Ellen DeGeneres opens up, proving she’s still Relatable after all these years
TV Reviews Comedy Special ReviewIf there’s a best-ever Kate McKinnon impression, her Ellen DeGeneres might be it. Apart from mere mimicry, the best impersonations incorporate something deeper in the soul of the impersonated, and the Saturday Night Live star’s uncanny Ellen found its truth in a placating coda to any joke that verged on actual edginess or in any way deconstructed her cuddly, audience-pleasing brand: “Just kiddin’, I’m Ellen.” Naturally McKinnon then guested on The Ellen DeGeneres Show—with Ellen, as Ellen—and was irresistibly subsumed into the host’s chummy embrace.
In Relatable, DeGeneres’ first stand-up special in 15 years, the comic does her own impression of herself: the stand-up star she once undeniably was. While she was never Richard Pryor or anything, DeGeneres was a groundbreaking comedian, emerging from the 1980s comedy boom as one of the most reliably funny headliners in the country, and, paralleling the career track of peer Jerry Seinfeld, vaulting into her own, self-titled hit sitcom. Her pre-talk show material wasn’t confessional—it was observational. Like Seinfeld, she goggled at life’s smallest absurdities and escalated them into big laughs, albeit with a more amiably self-effacing whimsy. But that innocuous image was an act in itself, as DeGeneres’ talent and ambitions belied any “aw shucks,” accidental-stardom illusions. She was a major star, and a major talent.
Partway through Relatable, DeGeneres tells a story about being 21 years old, living in a flea-infested basement hovel of an apartment and imagining a phone call with God—an idle musing that became her first piece of stand-up material. That she was moved to craft the bit because she’d wound up in that crappy place after her first girlfriend died in a car crash (complete with the sort of sick-joke detail seemingly designed by a particularly malicious deity) is a side of the story—and of herself—that the old Ellen never told. Not even six years later, when—as she claims she predicted in that itchy personal hellhole—she did the bit on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show and (again, as she’d vowed to herself she would) became the first female stand-up comic to get the coveted invitation to join Carson on the couch post-set.
Relatable sees DeGeneres shifting back and forth like that. Her Tonight Show story is illustrated by a projected onstage clip of her big moment, a device employed throughout the special—sometimes for emotional effect, but more often for daytime-flavored laughs like the montage of adorable cat and bird videos she and wife Portia de Rossi send to each other. Relatable is very much about Ellen revealing things about herself in ways her old persona never did, but it’s also about how that original, inoffensively observational persona wasn’t as much a persona as a part of who she is, too. She addresses how her coming out, which was once a career-threatening revelation, has been transformed over 16 years as America’s comfiest gift-dispensing daytime pal, by impersonating an Ellen DeGeneres Show viewer delighted that she “got a TV from the gay lady!”
DeGeneres incorporates some unaccustomed heaviness into Relatable, edging toward a more revelatory, one-woman show model at times. And those parts can be quite affecting, as when she talks openly about how the initial goodwill surrounding her coming out almost instantly evaporated, and the pain it left behind. “I’m still gay, by the way,” is how she offhandedly opens up the subject, receiving an enthusiastic swell of applause, before expressing how, when she announced her sexuality during the run of her soon-after-cancelled sitcom, “for five minutes it was really celebrated, and then everyone changed their minds.” Coming from the notoriously private DeGeneres, the stark statement that her “worst fears came true” is striking, as she details the three years of depression and mockery that preceded her return to TV. That she can look back in indisputable triumph now—she jokes in mock-humble passing about her Mark Twain Prize, Presidential Medal Of Freedom, multiple Emmys, and Peabody Award, among other accolades—doesn’t completely sap the vigor from a bit about endorsing gayness like a prescription drug pitch person. “Side effects may include loss of family, loss of friends, unemployment…”
Ellen is still Ellen, and if her occasional feints toward soul-baring comedy give way more frequently to innocuously amusing bits about shoe shopping, toothpaste, bathroom attendants, and the like, it’s not inconsiderable how the comic broadens her trusty stand-up palette. Indeed, the special is funniest and most biting when DeGeneres combines her two comic modes, peppering her set with airy asides about how she—one of the richest and most popular entertainers in the country—is “just like you.” In her opener, DeGeneres explains how she chose the title of her special as a riposte to a friend who dared doubt she could connect with the common folk of a paying stand-up audience again, drawing out the bit with details of her supposed daily life (butlers, gardeners, breakfast in her solarium, all those awards), and concluding by discovering that her friend has gotten lost on the way to the front door of her mansion. (He may have made a wrong turn at the escalator.)
