Ellen DeGeneres wants us to forgive her. That’s the TL;DR version of her new stand-up comedy special, For Your Approval, now streaming on Netflix. DeGeneres doesn’t try to disguise this transparent attempt to repair her reputation, which was shattered in 2020 by reports that her popular daytime talk show was a toxic workplace, allegedly teeming with racism and sexual harassment. For someone who’d built a brand around kindness, it was a bad look. DeGeneres wasn’t culturally canceled, but her show was, after losing a sizable segment of its viewers.
As a genre, the apology tour is a risky gambit: Can the penitent manage to hit just the right chord of humility, vulnerability, and hilarity? Humility, at least, is off the list within the first few minutes of For Your Approval.
The special opens with DeGeneres in her dressing room, looking into the mirror and seeing her career reflected back at her via a youthful appearance on The Tonight Show. As she walks through the theater hallway, other clips and voice-overs follow: the episode of her 1990s sitcom in which she came out as a lesbian; Oprah Winfrey talking to her about the historic nature of her role on that show; other media pundits accusing her of going too far; her voice as Dory in Finding Nemo; and news of the runaway success of her talk show. Her self-indulgent reverie is interrupted by a barrage of accusations, headlines, and viral tweets: “Is the queen of nice really the queen of mean?” DeGeneres stands there cringing as giant, nasty words (“TOXIC,” “PHONY,” “HYPOCRITE,” “LIAR”) close in around her. It’s a spectacle of contrition, a woman performing penance with a capital P.
“Hey, if I look older than when you saw me last, it’s because I’m older than when you saw me last,” she then tells a warmly welcoming audience. “And also, I stopped doing Botox and filler. I used to do Botox and filler back when I didn’t care what other people thought of me.” The act is filled with slightly double-edged references to the comedian’s need for adulation, from the title on down. In it, DeGeneres looks much as she always did, thin and spry—though on occasion, when she veers into confessional territory, her mouth is contritely downturned. Or is that just the lack of filler?
Laid-back, relatable comedy has always been DeGeneres’s sweet spot. She quickly falls back into that conversational groove in the new special, wringing light humor out of her car’s lumbar support (“It’s all any of us knows about the lumbar: It’s got to be supported”) and the shame of being a bad parallel parker. She promises her audience that she will talk about “it,” knowing the scandal is the primary reason some viewers will tune in. And DeGeneres does, sort of. But not before she makes a few teasing false starts.
“Let me catch you up on what’s been going on with me since you saw me last,” she says, building up anticipation with a long pause. “I got chickens!” What follows is a long ode to her birds (they fly, they lay eggs, they dream) before she finally runs out of fowl humor. “Let me see what else I can tell you about that’s been going on,” she says, rummaging in her pocket for her notes. “Oh yeah! I got kicked out of show business…cause I’m mean,” she deadpans. “You can’t be mean and be in show business. No, they’ll kick you out.” She carries on like this for a bit.
