Roseanne Barr Was Too Nervous To Chat With Johnny Carson on the ‘Tonight Show’

Roseanne Barr is looking back on her early comedy days. 

The actress and comedian, 72, recalls her first-ever performance on national television when she was invited to appear on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in the new documentary Roseanne is America. 

Barr was invited on The Tonight Show in 1985 after Mitzi Shore made her a headliner at her Comedy Store venue in Los Angeles. During one of her sets, producer Jim McCawley saw her and asked her to perform on the popular talk show. 

“I was the first woman comic in seven years on The Tonight Show,” Barr says in the documentary. 

When her performance ended, she recalls host Johnny Carson gesturing for her to stay and chat, but she was too nervous to stick around. 

“After I was done, Johnny [Carson] waved me over to the couch, but I didn’t want to go. Getting waved over to the couch was another huge thing, because I knew I was going to pass a bit of urine out of horrendous excitement. After having four kids, that’s what happens. So I just left,” the Emmy winner explains.

When Barr went to perform on the talk show for a second time, she was briefed in her dressing room beforehand. “Carson wants you to come over to the panel after you’re finished. He doesn’t want you to just leave,” she recalls being told by the production team. “So I knew I had to.”

“I go sit over there on the panel. All I can say is, ‘Thank you so much. Mr. Carson, I’m not even funny.’ But then something snapped and I go, ‘I gotta tell a joke,’ so I did,” Barr shares.

The comedian says singer Julio Iglesias was also a guest during that episode, and he invited her to go on tour with him across 18 cities in the United States. “That was pretty exciting, because I thought I might be able to buy a house, and it was great to open for him to 60,000 people in the [Houston] Astrodome when I had, at most, been in front of 700 people,” she explains. 

The Tonight Show brought the comedian “a great manager,” Barr says in the documentary, listing the opportunities that followed, including several bookings, an album deal and a pair of HBO specials. 

Earlier in the film, the comedian known for her namesake sitcom, which originally ran on ABC from 1988 to 1997, refers to her early comedy being dismissed as “radical feminism” by a woman in the audience.

“I learned how to make different audiences laugh at the same thing, which is a really hard thing for a comic to learn. It takes about seven years to learn that, on average. It took me about four,” Barr says.

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Roseanne is America, directed by Joel Gilbert, explores Barr’s “unusual upbringing and her extraordinarily successful career in comedy and television,” according to a synopsis. It also touches on the 2018 controversy in which the Roseanne revival was canceled after she sent a tweet likening President Barack Obama’s former advisor Valerie Jarrett to an ape. 

Elsewhere in the documentary, Barr discusses reuniting with her oldest daughter Brandi Brown, whom she placed for adoption shortly after she was born.

“When I gave my daughter up for adoption, I said to her, ‘I’ll see you again when you’re 18 because I’m not going to change my name, and I’m going to be famous. I’m going to have my own show named Roseanne,’ ” she recalls in the documentary. 

Roseanne in America is now available to purchase on video on demand.