Ellen DeGeneres kicks off comeback tour in Los Angeles, anticipates third ostracism for being ‘old, mean, and gay’

Jordan Hoffman
·3 min read
6

Ellen DeGeneres has licked her wounds since exiting her daytime talk show in May 2022, and is back on the road in preparation for a Netflix special she will tape this fall. Her performance at Largo at the Coronet in Los Angeles saw many scribes in the audience, eager to see how she addressed this new phase of her career. (Upcoming gigs take her from San Diego to Spokane through early July.) 

The former Oscar, Emmy, and Grammy host, who herself has won one Primetime Emmy and a whopping 33 Daytime Emmys, discussed her downfall to the sold-out audience of 200 on Wednesday night. “I used to say that I didn’t care what other people thought of me and I realized I said that at the height of my popularity,” she zinged. 

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She remarked that she’d been kicked out of show business for “being mean,” then added, “there’s no mean people in show business.” She also commented that this was the second time the industry turned its back on her—the first was when she came out as gay and her sitcom was canceled. 

She then foresaw her third excommunication for being “old, mean, and gay.”

Though DeGeneres’s persona stemmed from being super nice, a 2020 article in Buzzfeed poked holes in this with ample evidence to the contrary and led to a tide-turning against her. She eventually had to pull the plug on her show. 

“The hate went on for a long time and I would try to avoid looking at the news,” she said. “The ‘be kind’ girl wasn’t kind. That was the headline.” She reflected that she was once known as someone who “gave away stuff and danced up steps,” but then “I’m giving stuff away…and I danced, then I was mean and they didn’t like me again. It’s been such a toll on my ego and my self-esteem. There’s such extremes in this business, people either love you and idolize you or they hate you, and those people somehow are louder.”

Who knows, maybe this riff was funnier in person?

Anyway, during a fan Q&A, she got more serious and said, “It’s hard to dance when you’re crying” and that her suspension from the public had been “a hard time.” 

But she has a happy ending in mind for this summer’s tour: in fall she’ll be taping a comedy special for Netflix. 

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