Ellen Needed This
Over the past 40-something years, Ellen DeGeneres has been a legendary stand-up comic, groundbreaking sitcom star, daytime-talk-show luminary, and queer icon. She has also been, by many former employee accounts, a shitty boss, a revelation that punctured the 66-year-old’s longstanding image as the Queen of Nice in 2020. Her just-finished tour, titled Ellen’s Last Stand … Up and touted as the final act of her career, seemed designed as a tactical offensive against her most recent identity eclipsing all others. On tour, which sold out all 23 stops since beginning on June 19, that posturing was largely unnecessary — she’s playing to a predictably sympathetic crowd of fans, one primed to support her. Whether the material hits the mark when it’s released as a Netflix special later this year is where her legacy hangs in the balance.
The mood was lively outside Minneapolis’s Orpheum Theatre ahead of the comedian’s final tour stop on Saturday night, with an overwhelmingly white and upper-middle-aged audience funneling in under a marquee that read “ELLEN DEGENERES / SOLD OUT.” A pair of religious protesters — not an uncommon sight in response to Ellen’s work dating back to the ’90s — interrupted the preshow buzz with bleats of biblical gibberish, inviting one woman near the box office to yell “You don’t know shit!” at a man in a T-shirt with “Repent or Perish” festooned in red letters. Inside, attendees’ phones (and Fitbits) were locked inside mandatory Yondr bags, a typical occurrence at comedy shows but one that nevertheless underscored the significance of this particular evening.
When the lights dimmed inside the theater, DeGeneres’s opener took the stage: former Ellen Show employee comedian Tom Riles who did audience warm-up on the show for 17 years. “Tonight, you are all a part of history,” he told the crowd. “This is the last time Ellen will ever be onstage performing comedy again, and we’re taping it for Netflix.” The audience reacted as if they were beholding something sacred, their news-processing murmurs blending into a soft, reverent hum.
Riles eschewed the typical joke-packed 15 minutes of ushering the crowd into a Zone of Laughter and instead spent that time ushering us into a Zone of Ellen. He told charming anecdotes about his boss, including one about her lobbying him to name his daughter Ellen; blasted Lizzo to the rafters; and gave everyone permission to get up and dance like the audience on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, which ended unceremoniously in 2022 after 19 seasons. Many were rising to their feet before Riles finished his invitation.
The enthusiasm carried over to DeGeneres’s entrance, which was greeted by rapturous applause that seemed to last for the totality of her new and final hour. The number of applause breaks throughout the set was staggering, the audience’s threshold apparently set to a hair trigger. One observational bit — about how restaurant menus should feature a large-print option for old people — earned the kind of applause reserved for some comics’ closing jokes.
Later in the set, the crowd responded with emphatic coos of support when DeGeneres launched into her already much-dissected material on getting “kicked out of show business” for “being mean.” After rumors about the comedian being difficult to work for swirled for years, a 2020 BuzzFeed News report entered 11 anonymous employees’ accounts into public record. The report mainly focused on the show’s toxic workplace culture, with some employees alleging racism and harassment from producers and others claiming to have been fired after taking medical leave or bereavement days; DeGeneres was only implicated in allowing that behavior to occur. Still, the report seemed to confirm every “You can’t look her in the eyes” or “Ellen made me cry” story that long circulated in Hollywood or online.
During her final show, DeGeneres went on at length about how it felt to be thought of as mean, but never directly engaged with what may have inspired those whispers in the first place. She used words like “demanding” to describe herself but never offered any sense of what that looked like in practice. Instead, she performed this material with an aggrieved but vindicated conviction that suggested she’d beaten the meanness allegations on general principle and that they were merely something that happened to her. “The ‘Be kind’ girl wasn’t kind,” she said flatly at one point in an imagined-headline manner, referencing her routine of ending each episode of her show with the mantra, “Be kind to one another.” “Had I ended my show by saying, ‘Go fuck yourself,’” she continued, “people would’ve been pleasantly surprised.”
Whatever sins of coldness, ingratitude, neglect, or backstage imperialism that DeGeneres may have committed on her show, though, she has surely paid the price for them by now. The BuzzFeed exposé and eventual sunsetting of The Ellen DeGeneres Show were greeted online with the kind of Schadenfreude one might expect to accompany Donald Trump falling down a long, steep hill while trapped in a porta-potty. Her reputation may not ever recover, and as her new material attests, she is keenly aware of that.
After she finished the final show and left the stage, DeGeneres swiftly returned to address the crowd one last time. “I never thought I’d find the funny in any of that,” she said of her new material. “And having gotten to a place where I can tour with it has been so healing for me.” Some nearby audience members seemed moved to the verge of tears, their hands covering their mouths or heads nodding emphatically.
It’s been over 27 years since both DeGeneres and the character she then played on TV came out and nearly a decade since gay marriage was legalized in the U.S. That her shows are still being protested by religious fanatics in 2024 attests to how profound and indelible an impact she made on American culture, just by openly being herself. Based on all those applause breaks throughout the night, it seems like many of her fans will only remember her as that figure, or as the still-reigning Queen of Nice, no matter how much of a nightmare it may have been to work for her. Being in that crowd was a reminder of the millions of fans she’s made happy over the years, and her tearful grin at this Midwest send-off, suggests how happy their attention and affection made her. At least it’s nice that they got to have this last dance together.
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