Tom Arnold can’t believe his eyes after ex-wife Roseanne Barr said something nice about him.
The actor and comedian, 67, reacted to Barr, 73, recently defending him from The Big Bang Theory creator Chuck Lorre’s allegations over miscredited scripts during their time on the hit sitcom Roseanne.
In his new memoir, Sitcom, Lorre, who was a staff writer on Roseanne from 1990 to 1992, claimed that Arnold’s name was credited on scripts that were actually penned by other writers.
Arnold, who was married to Barr from 1990 to 1994, was a writer, actor and producer on the ABC sitcom at the time.
Despite their acrimonious split, Barr came to Arnold’s defense over Lorre’s claims in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter published on Tuesday, October 20.
“Unbelievably — I don’t think you’ll hear me say this often — but Tom Arnold is telling the truth for once,” she said. “Talk about the paradigm switch here. Tom Arnold is defending me. I have to thank him for that. That’s the first time he’s done something right by me in his f***ing life. Thanks, Tom.”
A stunned Arnold reacted to Barr’s kind words via X later on Tuesday, writing, “Don’t give up. Don’t ever give up. 33 years ago I predicted I would do something so cool my 1st X Wife Roseanne would be forced to say something almost nice about me. Hell finally froze over today.”
As for Lorre’s claims about Arnold taking credit for other writers’ scripts, Arnold gave his side of the story to Entertainment Weekly.
“I never would put my name on a script that [Lorre] wrote,” he told the outlet recently.
“Roseanne and I sat around talking about what we wanted to do in the next season, or maybe some ideas we had that’d be fun episodes, or groundbreaking, or whatever our bulls*** was, and I’d write them down,” Arnold explained the process. “We kind of doodled around. And then, you know, in probably June, the head writer and the writers would come back and the show starts shooting in August.”
According to Arnold, “every writer’s fingerprints” were on scripts for various episodes of Roseanne, which ran from 1988 to 1997 and was briefly revived in 2018.
In October 2025, Arnold opened up to Us about his marriage to Barr while promoting his My Crazy X-Wife comedy tour.
Roseanne Barr is no stranger to controversy. Long before ABC chose to cancel the reboot of Roseanne in 2018, the actress made headlines for a variety of reasons including a controversial National Anthem performance and a run for president. Years after Barr’s Roseanne character was killed off The Conners, Us Weekly learned exclusive details about […]
“People say ‘My Crazy X-Wife, oh, I know which one that is. It’s Roseanne,’” he told Us. “And I’m like, ‘She’s not even close to my craziest ex-wife because we didn’t have kids together.’ The worst thing she did was go on Saturday Night Live and say I have a three-inch penis, which is confidential information. You take that to the grave.”
“Even a 747 looks small when it flies over the Grand Canyon,” he quipped.
