COMEDY REVIEW : Roseanne’s Fresh Even on Old Jokes

Roseanne Arnold cheerfully styled herself the queen of fat people Saturday night at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano, but there’s more to her than meets the eye. She’s a mad, bad woman of the ‘90s, and glad of it.

Her generous one-hour plus set sprang unapologetically from the wellsprings of a middle-aged American woman who has graduated from spending her life in a trailer while she dreamed of becoming rich, to spending her life in a trailer while she earns a fortune pretending to be poor.

She plays the fat, female underdog to the hilt, and her audience loves it.

Her show is characterized by standard material about the trials of her childhood and of life as a fat person. She included some reliable riffs about the evils of Barbie and how the Brady Bunch was “a hoax they perpetrated on the children of America.” But she’s discovering fresh victim roles in her new circumstances as a “hugely famous megastar.” She found a way to link her disastrous rendition of the National Anthem directly to the start of the Gulf War. And she claimed that, unlike some people who make it big, she had maintained her contacts with her old friends. They’re all suing her.

The slant of her humor still relies heavily on the image of Roseanne as the scrappy product of a woeful, working-class family. One of the highlights of the show was when she sang the Dee’s Hamburgers jingle, “one of the happiest memories of my childhood,” she claimed.

Then someone from the crowd chimed in with an impression of the Dee’s clown. Roseanne was delighted. This is a woman who knows her audience, which is apparently working-class too; in this case, more tract-home than trailer-park.

Roseanne gave them what they wanted. She has a warm and open repartee with her fans and an expressive face that needs no punch line to get a laugh. She gave the impression that she might have gone on and on, but her husband, Tom Arnold, provided her an exit.

He had warmed up the crowd earlier with a half-hour set as boyishly punchy as hers was round. He riffed on his speckled past, showed off his new tattoos (one of Rosie and the other a Star of David) and climaxed with a tale about producing sperm for in-vitro fertilization. (Yes, fans, they are trying to have a baby.)

The audience welcomed him as much for himself as for the fact that he loves Roseanne, as they do. There was a 10-year-old boy sitting next to me, and although his mother winced and shook her head at the raunchy language and the many sexual references, they admitted that they had laughed even at routines they had heard before.

A generation raised on Roseanne? Could be an interesting century.