The Comedian Behind the Viral Mean Ellen Twitter Thread Celebrates Its Appearance in Her Special

It’s been a few days since Ellen DeGeneres’ newest/supposedly last-ever stand-up special hit Netflix, but some of us are still processing it. 

After all, there’s a lot to unpack in Ellen DeGeneres: For Your Approval, especially in its first few minutes. The opening sequence finds Ellen seemingly hallucinating her entire media history, before ultimately being swallowed up by a cyclone of negative headlines about her toxic workplace behavior, which were apparently torn out of newspapers from, like, the ‘70s? Do they know that Ellen wasn’t brought down by Woodward and Bernstein?

The special illustrates that the backlash against Ellen began with a tweet, which asked people to respond with “the most insane stories you’ve heard about Ellen being mean.” It was a real post, but For Your Approval made sure to obscure the text noting that the user would donate funds to the L.A. Food Bank for each response.

Although they blurred out his name and replaced his avatar, the original 2020 Tweet was posted by comedian Kevin T. Porter, who currently hosts the Good Christian Fun podcast, and previously co-hosted the excellent Gilmore Guys. And he seems to be viewing the tweet’s inclusion in the special as an inspirational social media story, posting, “Never let anyone tell you posting can’t change the world” in response to the video.

As Porter told Metro.co.uk back in 2021, he wasn’t trying to damage the “notoriously” mean talk show host, he was merely trying to find a funny way to do something positive in the early days of the pandemic (he ended up raising $600 for the food bank). “We were about two weeks into the lockdown, and a lot of my friends were doing kind of interesting, creative things to raise money for different charities,” Porter explained. “So my version of that was to do the thread on Twitter because I thought it would be funny.”

While Porter initially assumed that he would end up receiving only “super niche replies from the L.A. comedy scene,” the thread quickly went viral. The veracity of the stories shared online obviously couldn’t be proven, but it was the spark that led to more journalistic investigations into the behind-the-scenes drama at Ellen. And Porter also pointed out that the “consistency” of the stories being posted made the claims hard to dismiss.

Plus, the thread earned Porter a follow from My Favorite Murder host, and former head writer for Ellen, Karen Kilgariff, which he saw as “confirmation that there was some credibility to the claims.” Kilgariff told Marc Maron in 2014 that DeGeneres was a “great” boss — that is, until the writers strike of 2007, when Ellen continued doing the show, and Kilgariff ended up leaving Ellen as a result of the “painful” experience (according to some reports, she was “fired” by Ellen for refusing to cross the picket line).

Or as Ellen might put it, “You wouldn’t expect Ronald McDonald to respect United States labor laws.” (Hold for approximately 240 seconds of applause).

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