No apologies and not particularly funny: Ellen DeGeneres’s shameless return to standup
Four years after accusations of a toxic workplace culture torpedoed her talkshow, the star once dubbed ‘the most hated woman in America’ is attempting a comeback via Netflix. If you want humility, look elsewhere
Ellen DeGeneres begins as she means to go on in her new – and supposedly final – standup special. Her journey from dressing room to stage is cast as a memory lane, past clips of her first appearance on the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, snapshots of the furore when she came out as gay in 1997, and then a recap of her more recent brush with controversy – when, four years ago, accusations of a toxic workplace culture torpedoed her daytime talkshow. For Your Approval is DeGeneres’s reckoning with that cancellation, and her being deemed “the most hated woman in America”. And, like its opening sequence, it frames that reckoning solely in terms of our host’s journey, and her victimhood. Anyone looking for apologies, or humility, must look elsewhere.
As a study in evasion, self-mythologising – and world-beating servility on the part of her audience – For Your Approval takes some beating. If, like me, you can’t bear standup that courts affirming cheers rather than laughter – well, getting to the end of this will require considerable forbearance. Clearly, the scandal that saw off her TV vehicle has not sullied the ardour of DeGeneres’s many fans, who whoop and applaud her every utterance here; not just the ones that address healing after being “kicked out of showbusiness”, but the middling jokes about butterflies and parallel parking too. It slows the gig down terribly. Quit clapping, I shouted at the screen, and let the comedy crack on.
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