In 2020, a Buzzfeed News exposé revealed toxic workplace and sexual misconduct allegations on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Four years later, Ellen DeGeneres, who has mostly stayed out of the limelight since the end of her daytime talk show in 2022, is making quite a questionable comeback.
On April 23, DeGeneres performed a comedy stand-up routine for her new comedy special Ellen’s Last Stand… Up Tour, which is set to appear on Netflix, per Rolling Stone. In it, she addressed the elephant in the room head-on, but fans aren’t too happy with her opinion.
“What else can I tell you?” she said sarcastically at the beginning of the show. “Oh yeah, I got kicked out of show business. There’s no mean people in show business.”
After insinuating that the allegations brought against her team were not that damning, DeGeneres joked about her one-liner at the end of each episode: “Be kind to one another.”
“The ‘be kind’ girl wasn’t kind,” DeGeneres said. “I became this one-dimensional character who gave stuff away and danced up steps. Do you know how hard it is to dance up steps? Would a mean person dance up steps? Had I ended my show by saying, ‘Go f– yourself,’ people would’ve been pleasantly surprised.”
Later on, she admitted that she was never fully prepared to lead a team. “I didn’t go to business school. I went to Charlie’s Chuckle Hutt,” she joked. “The show was called Ellen and everybody was wearing T-shirts that said ‘Ellen’ and there were buildings on the Warner Brothers lot that said ‘Ellen,’ but I don’t know that that meant I should be in charge.”
DeGeneres, whose acting career stilted when she came out as gay in 1997, then added that this career dip isn’t a first for her. “For those of you keeping score, this is the second time I’ve been kicked out of show business,” she said. “Eventually, they’re going to kick me out for a third time because I’m mean, old, and gay.”
“It’s been such a toll on my ego and my self-esteem,” DeGeneres also admitted. “There’s such extremes in this business, people either love you and idolize you or they hate you, and those people somehow are louder.”
Following the news, users on X are making it crystal clear that DeGeneres’ jokes did not land. “If by kicked out you mean allowed and aided in the maintaining of a toxic work culture and suffered the consequences – then sure,” wrote one user. “‘I got kicked out of showbusiness’ and in other news, watch my new Netflix special,” wrote another.
Looks like quite a few people won’t be pressing play on her special anytime soon.
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