That seems like a very apt summary indeed. You can see it with Tim Allen, Christopher Titus, and Seinfeld as well. Ellen Degeneres seems immune to anything that would make her less humble, refreshingly.
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She has preserved her public persona better than most successful comedians.
A number of people have made disturbing allegations about how she and her producers have behaved behind the scenes though.
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Puts fingers in ears LA LA LA CAN’T HEAR YOU
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Then there’s the whole ‘being chummy with war criminals like Dubya Bush’ thing…
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Reminds me of this…
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Yeppers.
Never have been, never will be.
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Well, this has been a valuable and sobering lesson on Ellen. I’m less of a fan than I was now, but I appreciate a good schooling from the BB commentariat.
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Nobody’s perfect, and personally I don’t have such unrealistic expectations of anyone.
At the same time the active choices we make reflect who we really are, and although I also liked Ellen as an entertainer, my respect for her as a human being has waned greatly over the last few years.
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Sedaris has consistently written from the point of view of service workers and identified with them. In the Santaland Diairies the narrator, who is ostensibly him, working in a miserable job as a Christmas elf at Macy’s, encounters clueless customers with zero empathy for service workers, including an entitled woman who tells him, “I’m going to have you fired.” I can only assume that this is an attempt at the same sort of humor, but has fallen completely flat.
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Except the Santaland Diaries is over 20 years old. Another explanation is that he’s not that sympathetic guy anymore. If you read some of his more recent writing, you can see the shift. Money and success changes people and makes them forget where they came from.
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How closely have you been following his work over the last 15 years or so?
I remember one essay in which he was complaining about how so many hotels these days were posting notices indicating guests could help save water and energy by choosing not to have their bedding or towels changed nightly. The tone was basically “how DARE you try to guilt me for wanting fresh sheets every night.”
So his relatability has definitely been slipping as he’s grown more wealthy and successful.
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Well, she has COVID now so maybe it’s some kind of karmic justice at work?
https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/10/entertainment/ellen-degeneres-covid/index.html
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I’ve read most of his essay collections, though not all of them. It may be that his work has grown less empathetic, and thus less funny, over the years. That’s kind of what I mean–Sedaris has always been mercilessly critical of privileged people, including himself. So he’s just doing what he has always done, but it isn’t particularly funny.
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But that’s not the meaning of punching down, which is what he’s doing in this case.
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Really? I’ve watched the show many times in the past. It varies between subtly sweet to down right f’n dull at times. So I get the tone and style. That’s all I was sharing.
I’m not judging you as a person, I just don’t agree with your opinion.
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