What does it mean to be Ellen DeGeneres these days?
By Susan Shaw
(Toronto Star, 2. Mai 2002)She's already established herself as a producer and an award-show emcee (last year's Emmys were particularly challenging after
Sept. 11).She's been the star of two television series, including the groundbreaking Ellen, and has several movie credits to her name.
Now she's embarking on a 24-city tour before settling down to work on her new talk show.Tomorrow night DeGeneres does what she thinks she does best — standup — at Massey Hall, her first time before a Toronto audience since May 2000. Tonight she's in Boston; Saturday she'll be in Ann Arbor, Mich. The schedule doesn't leave much time for sightseeing but that doesn't faze DeGeneres.
"I'm used to the rigorous schedule of in and out of a city in the same day. I did that for 15 years when I started doing standup. I've been just about everywhere, but I don't know anything about anyplace."
Even though she won't be touring the city, DeGeneres says she's enjoyed Toronto on previous visits. "People are great here. Very, very friendly. I've never seen such friendly people. It makes me a little concerned. I don't trust anybody that friendly. Maybe it's something in the water, because I seem to get friendlier when I'm here."
Before her last tour in 2000, which led up to an HBO special, DeGeneres hadn't been out on the road for close to eight years, which meant a whole new spin on her routine — to remind people who she was, or at least remind them she was more than just Ellen Morgan, television's first openly gay lead character.
"Everything got lost when I came out; it was all about my sexuality, and my talent was nowhere. It was just `she's gay.'
"It was important to write a whole new special, and to show people my material was the same kind of stuff I was doing before everyone knew I was gay. I'm just a comedienne.
"This time, I'm doing some old stuff, material I haven't done for a long time, as well as new material. The new material is observations on the amount of choice we have today, how we're getting spoiled and jaded. It's my take on that."
Although DeGeneres enjoys her emcee duties and television series, she is eager to be performing standup again because she says she loves the creative outlet, the energy exchange between the audience." Plus, with the deal with Warner Bros. Domestic Televison for an hour-long syndicated talk/variety show slated for fall 2003, she's not sure whether her future schedule will allow for much touring.
"Rosie (O'Donnell) told me, get ready. It's hard, hard work. I'm just trying to prepare, like I'm doing an Ironman competition."
With the glut of talk shows on the air today, what will DeGeneres do to make hers standout?
"I'm going to have my guest stand up. No one's ever going to sit down. Or they'll be suspended, maybe in a swing. Who knows? I've got a year to think about it and put it all together. Really, I'm just going to be me, and try to make it as entertaining as possible. The most fun you can have during the daytime."
As Insecure as the Fans, but Funnier
By Bruce Weber
(New York Times, 21. Juni 2002)If the United States were looking for a comedian laureate, Ellen DeGeneres would be an apt nominee, but I don't mean that entirely as a compliment. Trim, blond and healthy-looking, with a friendly, beaming smile and a stage manner that says "I'm just like you, and aren't we all so secretly insecure?," she is the audience's clean-cut, confessional pal.
She is a humor ambassador, the kind of give-the-people-what-they-want performer who has the breathlessly enthusiastic following characteristic of certain pop music stars, one of a handful of comedians who can fill up Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center for a one-night-only show, as she did on Wednesday night. And she has a sure gift for milking the good will of her fans.
Opening the show, she lauded New York as "a city that represents everything I believe in: diversity, strength, courage and perseverance." And as she closed the show with an encore of past bits requested by the audience, she assured a wildly cheering throng that "if you put your mind to it and you keep putting one foot in front of the other, you can accomplish anything."
But if comedy at its most effective and adventurous is at least provocative, if not subversive, emanating from the fringe, well, Ms. DeGeneres just doesn't live there. Yes, it is well known that she is a lesbian, but she isn't one to define herself solely or even significantly in terms of her sexual orientation. It's a shrug in her work, a big so-what, and that's indisputably admirable. But it contributes to the palliating, as opposed to challenging, quality of her humor.
Actually, most of her 90-minute show was so conventionally unastringent and old-fashioned that there was nothing that wouldn't have been perfectly appropriate for "The Ed Sullivan Show" 40 years ago. The most revolutionary thing about it was its squeaky-cleanness; no four-letter words (well, O.K, she did refer to the anus of a mongoose) and barely a sexual innuendo (though she did have one good one, offered with a naughty little wrinkle of the nose, about a masseuse with a trombone).
And while her routines were up to date in their details, it seems fair to say that a comedian who remarks with astonishment on the advances of technology ("Everything's getting tinier and tinier," Ms. DeGeneres said, mimicking someone speaking on a telephone the size of a fingernail); the pervasiveness of television ("They have 500 channels now!"); and the fast pace of modern life ("Everyone's multitasking. That didn't even use to be a word") isn't exactly plowing new ground.
Ditto for a performer who goes on and on about procrastination; portrays her pets (in Ms. DeGeneres's case, a goldfish: "Oh, gee, big surprise, fish flakes"); is amazed by the widespread use of antidepressants; recites the lyrics of particularly ridiculous pop songs to emphasize their ridiculousness; and (paging Dick Van Dyke) imitates people tripping on the sidewalk and trying nonchalantly to regain their dignity.
But maybe originality is not the point. As she explained early in the show, in jest but tellingly nonetheless, she rejected the idea of going to a therapist to talk out her problems because she had a better idea: "I thought, Why should I pay a stranger to listen to me talk when I can get strangers to pay to listen to me talk? That's when I came up with the idea of touring."
But cynical or not, Ms. DeGeneres could not utter any banality that was not met with reflexive waves of approval; the titters and guffaws gave the evening a loud and regular laugh track. And it's hard to know whether most of the audience noticed that for 10 minutes or so, the show took on a different quality altogether.
It occurred about two-thirds of the way through, when Ms. DeGeneres abruptly changed her tone, as if she had been waiting for the children and the Disney executives to leave the room. A wickedness suddenly appeared in her material: "I lift weights religiously," she said. "I mean, I hardly ever lift them, but when I do, I go" — and here her voice rose to an angry complaint — " `Jesus Christ!' "
She cursed, talked about sex, brought a willing vulgarity to her physical comedy, for which she has a gift. In fact, the funniest bit of the evening may well have been her re-enactment — suggestively obscene but somehow still suitable for prime time — of being hosed off after a mud bath.
It was during this brief interlude that Ms. DeGeneres seemed to let something true about herself escape, and maybe it wasn't supposed to, because she bottled it up pretty quickly. Still, those apparently unwhitewashed minutes were welcome, because they seemed deeply rather than merely superficially honest in their observations and revelations. It felt as if Ms. DeGeneres were living comfortably in her own skin rather than wrapping herself itchily in ours.