‘Ellen DeGeneres: Relatable’ On Netflix Is The Comeback Special Of The Year

Ellen DeGeneres has delivered thousands of daytime monologues over the past 15 years, and hosted more than a few primetime variety specials (including the Academy Awards twice).

But none of that holds a candle to her stand-up.

You can see exactly why in her first stand-up comedy special since 2003’s Here and Now, called Relatable on Netflix. DeGeneres explains the title in her opening gambit, as he jokes about how despite becoming a mega-millionaire with all of the privileges that entails, she still has things to say that any audience member can relate to. Right?

An acknowledgement that DeGeneres and her wife of 10 years, the actress Portia de Rossi, don’t talk on the phone, but rather text each other dancing bird videos, indeed may have you screaming: Stars, they’re just like us!

So, too, DeGeneres espouses the same confusion over emotional support animals, or the side effects for medications pharmaceutical companies advertise on TV, just like we do (and so many other comedians do, too). She keeps her favorite socks even when they get holes in them, and knows that means an inner hatred for friends who make her/us take them off at the front door. DeGeneres claims her junk drawer contains the same odd items ours do. And she identifies with the common person’s plight of packing the things we use versus the things we fantasize about using on vacations.

All relatable stuff. If not out-and-out gut-busting or thought-provoking. Does comedy necessarily have to be either of those, though? Can’t funny just be funny?

DeGeneres has proven that true since her very beginning, which she takes us back to her early 20s in Louisiana, just after her girlfriend had died in a car accident. Living in a flea-infested basement, broke and broken, DeGeneres wished she could talk to God, and wrote down in her stream of consciousness a phone conversation between herself and God. “It wasn’t meant to be funny,” she reveals now. She hadn’t even ever gotten on a comedy stage at that point in her life. But six years later, she acted out that exact conversation with God on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.

She shows part of that clip in this special, and jokes all these years later about how “Sinbad dressed me for that,” adding: “I wish that were a joke.”

DeGeneres has had that natural knack for stand-up from the start.

But when she began The Ellen Show in 2003, she had a deep need to appear relatable. Because six years after coming out as lesbian in her ABC sitcom, she had something to prove to American television audiences (or at least to the TV executives, who told her “no one thought they’d watch” and “no one’s going to watch a lesbian during the day”). DeGeneres is so beloved by audiences today, it’s striking how she has to remind these same audiences how much it took to win them over again.

“I am still gay, by the way,” DeGeneres quips. “It’s really working out for me now. In the beginning, not so much…For five minutes it was really celebrated, and then everyone changed their minds.”

A video screen helps illustrate her own explanation for how it felt as a TV star coming out in 1997. She wishes others would come out of the closet, too — not just celebrities, but also athletes, doctors, lawyers. “A lot of kids would be helped by that,” DeGeneres said. She figures if Sofia Vergara can shill for dandruff on TV, and Jen Aniston can have dry eye, then why not imagine DeGeneres as spokeswoman for an ad campaign on being gay. She jokes: “Side effects might include: Loss of family, loss of friends, unemployment!” You can’t claim “too soon” for Ellen on this one.

DeGeneres says we’re all “looking for validation that we’re on the right path” when “we should be on our own path.” She retraces her own path in her most personal stand-up yet, talking about how she almost died as a child because her parents raised her Christian Science, not believing in doctors, medication or vaccinations. Her parents divorced when Ellen was a teen, and they were obsessed with celebrity. So even though Ellen never expected that life for herself, perhaps her path was meant to lead her there.

And she expresses some regrets. Telling her audiences to “be kind to one another” suddenly meant Ellen herself could never act unkind in public. “That and the dancing. That was a mistake,” DeGeneres admits. “I did it the first day as a joke.”

She never expected to be a TV dancing lesbian queen.

But if you’re tuning in to see her dance on Netflix, no need to fear. Ellen will dance.

“I am 60 years old and I am dancing to ‘Back Dat Ass Up.’”

Your favorite auntie couldn’t be more relatable.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.

Watch Ellen DeGeneres: Relatable on Netflix