She’s Ellen, and She’s a Comedian

The bit has nothing to do with being gay, or being a gay sitcom star, or being a former gay sitcom star turned network TV outcast.

What Ellen DeGeneres can’t understand is why shampoo bottles come with directions. Whom is this for? Someone raised in the wild, by wolves? And why a 1-800 number on the back of the bottle? Does it connect you to some shampoo trouble-shooter, a woman who spends her day telling anxious callers: “I’m going to stop you--did you wet your hair first?”

It is a joke DeGeneres might have told in the old days, when she was a skilled observational comic and a rising TV star. Today, of course, she is the lesbian celebrity who made TV history, and jokes about shampoo bottles, however witty and consistent with her stand-up past, can seem like so much small talk.

Two years after the cancellation of “Ellen,” her ABC sitcom, and her public condemnation of the homophobic forces that she said led to her show’s demise after five seasons, DeGeneres has a pilot deal at CBS and an HBO special to shoot this summer, an hour of stand-up comedy that has her back in the clubs.

Lately, she’s been working on material at LunaPark in West Hollywood. In a sense, LunaPark is a safe haven--supper club atmosphere for the “we-don’t-even-own-a-TV” crowd--but at some point DeGeneres does have to be funny. The appearances are barely publicized, but standing-room-only crowds show up, from celebrity friends (Lily Tomlin, Kathy Najimy, Melissa Etheridge) to fans who line up in the rain--and who, once inside, are eager for something political, hooting any time DeGeneres even casually refers to her sexuality.

For DeGeneres, such energy is a mixed bag. Personally, she says, she’s never been more comfortable in her own skin. But professionally things are more unresolved.

The end of “Ellen” was followed by sporadic film work, most notably a supporting role in last year’s “edTV,” but DeGeneres hasn’t been heard from as a comedian since the cancellation of her show, when she left prime time amid criticism that her personal life had bled lethally into her comedy. Her return to stand-up is more loaded than it might otherwise be. Is she coming back as the sharp-witted observational comedian she’s always been or the outspoken gay celebrity she suddenly became--the woman who announced, in December of 1998, that she and her companion, actress Anne Heche, had had enough of the Hollywood fishbowl life and were decamping, sans handlers, to Ojai?

Even some of DeGeneres’ friends believe she needs to address these confluence of messages onstage, to give the audience a sense of who she is and where she’s been.

“It doesn’t need to be boring or didactic or one-sided or bitter,” says Najimy, who’s attended two of the LunaPark shows. “It can be funny and it can be enlightening.”

‘Everybody’s Got So Many Different Expectations’

DeGeneres isn’t so sure. Mostly, she wants to remind people that she can be very funny about things like shampoo and health food stores and why some people--including physicist Stephen Hawking--really shouldn’t talk during sex. The HBO special, she says, is “the only way to refocus people.”

In her still-evolving act, the marriage of public expectation and artistic intention is so far best glimpsed in a story DeGeneres tells about being out of cheese. She goes to the market, only to discover that it, too, is out of cheese. She causes a fuss, the manager is summoned, someone gets sprayed with a produce hose, someone else slips and breaks his leg, and the next day the headline in the paper reads: “Lesbian Demands Cheese, Causes Riot.”

“The truth is, I’ve saved people’s lives,” DeGeneres, 42, says, speaking by telephone the morning after one of her shows. “But I’m really just a comedian. That’s all I am. So it’s a very awkward place. Everybody’s got so many different expectations of me.”

“I don’t have the advantage of being Jerry Seinfeld and walking onstage and you’re already laughing,” she says in a subsequent conversation. “It’s harder than being totally anonymous. It’s coming onstage with some baggage attached, and helping the audience disintegrate whatever reputation there is that precedes me.”

At the end of April, DeGeneres appears at an “Equality Rocks” concert in Washington, D.C., then embarks on a three-month stand-up tour that ends in New York City in July, where she tapes the HBO special. Heche will be along for the ride, filming DeGeneres for a documentary that the couple plans to shop as either a TV or theatrical release.

On its face, the project suggests that there is still interest in DeGeneres as both a performer and as a gay icon. And yet, DeGeneres is also hoping mainstream audiences will separate the two, not holding one aspect of her life accountable in the other. It’s a dance the comedian thought she could pull off when she came out as a lesbian in life and then on “Ellen”; while DeGeneres became an exalted political symbol for gay rights groups, viewership for her show deteriorated, an erosion that many in the TV business, including skittish executives at Disney-owned ABC, attributed to the jarring creative direction the sitcom took.

