Here’s the first thing you should know about Ellen DeGeneres’ latest and last stand-up special, For Your Approval: she does not apologize. For that, I am grateful. Celebrity apologies are pointless. Unforgiving online audiences and critics scrutinize every word, and in the rare instance when the apology is well-phrased, the celebrity is still dismissed as disingenuous. A good celebrity apology doesn’t exist. Whatever else can be said about DeGeneres’ career, I’m glad it didn’t end with debates over word choice and sincerity. Some critics are taking exception to DeGeneres for not apologizing, but as far as I’m concerned, the only people who deserve an apology from her are her staff and maybe the servers who have waited on her in restaurants over the years.
In the special, DeGeneres doesn’t deny that she was mean. She doesn’t spend that much time discussing the rumors that ended her talk show—maybe 15 minutes in the hour-long special. She doesn’t claim that male talk show hosts could get away with the same behavior she exhibited (though, given what we’ve learned about Jimmy Fallon and James Corden, it’s likely true). However, she does admit that she can be “tough and impatient and demanding.”
“I’m direct. I’m a strong woman,” she asserted, though she also admitted, “the thought of people thinking I was mean was devastating to me.” Understandably, she prefers to be remembered as “beloved” rather than “mean.”
I don’t know how she will be remembered, but I appreciated that her stand-up special was not a mea culpa, nor was it a series of excuses or rationalizations beyond acknowledging that she was likely judged more harshly for being “tough, impatient, and demanding” because of the expectations created by her TV persona. I think that’s fair (and to the extent that Jimmy Fallon faced criticism, it was also because his alleged behavior did not comport with his public image).
Frankly, I respected her for not begging the public for forgiveness and for saying, “This is who I am.” At the same time, she spent most of the special telling the kind of jokes and making the kind of observations she was known for as a stand-up before her talk show days. DeGeneres has always been a strong stand-up comedian, and at 66 years old, she hasn’t lost a step as she jokes about raising chickens, rescuing a pigeon, and aging. She did note that she liked to play tag with her co-workers on her talk show and scare them, which she jokingly realized could have been mistaken for chasing and terrorizing them.
Overall, it’s a solid special, especially for those of us old enough to remember Ellen DeGeneres before she became a talk show host. This special almost seems to pick up where her 2003 stand-up special, Here and Now, left off, only now she has 19 years of talk show material to draw from. I’m also reluctant to believe, even at 66, that this will be her last special. She admits she’s gained perspective with age, but I suspect she’ll have even more to share after a few more years of tending chickens and gardening.
