Putting Anger Aside for Laughs

The end has come at last. Finally, ABC’s “Ellen” is over, complete, finished in first run, about to become dust.

After tonight, no longer will we have Ellen DeGeneres’ loathsome personal lifestyle regularly thrust at us. You know full well the aberrant, dysfunctional, repugnant behavior I’m speaking of--a mode of conduct that promotes something vile and alien that America’s sweet, innocent children should not be exposed to or even hear.

Constant grousing.

Yes, her persistent grumbling, protesting, kvetching, even whining about her show’s removal from prime time.

The sitcom I go for. Always have during the last couple of years, even throughout her character’s coming-out-as-a-lesbian period that some of DeGeneres’ other admirers have found preachy and relatively humorless. Not I. Perhaps they’ll recall her more fondly after tonight’s creative, extremely witty hourlong finale written by executive producer Tim Doyle.

It’s DeGeneres’ sniping at ABC for canceling “Ellen,” not her show, that has grated mightily of late, peaking with this month’s Entertainment Weekly magazine cover story (“I was fired basically because I’m gay,” she again insisted) and last week’s emotional chat with Diane Sawyer on ABC’s “PrimeTime Live,” during which DeGeneres, in effect, applied the impolite H-word--homophobe--to those who control that network.

Well, who’s to say? Canceling “Ellen” does erase from prime time a hot-button comedy whose historic lesbian protagonist, Ellen Morgan, is as conventional as any other American, except for her wisecracking mouth and sexual orientation. Her basic ordinariness is what has terrified anti-gay bigots, who prefer homosexuals to be fatter targets, as in outrageously broad, stereotypical and threatening to the straight universe.

And wasn’t it the same Disney-owned network this season that aborted “Nothing Sacred” before that controversial first-year series could air episodes on a gay Catholic priest with AIDS and another about a teenage boy being molested by a priest?

Life definitely will be quieter for ABC and Disney without these two series, and it wouldn’t be shocking to learn that anti-gay aromas mingle with the other biases inside those executive suites.

From the perspective of network programmers, though, low ratings alone are justification for the kibosh. Just as scrawny Nielsens were lethal to “Nothing Sacred,” so, too, were DeGeneres’ own ratings close to being a stake in the heart of “Ellen,” her average audience this season falling to about a third of the whopping 36.2 million viewers who watched the landmark coming-out episode last season, airing right after DeGeneres had disclosed her own lesbianism.

Some of the show’s most myopic critics attribute the audience plunge entirely to its new lesbian theme, wherein Ellen immediately began awkwardly tapping her new sexual awareness (why wouldn’t she?) and soon acquired a girlfriend--a single mother played by Lisa Darr, whom she even kissed on the lips. Yikes!

“The 250 million people who live between New York and Los Angeles don’t share the same values as those espoused on ‘Ellen,’ ” crowed Mark Honig, executive director of the watchdog Parents Television Council, after “Ellen” was canceled.

He’s saying that we watch only comedies whose values we share? Tell that to committed viewers of NBC’s “Seinfeld,” whose basically nasty, self-obsessed characters have spent nine years leading empty lives and having no values other than hedonism. And tell it to gay viewers who watch heterosexual comedies, even ones where there is kissing on the lips--hold your hats--by opposite sexes.

America watches comedy it finds funny. Period. In any case, series whose ratings dive as dramatically as those of “Ellen” are always a good bet for cancellation.

At least “Ellen” continues to leave deep footprints by bowing out memorably, giving such other departing comedies as CBS’ “Murphy Brown” and, of course, the colossus that captured the planet, “Seinfeld,” something to shoot at.

The documentary-style finale, with Linda Ellerbee interviewing DeGeneres as the latter mutters droll throwaways that introduce flashbacks, holds its lesbian references to the end, with DeGeneres ultimately delivering this message about the debate over her show’s gayness: “Twenty years from now, it’s gonna be a big fat so-what!” She’s right--our nature being to suffer through these extended palpitations before the epiphany finally hits. But it will hit.

With that in mind, tonight’s double-sized episode is at once a sendup of Hollywood tributes and a spoof of so-called groundbreaking entertainment from the 1930s to the present, interspersed with fibbing testimonials from “Ellen” regulars Joely Fisher, Jeremy Piven and Clea Lewis and celebrities from Glenn Close and Tim Conway to Diahann Carroll and Phil Donahue.

Although the testimonials largely don’t work, nearly everything else does, including DeGeneres’ “recollections” of her vaudeville days as a ventriloquist with her dummy, Knuckles.

“Didn’t you go to school, stupid?”

“Yes, and I came out the same way.”

And when no one in the cheesy club laughs: “Are you an audience or an oil painting?”

Let’s hear it also for a black-and-white homage to the famous grape-stomping scene in “I Love Lucy,” with DeGeneres as you-know-who and Piven bursting in as high-pitched Ricky: “Ellen, you got some ‘splaining to do!”

Also for the DeGeneres-hosted game show of the red-scare ‘50s, “Who’s the Commie?” And for DeGeneres and Woody Harrelson in a ‘50s-style paternalistic sitcom in which the condescending husband pats his wife on the head when she wants to buy IBM stock (“No, no, silly. You leave investments to me”) because he wants to invest in asbestos.

Yet even more inspired is a howl of a sequence recalling the screen tests that Cindy Crawford, Helen Hunt, Jada Pinkett Smith, Julianna Margulies and Christine Lahti did when supposedly auditioning for the “Ellen” pilot.

A good comedy makes you laugh, a great one does that while also taking you places you haven’t been. For at least a bit of its 3 1/2-season run, “Ellen” was great and never, never an oil painting.

* “Ellen” airs at 9 tonight on ABC (Channel 7).