There’s not so much risk involved in this sort of material as a puckish confidence that her audience will incorporate this new, slightly more open comedy into their bottomless love of all things Ellen. She drops one, calculated “fuck” into an otherwise inoffensive bit about socks that elicits shrieks of delighted laughter. (You can practically hear murmurs of, “Oh, Ellen’s so bad!”) And while DeGeneres’ jokes about why she wishes she’d never started dancing on her talk show similarly walk the line between deconstructing her image and relishing in it (“Dance, Ellen, dance!”), she also incorporates the unedited version of Juvenile’s “Back That Azz Up” into a bit about how long it takes her, at 60 years old, to get to the dance floor.
Relatable is like that bit. A little bit of “just kiddin’” naughtiness folded into the fuller version of herself that DeGeneres wants to present as she moves forward into whatever shape her career takes after her long-running talk show gig finally closes. And it’s not a bad move, even if some of the segues into feel-good platitudes near the end of the special aren’t especially graceful or revelatory. From the start, Ellen DeGeneres has been a wryly original stand-up comedian. A joke about being asked to “tone down” her gayness at the start of her talk show yields the ticklish observation that she initially wore a lot of necklaces. (“Is Ellen wearing a necklace? It’s very delicate…”) And some of her more personal material—like the dream, of a pet bird with its cage facing a window, that she says was instrumental in her choice to come out—finds the storytelling sweet spot that marks the best one-person show-style specials. After all this time away from the stage, Relatable a promising new beginning for an old pro.
35 Comments
As someone who was unemployed for almost a year, I watched Ellen all daily during that period and really came to like it. She has some really funny bits even if the interviews are always manufactured sap and thinly veiled Target promotions. I’ll definitely watch this
Glad you found a job. My wife has been unemployed for a year, so you are now my hero.
Just watch Ellen!
this is very wholesome. <3
I haven’t seen the special, don’t watch her talk show.. but Ellen Degeneres has always been one of my favorite standup comics. Hm. That’s all I had to say.
We accept that.
And now it’s the next day, I’ve seen the special, and Ellen is STILL one of my favorite standups. As the review says, she’s evolved/gotten successful enough so that her comedy had to change… but it didn’t change in a bad way at all – she acknowledges what her life is like now, and delves into what it was like back then (before coming out), before her sitcom.[By the way – I used to see her a lot, in SF and in LA, before she got the show, and I don’t remember her being especially in the closet. I mean, I guess she was but no one I knew in comedy clubs thought she was straight…]
If it wasn’t for cable in the 80’s and 90’s having so many comedy stand up specials and programs I wouldn’t know about Ellen, Bill Hicks, Louie Anderson, George Carlin, Gallagher, etc etc etc. I can’t wait to watch this.
Are you aware of who Gallagher has become in more recent years? Sad to say it might sour you on him…
Gallagher’s a prick.
Is that you, Joel Hodgson?
Which one?
Agreed. About 8 years ago I was PD and morning guy at a small radio station in Oregon and Gallagher came to town. Our family-friendly country station promoted the hell out of the show, gave away tickets, the whole shebang…Needless to say we (and most of the audience) were pretty surprised by what happened on stage that night.
That’s true, but if you were to travel back in time to 1986 eleven year old me is still thinking his nonsense is the funniest thing I’d ever seen.
I remember her from the earliest days of Comedy Central and the various cable outlets for standup. She and Paula Poundstone were always among my favorites.
Them and Bob Nelson, who somehow is still getting away with his Asian Man character.
That’s the football guy! I love him! “If it weren’t for football, I would not be playing football today.” And, “The MFL: Mother Fu–no, the NFL.” I don’t remember the Asian character.
I still do the Paula Poundstone bit about the devil bug. “That’s just an ol’ devil bug, it won’t hurt you.” HBO’s Half Hour Comedy Hour is where I remember seeing them both first.
