Everything adds up for Ellen DeGeneres

July 27, 2018 5 AM PT

Ellen DeGeneres has millions of reasons to smile and laugh — and millions of fans to smile and laugh along with her. The most consistently successful and popular female comedy star of her generation, and the host of one of daytime TV’s most popular shows, DeGeneres may hold the record as the most popular stand-up comedian who hasn’t done a stand-up comedy tour in a very long time. How long? A full 15 years, to be exact. But that’s about to change, starting in San Diego.

Not so fast!

On June 14, DeGeneres announced a three-city summer stand-up comedy tour, which kicks off Aug. 10-12 at San Diego’s Balboa Theater. Those shows sold out in an instant, as did her dates in San Francisco and Seattle, where her special will be filmed for a Netflix special.

Ka-ching!

Netflix is paying DeGeneres $20 million for her stand-up comedy special. That’s the most ever paid to a female comedian for a stand-up special. No wonder she’s smiling and laughing so much! Then again, DeGeneres’ earnings for this year alone have been estimated at $87.5 million by Forbes magazine, which in July designated her as the world’s 15^th highest paid celebrity.

Queen of clicks

How big a deal is Ellen DeGeneres on social media? Let us count the followers.

Facebook: 29,355,746

Instagram: 52.5 million

Twitter: 76,059,348

The Ellen files

Ellen Lee DeGeneres, 60, is a Louisiana native who lives in Beverly Hills with her wife of 10 years, actress Portia de Rossi.
A staunch champion of LGBT rights and gender equality, DeGeneres is a vegan and a skilled ping-pong player.
She provided the voice of Dory the fish in the hit animated film Finding Nemo.
She was a finalist for the role of Phoebe on the TV series Friends.
In her pre-fame days, DeGeneres’ day jobs included shucking oysters, painting houses, selling vacuum cleaners and being a waitress at TGI Fridays.
She is Madonna’s 11^th cousin. No, really.

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George Varga

San Diego Union-Tribune music critic George Varga began drumming in rock bands at 12 and writing professionally about music at 15. A Louisiana native who grew up mostly in Germany, Varga has earned three Pulitzer Prize nominations for his writing at the U-T and is a voting member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In addition to providing live coverage of the Grammy Awards and festivals from Coachella and KAABOO to the 1994 edition of Woodstock, he has interviewed everyone from Miles Davis, Britney Spears and (over a game of chess) Ray Charles to Willie Nelson, Kanye West and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Anthony Davis. A triple first prize-winner for criticism and arts writing at the 2022 and 2023 San Diego Press Club awards and a double first prize-winner at the 2022 and 2023 San Diego Society of Professional Journalists awards, Varga is also a contributing writer for Jazz Times magazine and has written for Billboard, Spin and other publications. After attending San Diego City College and San Diego State University, he created and taught the 2002 UC San Diego Extension course, “Jazz in a Post-Ken-Burns World.” Varga has written liner notes for more than a dozen albums, including by jazz sax greats James Moody and Michael Brecker, and contributed two chapters to the book, “Dylan: Disc By Disc.”