Jimmy Kimmel and Ellen DeGeneres all smiled Tuesday during their late 20/4 sitting. But just below the surface, things were loaded.
Aside from the tightly controlled series of her day-to-day program, which has diminished her appreciation over the past few months after the setback to her ‘toxic’ workplace culture and eventual apology in public, DeGeneres has avoided almost any interaction with external interviewers who possibly asked. an awkward question or two about her behavior.
Hardly the toughest interviewer in the media sphere, Kimmel was particularly gentle about DeGeneres, who is trying out an image repair before the premiere of her new HBO Max furniture program. Ellen’s Next Great Designer. They joked about ‘wacky-tobacky’ smoking and even a quick round of ‘Who’s High?’ with pedestrians on Hollywood Boulevard.
After all the silliness, it would not have been easy to turn in the serious allegations against her guest. And Kimmel did not try. Instead, he set DeGeneres up for a simultaneously engaging, humorous, and disturbing story about how she had to drive her wife, Portia de Rossi, to the emergency room for an appendix surgery while she was very stoned. “It’s probably not safe, I should not say anything about it,” she admitted at one point.
The second half of their interview is dedicated to DeGeneres’ love of furniture and charity work to help endangered species. From there, the two hosts connected with each other by trying to see if they remembered various strange things they had done over the years in their talk shows.
In fact, the only sketchy behavior Kimmel did on air was. At the end of the match, DeGeneres reads from her card: “Have you ever surprised a guest – oh my god! – have you ever surprised a guest by pointing your or her penis in the air?”
“Yes, I did,” Kimmel told her. “I did it to George Clooney and Hugh Laurie.” After the host played the clip of the moment from a previous sketch with the two actors, the host ended the segment.
Obviously, Kimmel, who presents DeGeneres’ partner George W. Bush in his show on Wednesday night, is not Anderson Cooper or Oprah Winfrey. And a late-night comedy series is not necessarily the best place for DeGeneres to address the allegations, which include sexual misconduct by her top producers and the host accused of secretly “One of the worst people in life.” But not even coming to the fore shows how many celebrities tend to give their celebrity friends coverage when low-level staff members are abused.
And it also raises the question of whether DeGeneres only agreed on the condition that her scandal would be ignored – or if she only knew it would be.
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