Jimmy Kimmel and Ellen DeGeneres were all smiles during their 4/20 session on Tuesday night. But just below the surface, things were full.
Beyond the tightly controlled set of his daytime talk show, which has seen his qualifications drop in recent months following the backlash against his “toxic” workplace culture and possible public apologies, DeGeneres has avoided it almost completely. any interaction with external interviewers you may have asked. an awkward question or two about their behavior.
Hardly the toughest interviewer in the media, Kimmel was especially soft on DeGeneres, who is trying to rehabilitate the image before the release of his new HBO Max furniture show, Ellen’s Next Great Designer. They joked about smoking “crazy” and even played a quick round of “Who’s Tall?” with pedestrians on Hollywood Boulevard.
After all this nonsense, it would not have been easy to get into serious complaints against your guest. And Kimmel didn’t try. Instead, he prepared DeGeneres for an at once endearing, funny, and disturbing story about how he had to drive his wife Portia de Rossi to the emergency room to perform an appendectomy while she was heavily stoned. “It’s probably not safe, I shouldn’t say any of that,” he admitted at one point.
The second half of his interview was devoted to DeGeneres ’love for furniture and the work of solidarity to help endangered species. From there, the two hosts related to each other trying to see if they remembered several strange things they have done at their gatherings over many years.
In fact, the only incomplete behavior that appeared was something Kimmel did on the air. At the end of the game, DeGeneres read from his card, “Did you ever surprise a guest, oh my God?
“Yeah, I did,” Kimmel told him. “I did it to George Clooney and Hugh Laurie.” After playing a clip from that moment of a past sketch with the two actors, the host finished the segment.
Now, obviously, Kimmel — who is hosting DeGeneres colleague George W. Bush on his show this Wednesday night — is not Anderson Cooper or Oprah Winfrey. And an evening comedy show isn’t necessarily the best place to address DeGeneres ’allegations, which included misconduct from its main producers and the hostess herself accused of being secretly “One of the liveliest people alive.” But so that it doesn’t even show up, it reveals what celebrities tend to cover for their famous friends when low-level staff are abused.
And it also raises the question of whether DeGeneres only accepted the appearance on the condition that his scandal be ignored — or if he only knew it would be.
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