Indeed, in the wake of “Ellen,” other sitcoms, including NBC’s “Will & Grace” and ABC’s since-canceled “Oh, Grow Up,” have ventured gay lead characters, but those shows, one could argue, learned a lesson “Ellen” taught them: You can make casual jokes about being gay, but press the issue at your own peril.

DeGeneres remains proud of the coming-out event and the episodes that followed (“Someday people will look back and understand what a great season that was,” she says), but, she concedes, “there’s a digestion period that I didn’t allow everyone to have.”

Sitcom Pilot Set to Be Shot in April

The likable comedian--and not the political symbol--is whom CBS and the Artists Television Group got into business with last year, when they signed DeGeneres to produce a pilot for the network. For all the talk of the comedian being on the outside of the Hollywood system, CBS and ATG, the production arm of Michael Ovitz’s recently formed management company, signed her to a “blind pilot” commitment--meaning they committed to making the pilot without a script in hand.

The project, which ATG says is scheduled to be shot in April for a potential place on CBS’ fall 2000 lineup, is noteworthy for how it navigates DeGeneres’ self-described “baggage.” Positioned as a cross between “The Carol Burnett Show” and “The Larry Sanders Show,” DeGeneres plays the host of a sketch-variety show, with stories playing out behind the scenes. The series is a risk for various reasons, but the media’s interest in it has coalesced, predictably, around one question: Will you be gay?

“I’m playing me, so I will be gay because, as you’ve heard, I am” is how DeGeneres handled the question in January at a semi-annual gathering of television reporters in Pasadena, where DeGeneres appeared with actress Sharon Stone and Heche to promote their short film contribution to the HBO movie “If These Walls Could Talk 2”--in which DeGeneres and Stone play a lesbian couple using a sperm bank to conceive.

Two months later, DeGeneres is content letting that response stand, adding: “I think some people will jump to the extreme of, ‘She’s going to [have] a gay agenda.’ And then there’s the other extreme: ‘She’s learned her lessons.’ I’ve learned some lessons but that’s not going to change who I am.”

Asked if she considered going back on the air as the “out” star of a conventional sitcom, DeGeneres says conventional sitcoms no longer interest her. What interested her, she says, was the challenge of doing a prime-time variety show with funny sketches, modeled after “Carol Burnett”--a show, by the way, where the actors’ sexuality hardly mattered.

“It allows no single character to be her persona,” says one veteran TV executive, assessing the viability of the show. “And it allows her to be at the center of a lot of commotion and craziness, which she does well as a comedian.”

Getting Past Gay, Bitter to the Laughs

Tim Doyle was the executive producer of “Ellen” during its final season and worked with DeGeneres on the pilot, though he’s no longer attached to the project. (Mitch Hurwitz, DeGeneres’ current executive producer, declined to comment for this article.)

“For all the world she would love to make my parents laugh again,” Doyle says. But he also sees the inherent dilemma for a comedian who became so out-sized as a social figure that people forgot she was funny.

“She’s trying to reinvent herself for a mass audience,” he says. “If she ignores the gay thing, then she’s essentially denying the single-most familiar part of her identity now. . . . It’s the only thing the press is going to ask, and Ellen loses sight of that sometimes.”

Back at LunaPark, DeGeneres is not talking about any of this. She is talking instead about sports utility vehicles.

“How come every time I drive my Land Cruiser into an underground parking lot, I duck?” she wonders.

Afterward, she holds a Q&A; with the audience, soliciting their input about her material, fielding questions. A cynic might look at this and see a comedian angling for more validation, but DeGeneres says she actually used to do this, when she was at the height of her popularity as a stand-up comic. Back then, DeGeneres lived in fear that during such an encore somebody in the audience would out her--in effect seeing through the observational comedian to the gay person hiding underneath.

“I just knew someone was going to go, ‘Are you gay?’ ” DeGeneres remembers.

Today, DeGeneres needs people to see past the lesbian and back to the comic, and the questions from the audience are not “Are you gay?” but “Are you bitter?” DeGeneres has been bitter before, at least publicly, when in the wake of her sitcom’s cancellation she lashed out at ABC, saying in a 1998 Times interview that she couldn’t even watch the news on ABC.

But in the last couple of years, DeGeneres says, in the absence of regular work, she’s been reading self-help books like “Conversations With God,” “The Art of Doing Nothing” and “The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom,” which is full of easier-said-than-done life lessons, written by Don Miguel Ruiz and based on the ancient Mexican Toltec wisdom.

That book’s Second Agreement: “Don’t Take Anything Personally.”

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“It’s harder than being totally anonymous. It’s coming onstage with some baggage attached.” ELLEN DeGENERES