COMEDY Roseanne redux: Star lends voice to a cow and revives stand-up

The comedian sells her food line on Home Shopping Network.
By ROGER MOORE
ORLANDO SENTINEL
The tone of the conversation changes pitch. In the background, pots and pans rattle. Something is sizzling.
Roseanne has just switched over to the speakerphone.
"Hang on a minute, wouldya?" she says in that famous nasal drawl. "I gotta put stuff in boiling water. I got stuffed peppers I'm cookin.' Got a few other things I have to do for them."
Stir-fry the ground beef? Saute the onions?
"No, didn't do that part yet. But that's comin'. Hey, you know your stuffed peppers!"
As do you, lady. But then, you are the domestic goddess.
"You got that right!"
HSN food line
She's fresh off a plane from Florida, where she's been selling her food line on the Home Shopping Network. The product name? Domestic Goddess Foods.
"Cheap, fast and healthy stuff, like really great buffalo wings, and pot roasts that go from the freezer to the table in seven minutes."
Wait a minute, beef? On the hoof? What about Maggie, the dairy cow she voices in Disney's new cartoon, "Home on the Range"? What about the movie's "don't eat those farm critters" subtext? Didn't that change her?
"Well ..."
She laughs. She sounds relaxed, almost humbled. Maybe so, it's been a rough year -- a hysterectomy, two failed TV shows.
"Just trying to get out of bed every day," she says of her plans for the future.
OK with it
Maybe she has been humbled enough to go back to billing herself as Roseanne Barr. But humbled enough to voice a cow? Which Disney flunky got to make that phone call?
"Man, none of them had the nerve to do that. My agent is the one who told me about the offer. And he was very frightened. He thought I'd freak out or something. That I'd go, 'Are you crazy?'"
Hey, it could happen. We've all heard the stories.
"But I was very happy" with the call and the offer, she says.
Barr stepped into the role of Maggie, the plucky cow who resolves to save the farm and her town from a yodeling rustler and land-grabber voiced by Randy Quaid.
"I think Maggie's Gary Cooper in 'High Noon.' She's gotta save the town. She's gotta save the farm. She's a really determined Big Mama, and I could really connect with her."
She did it, she says, for all the reasons actors take their turn at the Disney microphone -- immortality, because Disney cartoons are forever. And she wanted to "be cool to my kids, and grandkid. I got an 8-year-old son. Trying to impress him a little."
Buck, her youngest, wasn't around during Mommy's glory days, back when "Roseanne" was a blue-collar populist tonic to yuppie-centric network TV and Roseanne, herself, was a tabloid obsession.
Long odds
At 51, Mommy is kind of back at square one, career-wise. She's richer, famous, but still faces long odds.
"There's a delicious element of sweet revenge in Barr's entire career," Roger Ebert wrote of her in 1989, a line that's just as true today. Think the public and the press have her dead and buried? Time to start planning the comeback, the best showbiz revenge. If Ellen Degeneres can spin an absent-minded fish in "Finding Nemo" into a career renaissance, maybe Maggie the cow will do the same for Roseanne.
"Ellen was just hilarious in 'Nemo,'" Barr says. "Funny. She got back to being funny. That's what it takes."
Barr has done a few stand-up dates -- and canceled at least one, too. She is, after all, Roseanne.
But she wanted to get back to her roots the way Bill Cosby did after "Cosby" made him rich and famous, the way Jerry Seinfeld did after "Seinfeld" made him rich and famous.
"That's what we're all good at. That's how we got famous and all that other junk that came along with it. My story's just like everybody else's. You've got to go back to what you love."