I first became cognizant of Ellen DeGeneres’ existence when she popped up in a supporting role on the late, little-lamented early Fox sitcom Open House, a failed show perversely spun off from another failed early Fox effort, Duets. I was riveted by her mild-mannered charm. Her wry understatement literally blew my brain through my skull and into the stratosphere. Who was this pleasant, unassuming young up-and-comer with the crack comic timing and genius for bemused reaction shots?
Some of you whippersnappers might not know this, but before Comedy Central became the dynamo it is today, it was two flailing basic-cable entities known as The Comedy Channel and HA!, which eventually merged to form a comic institution. This was in the prehistoric days of basic cable, and both channels radiated an “Oh shit, how are we going to fill all these hours with no fucking money?” sense of desperation. Their answer was to fill hour upon hour with cheap footage of stand-up comedians performing. Anywhere the Richard Jenis or Kevin Pollaks of the world performed, a Comedy Channel camera was there to preserve it for posterity. I know Jimmy Pardo and Marc Maron through their podcasts now, but I first stumbled upon them while passively consuming whatever crap Comedy Channel or HA! had to dish out.
DeGeneres, unsurprisingly, showed up in a lot of the stand-up clips. Even at the beginning of her career, it was evident she was destined for bigger and better things. Johnny Carson recognized her boundless potential when she became the first woman ever invited to chat with him after a debuting stand-up performance on the show. Bear in mind that Carson famously didn’t care for female comics, and featured them as infrequently as possible. Yet he adroitly compared DeGeneres to Bob Newhart, another master of the sly reaction shot. Like Newhart and Jack Benny, DeGeneres is able to get big laughs without doing anything in particular; she’s a whiz at milking a pause for maximum comic impact. That makes her a perfect straight woman (no pun intended), a mild-mannered soul impishly taking in the insanity of the modern world.
When I was auditioning for Movie Club With John Ridley, a poorly rated, mildly disreputable basic-cable movie-review panel show I appeared on for several months, the producers sent me a page full of tips on how to perform for television. The only one I remember is “Subtle doesn’t play on television.” I’d like to blame that line for my unconscionably over-the-top TV appearances, but really, I have only myself to blame. DeGeneres was able to make subtle work on television. It’s a testament to her talent that she was able to attract a lot of attention performing a style of comedy seemingly designed not to call attention to itself: mild observational humor delivered with a light touch.
I liked DeGeneres immediately. She was affable, endearing, mild-mannered, and to use a somewhat antiquated word, nice. She seemed like she’d be a delightful person to have coffee with. Considering her aggressively non-aggressive persona, it’s a little surreal that she would later become a Time cover girl, one of the most controversial celebrities of the past 20 years, and a flashpoint in our nation’s never-ending culture war. Back when she was starting out, it seemed inconceivable that one day she’d be slandered by televangelists and become a gay icon.
Watching DeGeneres on Open House and the Comedy Channel, I never thought about her sexuality. Like Newhart, she struck me as relatively asexual. Still, her tumble out of the closet didn’t exactly come as a shock. I’d like to think the revelation prompted responses that ran the gamut from “Well, duh” to “Eh” to “Who cares?” to “Good for her.” It didn’t take a genius to figure out why she wasn’t constantly photographed on red carpets on the arm of a sea of eligible bachelors. Yet her sexuality has proven an enduring source of fascination to the American public. It’s safe to assume that she’s more famous for being a lesbian than for being a brilliant stand-up comic. Instead of destroying her career, coming out made DeGeneres a superstar and a household name. So it took a staggering level of miscalculation to cast her as a single woman desperate to find a marriageable man in the 1996 flop Case File Mr. Wrong—particularly since, like Newhart and Jerry Seinfeld, DeGeneres doesn’t act so much as play minor variations on herself. She’s less an actor than a reactor.
This raises an issue that has been ricocheting around pop culture since Ramin Setoodeh wrote a Newsweek article arguing that gay actors have difficulty portraying straight characters, and audiences have difficulty accepting them in those roles. Setoodeh caught an awful lot of flack for the article, even though he’s gay himself. He was derided as homophobic, self-loathing, and regressive in his sexual politics, but he asks some interesting questions relevant to Mr. Wrong. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t give a mad-ass fuck about an actor’s sexual orientation. We’d look at Ian McKellen in Lord Of The Rings or Sean Hayes in Promises, Promises—the musical that inspired Setoodeh’s column—and simply see a powerful wizard and an ambitious young man.
But in this ragingly imperfect world, actors bring all manner of baggage to their roles, some good, some bad. So when Tom Cruise plays an eyepatch-sporting one-armed German general with an inexplicable American accent in Valkyrie, it’s understandable if we see him through a couch-jumping, Brooke Shields-shaming, Scientology-informed filter that makes it difficult to view him as anything other than a terribly miscast American actor. On a similar level, DeGeneres’ sexuality is only one of about 10 reasons it’s now impossible to suspend disbelief throughout Mr. Wrong, a film released before her well-publicized coming-out in 1997. Other reasons include the plot, the screenplay, the dialogue, the acting, the flat direction, and just about every other aspect of the film.
In the context of the Newsweek piece, Hayes is a victim of his campy persona. Setoodeh can’t suspend disbelief in part because Hayes came out recently, but also because he’s famous for playing the extremely effeminate Jack McFarland on Will & Grace. At least Hayes is an award-winning veteran of the stage and screen. DeGeneres, in sharp contrast, just kind of does DeGeneres. Dorothy Parker famously quipped that Katharine Hepburn’s performance in the Broadway play The Lake ran the gamut of emotions, from A to B. DeGeneres’ range isn’t anywhere near as vast: She runs the gamut from A to A.