Tuesday, Sept. 28, 2004 | 8:19 a.m.
She's thinner, kinda down to 175 pounds.
She's older 51 (52 on Nov. 3).
She's back to using her last name Barr.
And, she's mellower well, sort of.
"I think the whole world is going to blow up in two years," Roseanne Barr said during a recent telephone interview from her home in Los Angeles. "We're all going to be dead and I'm trying to find the humor in that."
Her spin on Armageddon?
"At least all of our credit-card debts will be wiped out," she said. "There won't be anyone around to collect we'll all be dead.
"And I like the idea that all the women who have no body fat will have died first and I'll step over their corpses on my way to Canada to find food."
Roseanne will perform at the House of Blues on Friday, one of her infrequent sojourns away from home to keep her stand-up comedy skills keen while raising her 9-year-old son, Buck.
"Most of my life now is homework," said the famed comic, known for her barbed wit and sometimes bizarre behavior.
Her one-night engagement in Vegas is part of a mini-tour, which will include stops at several House of Blues venues around the country among them Chicago and New York. Later she will perform in Australia.
Roseanne came to national prominence when her stand-up act was featured on "The Tonight Show," and her ABC series, "Roseanne," debuted on Oct. 18, 1988. After nine years and 224 episodes the show that championed working-class families ended.
She says she and the cast, which included John Goodman as her husband, still stay in touch.
"We're all still real friendly," she said. "We see each other and stuff like that."
Roseanne takes a lot of pride in her work on the series.
"Some of the shows I liked better than others," she said. "Some are really classic. We won a Peabody Award, which was just very cool."
Four Emmys also were pretty cool, but Roseanne says she is finished with starring in a series.
"I'm not going to do them again," she said. "I like the freedom of being able to do the date when I get the urge.
"I don't want to work that much."
One of her most difficult tasks these days is trying to figure out her son's math problems -- that and waking up in the morning and taking him to school.
"Waking up and getting out of bed is exhausting," she said.
What does she do for her own amusement?
"I have five kids," Roseanne said. "I have no enjoyment. I just do homework."
Four of the children are grown, but one at home can be a handful.
"He's already way smarter than me," she said. "He's doing stuff I never did in school, so I'm not much help. I can't see how people with more than one kid are doing it."
Roseanne's interest in children has surpassed her own child. She's now singing for them.
"I'm coming out with a song album for children," she said. "And I'm coming out with a video, with me being funny for kids. I really like performing for kids more than for adults -- the kids are honest."
Roseanne's razor-sharp tongue hasn't dulled with age, especially when she talks about education in this country.
"The school system sucks," she said. "It's just too terrible. There are too many kids in every class. They don't even have gym class. We had to buy soccer balls and basketballs for the school. They've cut all the arts programs.
"Our education system has totally gone down the tubes."
Roseanne is frustrated.
"I do volunteer work at school," she said. "You try to do what you can do. But it's just terrible to see how none of our taxes are going to schools.
"I saw a bumper sticker the other day I thought was funny -- 'No Child Left a Dime.' But nobody's talking about that much."
While she is bothered by a lot, Roseanne has learned to keep her perspective.
"I'm cheerful," she said.
One of the things she's cheerful about is her stand-up act, which was on hiatus for a while but finally has emerged from all the smoke created by years of publicity over outrageous statements, busted relationships and other controversies.
"I've been working on my new routine for a few years," she said. "I'm a comic. I like to perform, to tell jokes and make people laugh."
Roseanne says for the past couple of years she's been going out once a month or so and doing small dates "under the radar."
"I basically have kind of the same attitude as my original stand-up," she said. "Only the subject matter is different. I was always pretty cynical. Now I feel like a prophet. Every bad fear I had and talked about has come true."
Which brings her back to Armageddon, a bit in her new routine.
"I kind of make fun of everything," she said. "It's the end of the world now, and I'm really happy with it."
Why?
"The diet industry will be destroyed too," Roseanne said. "And so will the drug companies. Everyone in this country is on drugs. Everyone making decisions is doped up. I don't have a lot of hope for anything. All the kids are on Ritalin. The parents are on Zoloft and they're watching porn 24/7 while their kids are on the computer learning to build bombs."
Needless to say, Roseanne is still outspoken.
"I might even be more so than I was before," she said.
But she reserves most of the comments for her comedy act.
"I got a little smarter," Roseanne said. "I learn from experience, and basically what I learned was is to keep my mouth shut when not onstage."
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