COMEDIAN Roseanne Barr has been slammed for controversial photo shoot in which she dressed like Hitler holding a tray of gingerbread men in front of an oven.

The pictures, which were taken in 2009 for a satricial Jewish magazine called Heeb, have garnered attention online after the star returned to the public eye last week with the reboot of the sitcom Roseanne.

Entertainment Weekly reports that the concept was Barr’s idea, and the images were criticised when they first came out.

Barr, who is Jewish, addressed the issue in 2011 during an interview on The Green Room with Paul Provenza, saying she didn’t know why people were so upset over the images.

When Paul Provenza said, “Jews went crazy over this. Understandably,” Barr said she didn’t think the reaction was understandable.

“I don’t think understandably. It really pissed me off. Because they were like ‘you’re making fun of the people in the ovens’, but I’m not making fun of people in the ovens.”

She said the message she was trying to send, was about how many holocausts have occurred since Hitler was in power.

“Moving off this Holocaust. There’s been about fifty of them since then. That’s what I’m kind of trying to say. Is like, Jesus Christ it’s so fucking every day now, holocausts, it’s like baking cookies,” she said.

Some Twitter users don’t agree, however, saying despite its satirical nature, the photos are “offensive and obscene”, while others threatened to boycott the TV station that airs the show.

Some compared it to comedian Kathy Griffin’s stunt where she posed with a fake decapitated head of US President Donald Trump and said there were double standards.

“Kathy Griffin was fired for posting a fake picture of Trump missing his head,” one Twitter user wrote. “Why is Roseanne not being fired for posting a picture of gingerbread Jews going into an oven while she was dressed as Hitler?”

Others argued that it was just a joke and don’t understand what the big deal is.

Meanwhile, the producer of Roseanne has asked audiences to ignore the images and judge the show on its merits alone.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, co-showrunner Bruce Helford said of the images: “I imagine there’s probably some amount of parody involved and all that. I don’t know the context of that so I wouldn’t make a comment on it.

Instead, he encouraged audiences to focus on the show and not the controversy.

“My feeling is that people should just watch the show and judge it on its merits. Watch the show without the accompanying background noise. Everybody, including Roseanne, wanted the show to be balanced. When we talk about wanting to open a dialogue in America, that’s something that the show does. We’re not trying to perform brain surgery or cure cancer.”

Now in its second week, the Roseanne reboot is still proving popular with viewers, despite a slight drop in numbers.

The Nielsen company said that 15.2 million Americans watched the show on Tuesday night.

That’s down 16 per cent from the 18.2 million who watched the show’s premiere last week. With delayed viewing, that first show has already been seen by more than 25 million people.

It has to be heartening to ABC that so many people who sampled the sitcom stuck with it.

President Donald Trump has taken some credit for its popularity because Roseanne Barr’s character supports him in the show.