Ellen DeGeneres returns to the stage nearly two years after her talk show ended, and it’s clear she’s not happy with how everything went.
“Oh yeah, I got kicked out of show business,” she told an audience during her stand-up show at Largo in Los Angeles this week, according to rolling stone. “There are no bad people in show business.”
In 2020, accusations that The Ellen DeGeneres Show It was a toxic work environment that made headlines. A BuzzFeed article featured 11 people who worked on the show anonymously, providing details about “racism, fear and bullying” in the workplace. However, they largely placed the blame on its executive producers.
Still, the idea that working for DeGeneres wasn’t a positive experience didn’t surprise many people. The same year, a Twitter feed comedian Kevin T. Porter called the host “notoriously one of the meanest people alive” and called on people to share stories they had heard over the years.
When it all blew up, DeGeneres seemed (or at least acted) surprised by the accusations. She apologized to her team and three of her executive producers were let go of the show following an internal investigation. Cynics suggested it was a last-minute attempt to save face in the face of backlash that had been quietly brewing behind the scenes for years.
The show only lasted two more years before ending in May 2022, with DeGeneres stepping away from the spotlight since then. As she noted during her stand-up this week, this isn’t the first time she’s faced public backlash during her career, including losing her sitcom and rising star after revealed her status as a lesbian in 1997.
“For those of you keeping score, this is the second time I’ve been kicked out of show business,” she joked. “Finally, they’re going to kick me out a third time because I’m mean, old and gay.”
During a Q&A with the audience after the show, DeGeneres acknowledged that the two situations were completely different. However, it seems like she’s having a harder time understanding how to deal with the aftermath of losing her talk show.
“It was like, ‘What’s going on?’ It was so hurtful that I couldn’t take a step back, I couldn’t do anything to make myself understand that it wasn’t personal,” she said. “I just thought, ‘Well, this isn’t how I wanted to end my career, but this is how it’s ending.'”
She told the audience that her current routine would ultimately be recorded for a Netflix special this fall, so calling the loss of her talk show the end of her career seems premature. But it’s undoubtedly had an impact on his reputation: There’s really no way the comedian could put on a comedy routine right now without acknowledging what happened. It remains to be seen what further impact the way DeGeneres chooses to discuss it will have, if any.
“It had a huge impact on my ego and my self-esteem. There are so many extremes in this business, people either love you and idolize you or they hate you,” she told the crowd, “and these people are, somehow, louder.”
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