The term “successful comedian” has always been something of an oxymoron—there’s nothing funny about a rich entertainment icon. This is the premise of Ellen DeGeneres’s new, decorous Netflix special, “Relatable.” It’s DeGeneres’s first taped standup set in fifteen years, a period during which she’s been the host of one of the most-viewed daytime television shows in history—a savvy, cheerful jester tasked with surveying the fast-paced world of celebrity culture and translating it for a mass audience. Along with success, of course, comes wealth, perhaps the unfunniest subject of all. DeGeneres knows this. At the beginning of the set, she recounts a conversation that she had with a friend about returning to standup. “Your life has changed so much,” he told her. “I know, but I still think I’m relatable,” DeGeneres replied. “Anyway, just then, two of my butlers stepped into the library and announced that my breakfast was ready. And I said, ‘We’ll continue this conversation another time.’ ”
Wealth is not the only force that has threatened to undermine DeGeneres’s comedy. There’s also the treacly sensibility of “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” which she acknowledges has turned into a trap—particularly her tendency to dance on air, which, over the years, went from a gimmick to a prison of her own making. “There’s been times someone wants a picture, and while I’m doing a selfie, they’re, like: ‘You’re not dancing!,’ ” DeGeneres told the Times recently, in an article titled “Ellen DeGeneres Is Not as Nice as You Think.” “Of course I’m not dancing. I’m walking down the street,” she said. Two years ago, she decided to axe the dancing segment from her show altogether, a move that presented a real risk to her relationship with her fun-loving, all-ages audience.
Theoretically, “Relatable” is meant to offer a course correction, or at least an alternative, to DeGeneres’s reputation as a family-friendly gimmick queen. But, if DeGeneres has seemed to lose her edge over the years, she also struggles to relocate it in the special. Once the well of jokes about how rich she is has run dry—and it happens quickly—there is only a thin layer of material, most of it extremely breezy, to use. DeGeneres recalls the familiar ritual that she and her wife, Portia de Rossi, have of sitting on the couch, each sucked into her respective Internet hole, exchanging cute videos and memes rather than speaking. She brings up a video of a yellow bird dancing to Kendrick Lamar’s “HUMBLE.” and envisions a geriatric woman hearing Juvenile’s “Back That Azz Up” sometime in the distant future. And then she dances, seeming jubilant and defeated at once. This is DeGeneres falling back onto the shtick that has defined her career for the past fifteen years. And it’s not for a lack of material—she’s a woman working in the relative ghetto of daytime television, where she’s taken less seriously than the men doing the same routines on late-night TV. That’s a tension that I would have loved to hear DeGeneres explore.
When DeGeneres touches upon one of the defining moments of her career—coming out to Oprah Winfrey on television, in 1997, after which her namesake sitcom was cancelled—she transforms from carefree to serious. She recalls the period when she was becoming famous while still closeted. One night, she had a dream about a caged bird who finally realized that the window next to it was open. In the dream, the bird flew out, which DeGeneres took as a sign that she should do the same. Suddenly, the standup set becomes a TED talk, which DeGeneres pulls off more convincingly. “Nobody should be on anyone else’s path,” she tells the crowd. “We should be on our own paths.”
This can be an appealing mode. A major reason that DeGeneres has been so successful is that she is, in fact, relatable—not just to the masses at home but to the A-list Hollywood actors, pop stars, and reality-television personae she interviews on her show. Her bookers have a gift for selecting guests whose interviews will play to an Internet-minded audience; DeGeneres herself has a gift for asking these stars difficult questions in a non-confrontational way. She makes them comfortable. There’s a reason she’s the talk-show host of choice for the Kardashian clan, even during the particularly tumultuous, scandal-laden ride of the past year. And it was DeGeneres to whom Kevin Hart turned when he wanted to address the controversy surrounding his Oscars-hosting duties. Hart was announced as the host of this year’s Academy Awards, in December, but stepped down after old tweets surfaced in which he used the word “gay” as a pejorative. Last week, Hart sat in the confessional booth that is DeGeneres’s couch. “I know that I don’t have a homophobic bone in my body,” he said, in a long, defensive monologue about the dues he’d paid for making immature jokes. “I don’t know the perfect individual that society is now looking for. It’s not me.”
DeGeneres, surely banking on the idea that being a prominent gay celebrity would shield her from backlash, made a dramatic gesture of support for Hart. “There are so many haters out there. Whatever’s going on on the Internet, don’t pay attention to them,” she told him, as though the “haters” were not the same people watching her show’s often-viral clips each day. “I called the Academy today, because I really want you to host the Oscars,” she said. According to DeGeneres, the Academy agreed, and asked her what could be done to reinstate Hart. (The veracity of this conversation has not been confirmed, as the Academy has yet to weigh in.) But instead of being lauded as a gesture of unity the segment was met with more dismay over a needless, tone-deaf exchange between two celebrities propping each other up. In defending Hart without any sort of thoughtful inquiry, DeGeneres abdicated her responsibility to her audience. This may explain why there’s still a gulf between how DeGeneres is perceived and how she wishes to be known. That, at least, could hardly be more relatable.
Sourse: newyorker.com
