Throughout a podcast interview that’s now gone viral, San Francisco-born comic Margaret Cho opens up about her sisters in comedy, from Joan Rivers to Sandra Bernhard, sharing how they might at all times attempt to help each other as they broke obstacles for girls and LGTBQ individuals within the leisure trade.
Cho can’t say the identical for Ellen DeGeneres, regardless that the previous talk-show host grew to become well-known for breaking obstacles within the late Nineties by being the primary star of a TV community present to return out as homosexual, and to have her eponymous main character come out as nicely.
FILE – On this March 21, 2015, file picture, Ellen DeGeneres arrives on the twenty sixth Annual GLAAD Media Awards held on the Beverly Hilton Lodge, in Beverly Hills, Calif. DeGeneres is receiving a humanitarian award, and St. Jude Kids’s Analysis Hospital is reaping the advantages. Producers of the Individuals’s Selection Awards introduced Monday, Jan. 4, 2016, that DeGeneres might be acknowledged because the Favourite Humanitarian on the Wednesday, Jan. 6, ceremony. (Picture by Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP, File)
Throughout an interview on “The Kelly Mantle Show,” Cho confirmed the view that DeGeneres was really by no means a really good particular person to lots of people — behind her amiable “be kind” public persona that she promoted on the “Ellen DeGeneres Show.”
“The public perception of her is more true,” Cho stated. “She’s mean.”
Cho is referring to the general public scandal and fall from grace DeGeneres suffered in 2020. DeGeneres confronted allegations that “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” was a poisonous office and that she was not all that sort to workers and to anybody who wasn’t one in every of her superstar pals. DeGeneres and a few of these superstar pals — Ashton Kutcher, Katy Perry, Kevin Hart and her spouse Portia de Rossi — tried to vary the poisonous office narrative, however they largely failed, based on Enterprise Insider. DeGeneres ended up giving up her present in 2022 and he or she and De Rossi have since moved to the U.Ok.
Earlier than, throughout and after the poisonous office scandal erupted, a small variety of celebrities spoke out about DeGeneres’ “mean” habits, together with Kathy Griffin, Lea Thompson and “Everybody Loves Raymond” actor Brad Garrett.
The latter had as soon as appeared on DeGeneres’ present and stated on X — then Twitter — in July 2020 that her habits was “common knowledge,” Enterprise Insider reported.
Now, Cho is asking DeGeneres out. Cho, who grew up in San Francisco and studied at San Francisco State, has lengthy been revered for her activism on behalf of LGBTQ individuals and different marginalized teams.
“She was like, a mean girl,” Cho stated on Mantle’s present. “But also she would be real nice. I think she always had kind of negative feelings towards me because her girlfriends and wives always liked me.”
Cho continued, “Ellen was really weird and not nice to me for most of my career. I opened for her in the 1980s, when she was a headliner in comedy clubs and way before her big fame. So then later, when I would do her talk show in the 2000s, she acted like we just met.”
“And I’m like, what? Like, that’s weird,” Cho stated. “We go way back. It’s so creepy and weird.”
Considered one of Cho’s disagreeable experiences with DeGeneres was when David Bowie appeared on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” and gushed about working into Cho the night time earlier than.
“I had come to his show wearing this giant Chinese emperor outfit,” Cho stated. “He was really thrilled about it and he talked at length about it. And she cut it out of the show, which made me so mad.”
Cho realized about this portion of Bowie’s interview being minimize from an DeGeneres present producer, a great good friend, who referred to as to inform her about it. “The producer had to call me and tell me, ‘I can’t believe she did this, she cut it out of the show,’” Cho stated.
“‘But you need to know, that he was going on and on about your outfit. He loves you,’” Cho continued.
“I don’t know if it was personal, maybe it was for time,” Cho added. “But still, I’m going to take it personally just because I decided to.”
Final 12 months, DeGeneres made a return to her stand-up roots with a nationwide tour and a Netflix particular through which she instructed her followers that she was finished with performing. She stated “this is the last time you’re going to see me” and that she was “going bye-bye” and retiring after being “kicked out of show business for being mean.”
Throughout a efficiency on the Luther Burbank Heart for the Arts in Santa Rosa in July 2024, DeGeneres talked about being booted out of present enterprise earlier than — in 1998, when her sitcom “Ellen” was canceled after she got here out as homosexual.
“Next time, I’ll be kicked out for being old. Old, gay and mean, the triple crown,” DeGeneres joked, She acknowledged that she could possibly be “demanding and impatient and tough” and “a strong women.”
However DeGeneres finally refuted the claims that savaged her profession. She instructed the group: “I am many things, but I am not mean.”
