Help yourself to more laughs but please say 'thank you'
By Gene Stout
(Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 14. März 2003)

With possible war looming in Iraq, comedian Ellen Degeneres is looking at the bright side of, well, whatever.
 
 
"Here I am working on all this new material, and we're going to have a dirty bomb?" she said with a nervous laugh.

"What we should focus on is being nice to each other. What we should focus on are the silly things we can laugh at. And at the same time, we're all scared. It's a reality, but we've gotten through tougher times."

The Emmy and Peabody Award-winning star of movies, TV sitcoms and HBO specials is back on the road this winter and spring with her "Here and Now" tour, named for her next HBO special airing in June. Two shows in early May at New York's Beacon Theatre will be filmed for the special, which will include road-tested material from a comedy trek that includes a show Wednesday night at the Paramount Theatre.

Before the tour even started, Degeneres -- who is writing her second book, due next fall -- started working out material for the special at intimate clubs.

"I went to a small club outside of Los Angeles for a show we announced two days before I was there," Degeneres said in a recent phone interview from L.A.

"It was really fun because everyone was in a little 190-seat room with me, and there I was, literally, with my glasses on and holding pieces of note paper, trying to make sense of what I had written," she said.

When she reaches Seattle, Degeneres won't likely be wearing her glasses and peering at scraps of paper like a worried bookkeeper. By then, her work-in-progress will have evolved into a smooth-running performance.

If there's a central theme to the show, it's the loss of manners in America, where the phrase "No problem" has taken the place of "You're welcome."

"I think everyone agrees that something's happened to manners and that there are no more 'pleases' and 'thank-yous.' People aren't nice to each other," she said.

"We're losing our compassion because everything is a computer and everything is immediate. We just don't have the tolerance and the patience because if we don't like something, we have a button and we change it."

After weeks of writing, Degeneres settled on what she thought would be about 50 minutes of new material. After the first show stretched to two hours, she started cutting. And cutting. And cutting. After several nights, the show was still two hours long.

"I don't really know what's happening. I can't understand it. But what I think is happening is the stuff that's really working keeps expanding because I keep playing with it and finding new things that are funny."

Degeneres includes humorous, anecdotal experiences in her comedy routines.

"I recently did a piece on stage about having pickle juice in your eye, and opening a pickle jar and the entire process of getting the right pickle out. And I was really surprised at how everyone related to that bit," she said.

Degeneres is auctioning off pairs of front-row seats to raise money for the World Wildlife Foundation and Greenpeace. Fans can go to www.ellendegeneres.com or www.stubhub.com to bid on ticket packages.

"I found out that scalpers were buying the front-row tickets and trying to sell them for three times the face value and sometimes people wouldn't buy them," she said. "So I bought the tickets myself and figured I'll let the people set the prices themselves and the money will go to these good causes."

For the past year, Degeneres has been working on her next TV program, a talk show titled simply "The Ellen Degeneres Show." Her first show, the sitcom "Ellen," made TV history when her character came out as a gay woman.

"I've decided I'm not going to have a desk," she said of the new show. "I'm just going to have two chairs because I don't want to have a barrier between myself and the guests. I want it to be open and casual. And instead of getting up in front of a curtain and talking, I'm going to just sit down and talk."

Degeneres plans a mix of celebrities and ordinary people as guests.

"I'm fascinated by real people, people who aren't affected," she said.

"In one of the test shows, we had this 90-year-old woman from Minnesota who was a baking champion. She was 4-foot-11 and her energy was unbelievable.

"But she wouldn't stop talking, and when I had to cut for a commercial break, I decided to just pick her up. It was hilarious because it kind of surprised me as much as it did her, but it was the only thing I could think of to shut her up."