Roseanne Roseannadanna
Roseanne Roseannadanna is a character created and portrayed by Gilda Radner on Weekend Update in the early seasons of Saturday Night Live (SNL). She was the segment's consumer affairs reporter who, like an earlier Radner character Emily Litella, editorialized on current issues, only to go off-topic before being interrupted by the anchor.[1] Unlike Litella's meek and apologetic character, Roseannadanna was brash and tactless. The character was based on Rose Ann Scamardella, a former anchorwoman on WABC-TV's Eyewitness News in New York City.[2] The character also appeared later in Radner's live one-woman shows.
Roseanne Roseannadanna
October 29, 1977 ("Hire The Incompetent")
January 21, 1978 (Weekend Update)
May 24, 1980 (regular)
February 15, 2015 (SNL 40)
Gilda Radner
Emma Stone (SNL 40)
Characterization[edit]
Radner's character had a tendency to refer to herself by her full name whenever possible: "Mr. Feder, I know what you're talkin' about, because, I, Roseanne Roseannadanna, once had the same thing happen to me." She often exaggerated her tribulations, saying: "I thought I was gonna die!"
For example, she narrated a story about eating a hamburger in a restaurant and feeling something hard in it. She spat it out and found it was white and looked like a toenail, and she said: "I thought I was gonna die. I mean, what was a toenail doing in my hamburger?" Then she went to the restroom and, on the way, she saw Princess Lee Radziwill whom she described as the "classy lady that no one knows where she's the princess of." However, what the Princess didn't know was that she had a tiny piece of toilet paper hanging off her shoe, and she was walking around and the toilet paper hadn't fallen off. "I thought I was gonna be sick. So I said to her, 'Hey Princess Lee — what are ya tryin' to do, make me sick?' Jane Curtin then asked her what this had to do with anything, and Roseannadanna replied: "Well it just goes to show you, it's always something, you either got a toenail in your hamburger or toilet paper clinging to your shoe."
After Saturday Night Live[edit]
In Radner's off-Broadway one-woman show, Gilda Radner – Live from New York (filmed as Gilda Live), she included a sketch where Roseanadanna is invited to give the commencement speech at Columbia University. After disclosing that she had not been the first choice for the commencement speech, and that the university only called her after Geraldo Rivera pulled out because he "had a boil that needed to be lanced", she attempts to prepare the new graduates for the hard road ahead by describing a job interview she once had with CBS, in which Walter Cronkite mistakenly thought that she'd "passed gas" and consequently kicked her out of his office.
Roseannadanna was later credited as "co-author" of Radner's book Roseanne Roseannadanna's Hey Get Back to Work. In the last year of her life, Radner released a memoir of her experience with ovarian cancer, entitled It's Always Something. Radner also recorded the memoir as an audio book, imitating Roseannadanna and some of her other SNL characters when describing parts of her life.
The character also appeared in Radner's 1979 one-woman-show, Gilda Radner – Live from New York, filmed and released as Gilda Live.