Slightly To The Left Of Normal

By ELAINE DUTKA, Roseanne Barr

Q. Mark Twain once said that the secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow.

A. True, in my case. Humor was a coping skill, I guess you could say. A way of responding to the intense agony of my family. Performing was a way of being O.K. in a world that largely disgusted me. A friend once told me, and it's true, that one foot onto the stage and you're suspended in another world, a world you control totally.

Q. Why the need to escape?

A. I grew up Jewish in Salt Lake City, a very conservative Mormon place, in an apartment building full of Holocaust survivors. It was very painful to be different and not understand why. I heard things as a kid that were horrifying. I thought the world was like that. It was also the blacklisting time, full of anti-Semitism. The only positive images of people like me were the comedians on Ed Sullivan. That show was the lifeline to the Jewish people, maybe even more important than Israel. It gave a positive, warped view of what it was like to be Jewish. I'd ask my father if Totie Fields was Jewish. He'd say yes. Bob Hope? "He used to be."

Q. Was your family a very religious one?

A. Nah. My father was actually kind of an atheist. He sold crucifixes and 3-D pictures of Jesus door to door. Our house was full of them. You'd walk by and Jesus would blink or his hands would spread out. My mother liked Mormons. I'd go to church on Sunday and synagogue on Saturday. Later on, when I became a member and got baptized, my mother told me not to take it too far, that it was just the way we stayed safe.

Q. How did that affect you?

A. For one thing, I got a pretty good course in comparative religion -- all based on xenophobia. And since I felt on the fringe anyway, people's approval never mattered to me much. In fact, I thought it was my God-given mission to shock and upset people. I was always smart. I always knew what to say. When I was eight, I'd go around to churches talking about being a Mormon and a Jew. They call it manipulation when women do it. With men, they call it will.

Q. When did you first get in touch with your will?

A. After a car accident I had when I was 16. That was a big one. Some lady had the sun in her eyes and ran her car into me. The hood ornament rammed into my head. I had days of semiconsciousness, an out-of-body experience. I saw the tunnel, the light, the whole deal.

Q. Were you frightened?

A. Nooooo! It was better, in a weird way, because everything was O.K. There was sense in the world. I went deep into my subconscious and had access to two different vantage points. I still feel that there are two worlds: the mirror world and the other one. Reality is the one that I see, not the one most people see, except in their dreams. Because I'm from that world, just pretending to fit into this one, the creative space in my head is freed. There are no limits. Nothing is imposed.

Q. Any aftereffects of the accident?

A. Ten years of nightmares, dreams of not waking up. Feelings about being buried alive. Once, when I was 17, I'd been walking around days without sleep and collapsed on the living-room floor. I realized that something was really wrong with me, that I needed to be hospitalized.

Q. You told an interviewer in January that your parents forcibly initiated your eight-month stay at the Utah State Hospital.

A. I was another woman when I gave that interview. I'm not a stationary person, but a chameleon. My husband Bill says that I've been about 15 different women in my life. Every so often something will come along and fill me so that I change. I came away from that interview very cleansed. It was like a dam. All the water ran out and everything flows better now. I'm now seeing that that was a real positive period in my life.

Q. How so?

A. I'm not saying that some real intense things didn't happen there. They gave lobotomies. A couple of my friends hung themselves in their cells. It was like Cuckoo's Nest. I was struck by the truth of that movie. I saw it as a metaphor for society rather than a nuthouse. Still, the place was a respite from the world. They drugged me, so at least I slept. I was popular, the vice president or the secretary of the student body. And hearing the door slam internalized the idea of limits and taught me to set goals. If I hadn't learned that, I'd have rolled with the punches instead of seeing them coming and anticipating them better as a result.

Q. Were you more mainstream when you left the institution?

A. No. After I got out, I headed for Colorado and holed myself up in a trailer for seven years. It was a form of agoraphobia, but I don't recall that being a real negative time. I had three kids in three years and was into being pregnant and a mom. I had a very active inner life. Bill liked it. I'd wait for him to come home at 4:30, serve Hamburger Helper and Jell-O and a salad, and we'd sit for hours passionately discussing music, art and philosophy. I've always been either "in" or "out." Rarely in-between. When I'm in, I gain weight to protect myself, think a lot, write a lot. I get into solitude. When I'm out, I lose weight and like to be with people. Now I've managed to integrate both for the first time. I'm losing weight, being social but creative.

Q. How have you managed to sidestep the usual hang-ups that come with being heavy?

A. To me, being fat isn't a negative. Being fat is a response. If you eat, you're choosing to be fat. Fat is a great friend. It's a cushion, very comforting at times. I feel sexy when I'm fat, but then I feel sexy when I'm $ skinny too. Being fat, for a woman, also means you take up more space, so you're seen -- and probably heard -- more easily. It's real ironic. At the same time that women were encouraged to be politically active and speak out, we unconsciously started to starve ourselves skinny, which is what men want us to do. That's very much a part of this wave of feminism, an epidemic among women.

Q. How close is the character you play to your real-life persona?

A. That's me up there, but there's a deliberate choice of what to expose. I like being naked. I'm one of those weirdos who ain't never frightened when I perform. All comedians, the good ones at least, are psychic, mental, emotional exhibitionists -- though a lot of them hide it by attacking other people. I call my stuff three-day comedy. First they laugh, and three days later they go, "Oh, God, this is what she was talking about." Once the brain is stretched, though, they can't go back. It's too late.

Q. What are you trying to get across?

A. I want to be a voice for working women, to get the same kind of roar from them that Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor did from their subgroups. I see myself as a role model for people left of normal, a three-dimensional woman, not a token, not a supermom. I'm trying to show that there's a lot more to being a woman than being a mother, but that there's a hell of a lot more to being a mother than most people suspect. Motherhood emotionally and physically changes a woman. Your head and your body get connected so fast. Cloning, all that biological stuff, is male motherhood. The whole technological age is an attempt to have men give birth.

Q. Your TV show is currently No. 1. You're starring in a movie, She Devil, with Meryl Streep. You have a book, Stand Up! My Life as a Woman, coming out in August. What's left?

A. I'd like to make films. My sensibilities are a cross between Woody Allen and John Waters. In about eight years I'll retire from show business and devote myself to politics. I probably won't run for office, but I will do fund raising for people I believe in. People whom I train (laugh). I have plans for taking over the world.