Ellen DeGeneres begins as she means to go on in her new – and supposedly final – standup special. Her journey from dressing room to stage is cast as a memory lane, past clips of her first appearance on the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, snapshots of the furore when she came out as gay in 1997, and then a recap of her more recent brush with controversy – when, four years ago, accusations of a toxic workplace culture torpedoed her daytime talkshow. For Your Approval is DeGeneres’s reckoning with that cancellation, and her being deemed “the most hated woman in America”. And, like its opening sequence, it frames that reckoning solely in terms of our host’s journey, and her victimhood. Anyone looking for apologies, or humility, must look elsewhere.
As a study in evasion, self-mythologising – and world-beating servility on the part of her audience – For Your Approval takes some beating. If, like me, you can’t bear standup that courts affirming cheers rather than laughter – well, getting to the end of this will require considerable forbearance. Clearly, the scandal that saw off her TV vehicle has not sullied the ardour of DeGeneres’s many fans, who whoop and applaud her every utterance here; not just the ones that address healing after being “kicked out of showbusiness”, but the middling jokes about butterflies and parallel parking too. It slows the gig down terribly. Quit clapping, I shouted at the screen, and let the comedy crack on.
And there is comedy here, amid all the slippery self-justification: standup of the type with which Ellen first secured her place in America’s affections. She talks about rearing chickens, a hobby with which she has filled her newly spare time. She talks about her OCD and her ADHD, and how they cancel each other out. She addresses the oncoming decrepitude of her body, and her mother’s dementia.
Most of this is fine, little of it remarkable, and all of it overshadowed by the address For Your Approval makes to DeGeneres’s fall from grace in 2020. The problem then was that a host who had made “be kind” her trademark was said to have presided over a workplace culture of bullying, discrimination and harassment. Four years on, that doesn’t seem to be DeGeneres’s version of events. “We had so much fun together on that show,” she trills here, playing tag and practical jokes on-set. Perhaps some construed this bonhomie as bullying? Or perhaps it’s a gender thing? Women aren’t used to being bosses, she says at one point – and comedians even less so. How that tallies with her later claim, that her only crime was to be “a strong woman”, is not clear.
As a feat of self-exculpation, For Your Approval is a wonder to behold. You can’t help but admire the chutzpah when the 66-year-old brackets her recent excommunication with the one she suffered when she came out as gay, 23 years earlier – as if these were analogous experiences of heroic persecution. For anyone who had a miserable time working on her TV show, no thought is spared. “I’m proud of who I’ve become,” intones DeGeneres solemnly at the show’s conclusion, to more roars of approval. But there’s not much here for her to be proud of – nor much for fans of comedy (as opposed to fans of Ellen) to savour.
• Ellen DeGeneres: For Your Approval is on Netflix
