Ellen DeGeneres laments being ‘kicked out of show business’ in her new stand-up routine

Ellen DeGeneres returns to the stage almost two years after her talk show ended, and it’s clear she’s not happy with how it all turned out.

“Oh yeah, I got kicked out of show business,” she told the audience during her stand-up show at the Largo in Los Angeles this week, according to Rolling Stone. “There are no mean people in show business.”

In 2020 there were allegations that The Ellen DeGeneres Show was a toxic work environment that made headlines. a BuzzFeed article featured eleven people who worked on the show anonymously and provided details of “racism, fear and intimidation” on the job. However, they placed much of the blame on her executive producers.

Still, the idea that working for DeGeneres wasn’t a positive experience didn’t surprise many people. In the same year, a Twitter thread by comedian Kevin T. Porter called the host “notoriously one of the meanest people in the world” and called on people to share the stories they’ve heard over the years.

When everything blew up, DeGeneres seemed surprised (or at least acted) by the accusations. She apologized to her staff and three of her executive producers were released from the show following an internal investigation. Cynics suggested this was a last-minute attempt to save face in the face of the backlash that had been quietly brewing behind the scenes for years.

The show only lasted two more years before ending in May 2022, and DeGeneres has since stepped away from the spotlight. As she noted during her stand-up routine this week, it’s not the first time she’s faced public backlash in her career, most notably losing her sitcom and her rising star after coming out as a lesbian in 1997 .

“For those of you keeping score, this is the second time I’ve been kicked out of show business,” she joked. “They’re going to end up kicking me out for the third time because I’m mean, old and gay.”

During a post-show question-and-answer session with the audience, DeGeneres acknowledged that the two situations were completely different. Although it seems like she’s having a harder time figuring out how to deal with the fallout from losing her talk show.

“This was like, ‘What’s going on?’ It was so painful that I couldn’t get any perspective. I couldn’t do anything to tell myself that it wasn’t personal,” she said. “I just thought, ‘This isn’t the way I wanted to end my career, this is is the way it ends.'”

She told the audience that her current routine will eventually be recorded for a Netflix special this fall, so it seems premature to call the loss of her talk show the end of her career. But it has undoubtedly had an impact on her reputation; there’s no way the comedian could even put together a comedy routine at this point without acknowledging what happened. What, if any, further impact the way DeGeneres chooses to discuss this will have remains to be seen.

“It’s taken such a toll on my ego and my self-esteem. There are such extremes in this industry: people either love you and idolize you, or they hate you,” she told the crowd, “and those people are somehow louder.”