Tim Allen broke his silence on Roseanne Barr's firing from ABC and his views were pretty straight forward — "Who makes up these rules?" the comedian asked Thursday at the Television Critics Association’s press tour in Beverly Hills,
Entertainment Weekly reported.
Like Barr, Allen is a conservative sitcom star whose show "Last Man Standing" was abruptly cancelled by ABC last year.
Fox has revived the show for this fall and Allen made his comments after a panel with "Last Man Standing" showrunner Kevin Abbott to promote the series.
"I go way back with Rosie and that’s not the Rosie I know," Allen said of Barr's racially charged crack about Valerie Jarrett, a former senior adviser in the Obama White House, which ultimately led to the cancellation of her "Roseanne" reboot.
"She was the most diverse and tolerant woman I’ve ever known for a long time," he continued. "Whatever got in her head isn’t the Roseanne I know. It’s a very icy time."
Allen said ABC "had to do what they had to do" however, he wondered about where the industry was headed considering how swift the repercussions were to offhand remarks.
"I’ve been a comedian for 38 years and I’ve never seen it, like Lenny Bruce said at the Purple Onion, 'We’ve gone backwards,'" Allen said. "There are things you can’t say. There are things you shouldn’t say. Who makes up these rules? And as a stand-up comic, it’s a dangerous position to be in because I like pushing buttons. It’s unfortunate."
Barr meanwhile has continued to defend herself and made numerous attempts to explain her infamous tweet to the public.
She recently took to YouTube to share installments of her self-produced talk show and her latest episode, released Monday, featured author and life coach Brenden Dilley as a guest.
The two spoke about Trump's controversial Twitter campaign but discussions soon turned to Barr's tweet.
"I think they didn’t give you credit for that level of thinking," Dilley said of the masses. "They took it completely at face value."
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