Relatable

Ellen DeGeneres spends her first stand-up hour in fifteen years leaning hard into the absurdity of her own massive wealth. Instead of pretending to still be an everyday woman, she opens with a joke about her butler, Batu, serving breakfast in her solarium, using the very title of the show as an ironic punchline. It is a clever way to bypass the elephant in the room of her immense fame, transitioning into physical bits about scooting bathmats with her feet and walking past her Presidential Medal of Freedom just to reach her front door.

Filmed over two nights at Benaroya Hall in Seattle, Washington, this 2018 Netflix release was directed by Joel Gallen and Tig Notaro. At this stage of her career, DeGeneres was still dominating daytime television, which brings a highly enthusiastic, almost worshipful studio-audience vibe to the theater. She uses that goodwill to reflect on her early days, contrasting her current opulence with her strict Christian Science childhood and the flea-infested basement apartment where she wrote her breakout material. The hour also serves as a retrospective of her 1997 coming-out and the subsequent industry backlash that briefly derailed her career.

Critical reception was polite but divided. Some reviewers found the self-referential rich-person jokes a bit thin for a full hour, noting that the show often leaned on easy applause rather than sharp punchlines. Others appreciated the nostalgic retrospective on her career and the return of her signature light observational style.