Jerry Seinfeld Doesn’t Think Roseanne Barr Should Have Been Fired

In an interview with Entertainment Tonight, Jerry Seinfeld said that he didn’t think Roseanne Barr needed to be fired by ABC for her racist tweet about former Barack Obama aide Valerie Jarrett. ABC fired Roseanne and cancelled her titular sitcom, which will be retooled into a version that exists without her, The Conners. Here are highlights:

On Barr’s firing: “I didn’t see why it was necessary to fire her. Why would you murder someone who’s committing suicide? But I never saw someone ruin their entire career with one button push,” he added. “That was fresh.”

On recasting her role: “I think they should get another Roseanne. They brought Dan Conner back, he was dead and they brought him back. So, why can’t we get another Roseanne? There’s other funny women that could do that part. You need to get the comic in there. I hate to see a comic lose a job.”

On having Ellen DeGeneres on his Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee: “It was fun. And then we had an interesting conversation about penises, but I’ll let you watch that. But it’s clean, believe it or not. … Yeah, we started discussing, ‘If you’re a lesbian, what do you think of the penis? Is it something you hate? Or are you OK with it?’ She said she was OK with it. She just says she doesn’t really feel one way or the other about it, and I said, ‘That’s the way I feel.'”

On why the show is important to him: “I felt like there’s another world to being a comedian that the public never sees and it’s not on a talk show and it’s not in some of these other interview shows that are on TV. I thought I gotta get them out of the package, out of the wrapper and just go to a coffee shop and hang out and then you see the real person.”