Margaret Cho has had many run-ins with Ellen DeGeneres — more than DeGeneres claims to remember, apparently. In a recent interview, Cho said that DeGeneres had been “not nice” to her and acted like they didn’t have history.
“Ellen was, like, really weird and not nice to me for most of my career,” Cho said on a new episode of The Kelly Mantle Show. “I opened for her in the 1980s, when she was a headliner in comedy clubs, [and] later, when I would do her talk show in the 2000s, she acted like we just met. And I’m like, ‘Bitch, what?’ Like, that’s weird. We go way back. … It’s so creepy and weird.”
Cho also recalled hearing that David Bowie spent part of an Ellen DeGeneres Show interview praising the “giant Chinese emperor outfit” