Ellen DeGeneres’ Last Standup Special Is Getting Absolutely Eviscerated on X

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Ellen DeGeneres has officially left the building, and judging from the social media response to her final standup comedy special, the prevailing reaction was anything but tearful.

The once-beloved daytime talk show host released her final hour-long special, For Your Approval, on Netflix this week, and viewers immediately noticed something felt a little… peculiar. For one thing, the mood in the Minneapolis theater where the taping took place was almost gratuitously happy to be there: As Vulture noted, DeGeneres paused for applause no fewer than 70 times during the special for a total of just under 12 minutes, or about 17% of its total runtime.

Then again, DeGeneres’ manner of presenting herself rubbed some folks the wrong way from the outset. Four years after workers on The Ellen DeGeneres Show publicly accused her of fostering a toxic, abusive, and racist workplace, and two years after the show ended, DeGeneres began her special with a digitally assembled montage of headlines labeling her “mean” swirling around her dejected head. It’s a sequence so desperate for pathos, comedian Zach Schiffman could only compare it to Ben Platt’s notoriously self-aggrandizing Dear Evan Hansen film:

DeGeneres delivers some safe comedic banter in the early going — her chickens, the perils of parallel parking — before jumping into the reasons her career is over. (“This is the last time you’re going to see me. After my Netflix special, I’m done,” she told a crowd this summer.) But although she alludes to having been “kicked out of show business” for being “mean,” DeGeneres never confronts allegations against her outright, like staffers’ claims that producers routinely made racist remarks and microaggressions on set. The result is, well, basically another Netflix special from a comedian about being “canceled.”

Now that the internet remembered Ellen DeGeneres is still around, some folks dug through their receipts to remind us all of her apparent celebrity friendship with one Sean “Diddy” Combs, whom DeGeneres once jokingly called “Cuddle McSnugglestuff” and who is currently facing sex trafficking and racketeering charges for so-called “freak off” parties he allegedly held over the course of a decade or more. (During one Diddy appearance on her show, a clip of which went freshly viral this week, DeGeneres commented that “once you get there, the party really starts.”)

Of course, we can’t forget that DeGeneres was a major boundary-pusher in the 1990s, coming out as gay on her own sitcom in 1997. Today, believe it or not, she may still be breaking down barriers: Trans comedian Stacy Cay quipped that the fact DeGeneres’ apparent need to make another comedy special in 2024 is evidence that gambling isn’t just for Norm MacDonald anymore.

Over on Threads, comedian Justin Avery Smith pointed out the poetic irony in DeGeneres’ downfall: Many trace the beginning of Ellen’s end to her notoriously tense interview with Dakota Johnson, who happens to be the granddaughter of Tippi Hedren, the iconic star of The Birds whose career was ended prematurely after a series of alleged sexual assaults by Alfred Hitchcock. DeGeneres has no connection to the notorious filmmaker, of course, and hasn’t been accused of assault — but it’s nice to imagine that Hedren’s descendant helped deliver another alleged Hollywood tyrant’s comeuppance.

It’s too bad that this special and its context will be how we remember Ellen DeGeneres — nobody wanted things to turn out this way, least of all the people who worked on her show. Sadly, not all mistakes can be fixed with a wide smile and an endearing dance break.

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