Roseanne Barr unfairly slammed for satire

Roseanne Barr is notoriously sarcastic and pointedly snide. A committed Jew and liberal activist member of the Peace and Freedom Party, she recently employed dark sarcasm in her attempt to ridicule those who deliberately spread online disinformation and the internet platforms which tolerate it and even promote it. Now she seems to be paying the price.

On a podcast about this subject she quipped: “There’s such a thing as the truth and facts and we have to stick to them. “And nobody died in the Holocaust either, that’s the truth. It should happen – 6 million Jews should die right now because they cause all the problems in the world. But it never happened.”

She inappropriately is being slammed and canceled over her off-the-cuff comments by a massive disability or unwillingness to understand her meaning, no matter how artlessly expressed.

This is a demonstration of why sarcasm and satire, tried and true classical rhetorical devices, are best left on the shelf in today’s world of uniformed, misinformed and indifferent “influencers.” Sarcasm and satire only work when its audience knows about the underlying facts that are being satirized and enough about a person’s true values and actual position when sarcasm is being employed to drive home a point.

You would think that near universal access to virtually unlimited information would create better informed people and more careful, thoughtful readers.  It does not. Why that is must be left for another time.

Now it may be that the Holocaust is just too toxic a subject for sarcasm and Roseanne did a poor job of thinking this through before blurting, a problem she’s had in the past.

But in this case the issue runs a lot deeper. Knee-jerk reactions by the seemingly well-intended eager to bash her over this and trying to force her off public media are guilty of the banal and the “surfacy.” They are falling over each other in their mad rush to show off their “good guy” bona fides by attacking her when she does not deserve it.

No, Roseanne did not deny the Holocaust and millions it took. She was not accusing the Jews of being an international problem. She was using online Holocaust denial and antisemitic conspiracy theories to illustrate an important point through sarcasm that went way over the head of those now in a rush to judge her.

Bruce Diamond is Rabbi at the Fort Myers Community Free Synagogue.

This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: Roseanne Barr unfairly slammed for satire