Former Ellen DeGeneres Staffer Calls Her the ‘C Word’
At this point, it’s no secret that working for Ellen DeGeneres was a nightmare. There’s even a whole 9/11-Twilight-Dakota Johnson theory about her downfall tied to the serial mistreatment of her staff. And now, we’re getting additional confirmation that working for The Ellen Show really wasn’t a good time.
Greg Fitzsimmons, a comedian, writer and actor, was on the show from the very beginning as a joke writer. For a while, he was even responsible for being the warm-up guy before the show. In a recent interview on the We Might Be Drunk podcast he reminisced about his experience on the show. He didn’t have glowing reviews.
“Yeah, I did the first two years on that show,” Fitzsimmons recalled. “And she was rough. She was the c-word.”
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He did actually say “the c-word.” This isn’t some Cracked-imposed censorship. He gave one example of when he was tasked with warming up the audience. He told the eager live-studio audience to do the wave any time he said the word “banana.” Unfortunately, the word banana was also in Ellen’s opening set, and she really hated that the audience kept doing the wave mid-joke.
“So, she stops, and she goes, ‘All right, that’s weird.’ She goes, ‘All right, pause. Let’s do it again. Whatever that was, don’t do that.’ And she says, ‘Banana’ again,” Fitzsimmons explained. “And they do the wave again. And we stopped again. She says, ‘Don’t do it.’ They do it again. And then finally, I just go up on stage. I explained to her what happened. And she was fucking seething.”
Things started to get weird, the more successful the show became, too. The better ratings got, the more awards the show received, the more the vibe intensified. “We started winning Emmys,” Fitzsimmons continued. “Like I won four Emmys on the show, but like that made things bad. That made her start to be mean, right? Because she was back on top.”
Fitzsimmons was asked to give specific examples of how DeGeneres was actually mean to staff. Unfortunately, it sounds entirely too familiar to any writing job where you had to get idea approval from one person.
“It was like if you didn’t pitch in her wheelhouse, then she looked at you like you had just fucking stabbed her puppy,” Fitzsimmons said. “And then there was this process of pushing people out of the circle. And you know, you want to be in the circle because there’s a lot of fear going on and you’re in or out. It didn’t really bother me that much because I’d written on a lot of shows before and I kind of knew what it was like to have tough bosses. You know, I wrote for Bill Maher.”
Maher being so mean that working for Ellen was easy? Can’t say I’m shocked! Still, for the writers who were new to being on staff, it was a horrible experience. “First time writers, they used to cry,” Fitzsimmons said. “There was a lot of crying in the hallways.”