Yes! Or the Snickers commercial bit…”long about noon when your appetite’s pokin’ at ya!”
Thanks for this 🙂
I still to this day say “Someone wrote that down!” on really terrible TV
Reminds me of this…
Ellen is 60?! But my internal image of her has been the same for the entirety of my knowledge of her existence… I see no wrinkles, her hair is still blond. We are all speeding for the coffin.The Seinfeld comparison is right on. But while his shtick (maybe I’m overly influenced by him being on Curb) has gotten seemingly darker, she has gone into Oprah territory (maybe overly influenced by the last episode of her show I remember, Portia giving her a gorilla sanctuary as a birthday gift, or vice versa, and simultaneously announcing Portia’s retirement— my takeaway was I get it, you have ascended to higher plane of immortal Altered Carbon-like wealth.)The recent (real?) convergence of Ellen, Julia Roberts, and a deep-cut Red Letter Media reference drove home how out of place edginess would be in Ellen’s comedy.
Rich Evans went Hollywood.
I know, I just watched the special and when she said she was 60 I thought she was kidding. Easy, breezy, beautiful.
She does talk about why she has to act the way she does during the special. After what happened when she came out you can’t blame her for playing it safe.
She’s been 36 years old for her entire life.
I like Ellen, but her Spectrum commercials that are played approximately 83 times an hour are really testing that.
Spectrum commercials have ruined her for me.
A friend of mine worked on the set of Ellen, reportedly she is a horrible to her employees, demeaning, demanding a total prick….
My grandmother fucking loves Ellen.
Ellen? You know it sucks without even having to watch it.
Ellen Degenerate isn’t relatable, at all.
The two other people I watched the special with last night and I all walked away from her new stand up special feeling… underwhelmed? Let down? Bummed out? I’m not sure what the word is for the way we all felt afterwards.Ellen is perhaps one of the keenest comedians I can think of. She has such a sharp wit, and there are moments of that in her special, I think. The opener, when she turns that sharp wit on herself. The moments when she makes fun of her audience for holding so fastly to the image they’ve constructed of her, that they don’t even realize she’s making fun of them in that moment. But she looks at them while they’re failing to understand they’re the butt of the joke, smiling through grimaces as they laugh at some of the most painful and traumatic moments of her life.At times the special almost feels like a Nannette-style confessional. Ellen recounts the pain of losing her first girlfriend in a car accident, the financial repercussions of her partner’s death and ending up in a flea-infested apartment, wondering why her partner had died and fleas were still allowed to exist. She describes graphic experiences of neglect at the hands of her Christian Scientist parents. She describes the shock and deep betrayal in the aftermath of her coming out. I think the three of us sat waiting for Ellen to eviscerate her exclusively white, mostly straight audience for laughing at these experiences? They certainly weren’t funny to the three of us watching, and it didn’t look like Ellen really believed her own delivery of her “jokes” about these experiences. But the evisceration never came. Ellen moved on, and these sometimes horrifying, sometimes heartbreaking stories were never brought up again. There was no real resolution to these traumatic “nuggets,” and it was definitely emotionally jarring.I really do believe Ellen has something new to say. Ellen has experiences to draw from to offer fresh, original ideas. Because honestly, the experience of coming out on a nationally syndicated TV show and then watching your career virtually fall apart only to be remade into the 15th highest paid actor in the world is NOT a relatable experience, but it offers a humanizing vantage point her audience’s demographic has probably never looked from. But Ellen plays it safe because she’s scared NOT to be seen as the “relatable,” “safe,” “positive,” persona crafted on her talk show. She flip flops between not caring if she’s truly relatable to her audience, bragging about not knowing “if the plane goes that far back,” and desperately reassuring the audience that she’s still the same Ellen. She even announces in the show that she’s not going to dance for them anymore, but five minutes later she’s dancing to “Shake That Ass,” giving her audience exactly what she anticipates they want. One could argue that she’s showing her audience that she’ll dance on her own terms, but that’s not how the three of us saw it. But who can blame her for playing it safe? The one time she showed herself to the public, her audience turned their back on her so fast she didn’t have time to plug in her new toaster oven.
ALT Title: “Ellen Degeneres Opens Up Proving The People Who Writer For Her Are Still Relatable After All These Years”