There have been a lot of comparisons made over the past few days about the similarities around Disney’s firing Roseanne Barr for calling an African-American woman who was a former advisor to Barack Obama an ape and Disney firing James Gunn for making some off-color jokes ten years ago.
Roseanne herself commented on it, tweeting “I’m disgusted to read all of the support for James Gunn’s pedophile jokes-as the same people supported blacklisting me for a joke they didn’t even understand.”
I’m disgusted to read all of the support for James Gunn’s pedophile jokes-as the same people supported blacklisting me for a joke they didn’t even understand.
— Roseanne Barr (@therealroseanne) July 24, 2018
I mean, everyone understood the joke, you called an African-American woman an ape. You just tried some post-hoc justifications, first saying you were actually calling Valerie Jarrett an anti-Semite by making a Planet of the Apes reference, then saying it was because you were on Ambien and after that you claimed you thought she was white.
If you recall, when Barr was fired, I pointed out that it wasn’t a display of morality or political choice by Disney, it was a capitulation to outrage and a fear of being boycotted, essentially. Given that in this case the outrage at Disney is coming from the firing of Gunn and not at his tweets, I’m holding out hope for now that Disney will rehire Gunn to work on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. This is exactly what happened the last time weird Mike Cernovich got someone fired over a years-old tweet with a joke that referenced pedophilia; MSNBC contributor Sam Seder was let go over a tweet critical of supporters of Roman Polanski that was taken out of context and quickly reversed course less than 24 hours later when they realized they had been played.
I’m not optimistic that Disney will do the right thing and rehire Gunn, though. Odds are good that this decision was calculated to appease fans angry over Barr’s firing by going “See, we fired one of theirs, too, we’re unbiased” while saving money on whoever replaces Gunn. There’s probably a feeling that practically anyone can write and direct a Marvel movie following the formula created by Gunn; they did basically the same thing when Edgar Wright was driven off of Ant-Man and it worked out fine for them.
And Roseanne, if you want to rehabilitate your image and get people to stop hating you, maybe stop spreading the crazy racist conspiracy theories. Start with saying Barack Obama was born in Hawaii and not Kenya and that we actually landed men on the moon. Baby steps.