Ellen DeGeneres branded ‘the c-word’ by former writer who reveals how disgraced star seethed when audience WAVED at her

Ellen DeGeneres is a ‘c-word’ who was left ‘seething’ by a harmless misunderstanding involving her talk show’s studio audience, a former writer said.  

‘She was rough,’ former Ellen DeGeneres Show joke writer Greg Fitzsimmons told fellow comedians Mark Normand and Sam Morril on the ‘We Might Be Drunk’ podcast Tuesday. ‘She was the C-word,’ he added, censoring himself.

Fitzsimmons, 59, further remembered how DeGeneres, 67, offered him a role as a warmup guy comic during the show’s first season in 2003, after impressing her during his first month.

‘She said, ‘Greg, you’re going to do it,” the actor added. 

‘And I was like, “I don’t want to be the warmup guy on a daytime talk show,” he remembered. ‘And they were like, ‘Well it’s an extra four grand a week and it’s 10 minutes a day.”

But Fitzsimmons said the decision was one he came to regret.

In one instance, Fitzsimmons recalled how he told the live-studio audience to do a ‘wave’ any time he said the word ‘banana’ during his set. By coincidence, the same word was also in DeGeneres’s script that day. 

She was left confused and perturbed when the audience waved at her unexpectedly, then ordered them to stop and was left ‘seething’ when it happened a second time. 

‘Now, she hasn’t seen the warmup. So she says banana, and the crowd does the wave,’ he said. ‘She’s a control freak, so this is like the worst thing that could ever happen. 

‘She stops and goes “Okay, that’s weird. Whatever that was, don’t do that,”‘ Fitzsimmons – who has also written for The Chelsea Handler Show, Lucky Louie, and Politically Incorrect w/ Bill Maher – continued.

He detailed how when DeGeneres said banana a second time, the crowd repeated the wave.

‘Finally, I just go up on stage and I explain to her what happened,’ he recalled. ‘And she was f**king seething.’  

‘I thought, ‘Alright, I’m getting fired for that.’ And I didn’t, but then everything got weird and we started winning Emmys,’ he said. ‘I won four Emmys on the show, but that made things bad.’

This was around 2004, around two years after DeGeneres’s sitcom career ended. DeGeneres’s chat show was first embroiled in a bullying scandal in 2020. It ended in 2022 after anecdotes about DeGenere’s alleged meanness continued to emerge.

She denied knowledge of what was going on at the show, despite being an executive producer on it and earning an estimated $77-million-a-year from it.  

Earlier this week, the Daily Mail revealed a host of explosive allegations about behind the scenes goings on DeGeneres’ now-defunct daytime show, as told by a former staffer.  

The source described a similar sense of fear from DeGeneres’s employees, as well as a prank played by them in an attempt to mock her allegedly childish behavior.  

Fitzsimmons says DeGeneres  grew more temperamental as her success increased and believes she became ‘mean because she was back on top.’ He went on to take a job from Jimmy Kimmel and Adam Carolla as a lead writer on The Man Show after working for DeGeneres.

Carolla, now a podcaster, recalled staffers being ‘scared, real scared’ during his two guest spots on DeGeneres’s daytime show during a podcast appearance just last month.

Fitzsimmons – the recipient of four Daytime Emmys for his time on the Ellen Show – similarly recalled ‘this process [from DeGeneres] of pushing people out of the circle’.

‘You want to be in the circle because there is a lot of fear going on. So you’re in or out,’ he said.

 For Fitzsimmons, he said it didn’t ‘really bother me that much’ – since he was so seasoned.

Others, however, were having a harder time, he said.

‘I had written on a lot of shows before, and I knew what it was like to have tough bosses. I wrote for Bill Maher. I was tough enough, but then there were these first-time writers who cried. It was a lot of crying always,’ Fitzsimmons, the host of Fitzdog Radio on Howard Stern’s SiriusXM, said.

He then referenced DeGeneres’s recent move out to the UK following her show’s cancellation when asked about any prospective pushback he may now face.

‘I think she’s out of the country. I don’t really care,’ he joked.

DeGeneres, after making the move with wife Portia De Rossi, admitted last month that despite the bevy of claims surrounding her show, she misses hosting.

‘I mean, I wish it did,’ she told the BBC of what she framed as the daytime talk show format no longer working

‘Because I would do the same thing here.

‘I would love to do that again, but I just feel like people are watching on their phones, or people aren’t really paying attention as much to televisions, because we’re so inundated with information and entertainment,’ she explained.

Reps for DeGeneres did not respond to a Daily Mail request for comment.