The biggest joke in Ellen DeGeneres’s new Netflix special
For one entire minute in Ellen DeGeneres’s new Netflix special, DeGeneres receives a standing ovation for stating, “I’m a strong woman.”
DeGeneres soaks in the applause, staring into the rafters of Minneapolis’s Orpheum theater like she’s witnessing a holy miracle, and the entire audience rises to its feet. It’s one of the more absurd things happening in For Your Approval, a night of taped comedy that DeGeneres and Netflix have been promoting as the comedian’s response to being “kicked out of Hollywood.” Nabbing a comedy special on one of the biggest entertainment platforms on the planet should probably disqualify anyone from saying they were “kicked out of Hollywood,” but we do not live in a world where sentences make sense. (Netflix reportedly paid DeGeneres $20 million for her 2018 set Relatable.) Instead, we have a packed-house show by an alleged Hollywood outcast filmed for Netflix, with an audience hooting and hollering for a 2016 girlboss platitude.
What the former talk show host really means by “kicked out of Hollywood” is that her brand took a hit. DeGeneres, who was blacklisted and shunned in the industry after coming out in the ’90s, should know the difference between those things better than anyone.
The severity of DeGeneres’s second “cancellation” is debatable. In 2019, DeGeneres had actress Dakota Johnson on her eponymous show and that interview quickly turned into a meme. The host questioned the actress about her recent 30th birthday party, claiming she hadn’t been invited, which prompted Johnson’s famous reply: “Actually, no, that’s not the truth, Ellen” — saying in fact, DeGeneres had skipped the festivities. (It was later discovered that DeGeneres was hanging out with George W. Bush at a Dallas Cowboys game.) The back and forth went viral, prompting a semi-playful examination of whether DeGeneres was actually a nice person, which built into more serious reports of a toxic work environment at The Ellen Show, with accusations of racism and sexism. Eventually, The Ellen Show was quite literally canceled in May of 2022.
DeGeneres doesn’t get into these specifics in the special. For her applause-ready audience (at one point they cheer when DeGeneres name-drops a producer named “Andy”), she glosses over the more serious parts of the fallout, saying simply that the reason she was booted from the industry was because people didn’t realize her kindness was part of the act.
“You can’t be mean and be in show business,” DeGeneres deadpans. “No mean people in show business.”
DeGeneres paints herself as a less kind person than the Ellen we see on TV, recounting complaints from her wife Portia about how she’s comically impatient. She admits she’s rude at parties, saying that her talk show trained her to only pay attention in segments.
When it comes to the toxic workplace allegations, she explains that she didn’t really know how to be a boss, which she chalks up to her love of playing pranks on producers. She also speaks about how complicated she is — having been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder and attention-deficit disorder — and how that can manifest in being a bad manager.
At the same time, DeGeneres asserts that she’s definitely kinder and nicer than the person we read about in the news. She can’t stop wanting to help lost animals, she says, and she finds beauty in how caterpillars liquefy themselves and turn into butterflies. That ties into what she lets on about her peaceful, post-talk-show life: She’s gardening more, surrounded presumably by butterflies, and tending to a roost of chickens. DeGeneres also reveals that she wears sweatpants in the home and cannot be pried out of them once she slips them on, not even for “Mick” (as in Jagger).
“I’m 66 years old,” she tells the audience, who respond with raucous applause. DeGeneres follows that statement up with a joke about how restaurants’ menu font size makes her feel old.
For all the time she’s spent imagining the thought process of a just-hatched butterfly or the seemingly brainless organization scheme of her car’s dashboard or how the width of the two “bankrupt” panels flanking the million-dollar panel in Wheel of Fortune is unfair, DeGeneres barely examines the obvious question about her “niceness.”
“Nice” wasn’t simply a byproduct of being Ellen; DeGeneres ultimately turned being kind into one of the most profitable business plans in Hollywood. And she did so after gaining first-hand knowledge of what it’s actually like to be professionally blacklisted.
At one point in the special, DeGeneres compares this current time in her career to the period after she came out publicly. The comedian had announced she was a lesbian on The Oprah Winfrey Show just prior to her eponymous character coming out on her sitcom, Ellen, that same year. She also famously appeared on the cover of Time magazine, with the cover line reading, “Yep, I’m Gay.” It was, undeniably, new ground for the country, and a brave claim of self. After “The Puppy Episode,” as it was called, DeGeneres says she struggled to find work — a rejection based on who she was, even if the sitcom character wasn’t exactly her.
During DeGeneres’s turn as a talk show host, she became less like herself and more like a sitcom character. Her terminal niceness became her identity. All the mean, bigoted things people said about her being a lesbian didn’t have any bearing — she was showing audiences across America that she was a nice person, first and foremost, who just so happened to be gay. She rose above the prejudices.
It was respectability politics, stretched and shaped into an extremely beneficial career.
It must have been difficult to do what DeGeneres did, to sand down the edges and flatten the wrinkles of her whole identity, to fit into this TV host mold and appeal to people who had rejected her. But that was her business, one more crucial than being a TV show host, producer, or comedian. Behind the scenes, it seems, she dropped the ball. After many years of playing nice, DeGeneres wasn’t able to do her job.
Instead of acknowledging that lapse or asserting that there’s a stark difference between being unpleasant to work for and ignoring a toxic work environment, in For Your Approval, DeGeneres pivots to talking about how society is tough on women in the workplace — holding them to impossible double standards and trapping them in roles designed to fail. While those factors were certainly at play, it’s a little obtuse — if not purposely hollow — to use those societal issues to buff out the more serious accusations that sunk her show. I’m not sure those kinds of excuses and obfuscations are what you’d hear from a nice person, but DeGeneres would concede she was never that nice to begin with.