Ellen DeGeneres: I expected the Netflix special to be rough. I didn’t expect this.

We're at that stage in the culture wars when comedians exposed for abuse, exploitation, or just being terrible bosses don't even need to mumble a mea culpa when they tape their Netflix specials. Apology tours have become explanation tours, venues for misunderstood multimillionaires to broadcast their side of the story, blithely ignoring any facts that don't fit their version of events.

In the latest, Ellen DeGeneres: For Your Approval, straight America's favorite lesbian tells the adoring crowd at Minneapolis' Orpheum Theatre, one of a string of venues on a recent multicity tour, "I was kicked out of show business." If she'd acknowledged the comedy in that line, it would've been the biggest laugh of the evening. Not that there was much competition.

Deep into the special, while listing the aches and ailments that now afflict her at the age of 66, DeGeneres says she's losing her memory. Apparently, she assumes the same is true of her audience. The show exists so that DeGeneres can address her supposed ejection from the entertainment industry, yet she also seems to think viewers need reminding who the hell she is. Before the stand-up begins, Ellen sits alone in a bare dressing room, staring at her reflection, while a supercut of career highlights flashes by: her TV debut with Johnny Carson, the most famous coming-out episode in TV history (and the astonishing 36 million people who watched it), DeGeneres' own coming out on Oprah, followed by backlash and her sitcom's cancellation. As this lone, slight figure approaches the stage, we see her triumphant comeback—her talk show's success, that famous selfie at the Oscars, receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama, and, in one more twist, devastating revelations that "the queen of nice" might actually be "the queen of mean." The montage switches to chunks of text featuring accusations of misconduct, intimidation, and an abusive work environment; headlines featuring the words "Toxic, Phony, Hypocrite, Liar." DeGeneres closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, shutting out all that negativity. Her arrival on the stage is greeted by a rapturous standing ovation.

A stand-up special is no place to litigate serious accusations of workplace racism, misconduct, and sexual harassment. Still, it's galling to hear DeGeneres, who in 2021 acknowledged and apologized for the problems that arose in the production of her talk show , reduce the issue to people thinking she's mean. She cops to being a bad manager and an "immature boss"—though she sincerely seems to believe that it was fun to chase colleagues around the set as part of a yearslong game of tag and to stage elaborate pranks designed to terrify guests and members of the production crew—but the excuses she offers for her shortcomings are unconvincing. "I didn't go to business school. I went to Charlie's Chuckle Hut," she says. Sure, her name was on billboards and T-shirts, but that didn't mean she had to be in charge. She didn't want that role: "I don't think Ronald McDonald's the CEO of McDonald's." It's a good line, but Ronald McDonald doesn't take home millions of dollars every year. Oh, yeah, and he isn't real.

When she isn't addressing the elephant in the room—and her version is definitely a cute Dumbo of a pachyderm rather than a rampaging wild beast—the humor is so gentle it's positively anemic. There's an actual "Why did the chicken cross the road" gag, along with bits about windshield wipers, parallel parking, and pigeons. It's downright wholesome. As the show's early flashbacks established, DeGeneres always specialized in quiet, observational whimsy. Her delivery is flawless, her timing perfect, but there's an odd disconnect between someone who can hold an audience enraptured with dumb stories about backyard birds yet doesn't seem to realize how alienating it is for her to name-drop Mick Jagger, Usher, and "Portia"—just as she never seemed to realize why people were mad that she took it upon herself to absolve buddy Kevin Hart of his homophobic past or palled around with former President George W. Bush.