In ‘For Your Approval’, the stand-up comedian addresses the implosion of her eponymous talk show and the allegations that she’s ‘mean’ off camera. But it’s debatable whether she’s truly learnt anything from the backlash, writes Adam White.
In 2020, a Los Angeles-based Twitter comedian promised to donate two dollars to a food bank for every “insane story” he received about Ellen DeGeneres “being mean”. Six hundred dollars later, the platform had become a hotbed of unverified tales of the apparently super-friendly star rampaging through shops, restaurants, studio backlots and down the corridors of her eponymous talk show. The queen of nice? More like Godzilla with a pixie cut, the stories claimed. Satan in sneakers. A grinning tyrant armed with nothing but a Lizzo CD and nasty intentions.
Four years later, the Ellen show is dead, brought to an undignified close following a behind-the-scenes investigation into allegations of a toxic workplace. And DeGeneres herself has dropped off the celebrity radar, having admitted to occasionally being “sad, mad, anxious, frustrated and impatient”, but denying ever being outright mean. What a strange pseudo-end to more than three decades in showbiz, you might think. That America’s most famous gay woman, who’d long been the face of queer respectability in the mainstream, could be so violently undone by her own hubris.
But if you were to be generous, the “secretly mean” hubbub could have been a real opportunity for DeGeneres to get her bite back. Rather than be shackled to the persona of a milquetoast and inoffensive Obama-era funny lady, she could turn inwards, grapple with her mistakes, and start anew.
Or there is option B, which is to buy some pet chickens, film a Netflix stand-up special, and tell the world that, actually, it was everyone else who was wrong the whole time. For Your Approval, which is streaming now, is a bizarre, unfunny and self-pitying missed opportunity. DeGeneres has stated that it’s her swan song, or a goodbye from showbusiness on her own terms. But it is frustratingly clean, devoid of any real anger or regret, and refuses to depict its star as anything other than an unfairly condemned martyr.
This is partly a result of the context: For Your Approval seems to have been recorded in front of a pre-selected audience of supporters, if not of Ellen fans then at least of Ellen friends. Oprah Winfrey is glimpsed cackling from the crowd at one point, while an enormous cheer goes up after DeGeneres mentions her chat show’s executive producer Andy Lassner – a name absolutely no one outside of DeGeneres’s inner circle will recognise.
It’s a decision that not only wraps DeGeneres in cotton wool, but indirectly speaks to one of the problems with her old talk show that she clearly hasn’t come to terms with – that this was a woman who presented as being one of us, but who really wasn’t. Over time, the gap between DeGeneres and us mere mortals at home went from a short leap to a chasm. You can only hear so many stories about Ellen fraternising with Jennifer Aniston or George W Bush before beginning to suspect she lives on a different planet.
Much of For Your Approval trades in the same anodyne observational comedy that made DeGeneres so agreeable if unchallenging in the first place. There is an extended bit on parallel parking and the trouble with modern windshield wipers, which is indeed about as funny as it sounds. Likewise, she expresses her disappointment with pigeons.
Of course, DeGeneres knows why you’re really here. It’s there in the special’s mortifying opening scene, in which a misty-eyed and terrified-looking DeGeneres stares directly into the camera while archive footage of her career and its loud implosion is projected onto her dressing room mirror. “I got kicked out of showbusiness because I’m mean,” she announces to her audience early on, before adding an ironic zinger: “And you can’t be mean and be in showbusiness.”
Missing, though, is any real explanation as to why she was “kicked out”. DeGeneres’s exodus is framed as a strange and mysterious thing that merely happened to her, and not something partly – or entirely – set in motion by her alleged behaviour. She suggests that the wind simply changed one day – the people “decided” she was mean, and that, really, she just wasn’t cut out to run a daily talk show, anyway.
Her conclusion, somewhat inevitably, is that she simply #Girlbossed too close to the sun. Whereas men can manage and delegate forcefully and angrily, she says, women in positions of power have to be kind and placating. Anything that disrupts that unspoken agreement is frowned upon – and it was this, she insists, that got people’s backs up. “I’m honest, I’m generous, I’m sensitive and I’m thoughtful,” she says at the end of her 70-minute set. “I’m tough, I’m impatient and I’m demanding. I’m direct. I’m a strong woman.” The moment is cookie-cutter, second-wave feminist and cloyingly neoliberal by design – I half expected P!nk to fly out on a trapeze to echo the sentiment.
You wonder if DeGeneres’s resolute defensiveness is a product of the criticism she’s faced in the past. In 1997, upon coming out as gay, she lost her self-titled sitcom and was largely exiled from pop culture until the debut of her talk show in 2003. DeGeneres draws numerous parallels between that experience and what’s happened to her in recent years, as if they were fuelled by the same impulse.
But it’s a wildly confusing comparison; one was fuelled by undeniable prejudice, the other by far more complicated allegations. By linking them together, it suggests DeGeneres has placed all forms of criticism under the same umbrella, and that for all the references she makes to being prickly and complicated – and not the “one-dimensional character who gave stuff away and danced every day” – she’s truthfully learnt little in her time off television.
For Your Approval renders DeGeneres an unimpeachable victim to an angry mob, her failings largely inconsequential, her imminent departure from the spotlight a tragedy. “Look what you’ve done,” it seems to insist. “And look at what we’ve now lost.”
‘Ellen DeGeneres: For Your Approval’ is streaming on Netflix
