2 hours of even newer jokes. At Humphrey’s, Arnold will mix up her act, taking the top stuff off the album, choosing a few of her classic routines and filling the bulk with fresh observations.

“It’s her show, and I’m just opening for her. I’m not co-headlining,” Tom Arnold said, making it clear he harbors no illusions of who’s the star of the family.

“We’ve been going to the Improv and stuff,” trying out the new jokes, he said. “Rosie gets ideas for her stuff . . . and we take notes. Rosie is good at thinking standing up. I’ve been writing for her for eight years, and this is the best yet. This plays to a broader audience.”

This won’t be Roseanne Arnold’s first time at Humphrey’s. She opened for Ray Charles and Whitney Houston in 1985 and headlined there in 1987.

“It’s a really cool place,” she said. “I like that it’s outside. The audiences were great.”

“We love doing stand-up,” she said. “I like it better than anything on earth. It’s pure performance.

“I think it (the tour) will be fun. It will be me and Tom and the weight equipment.”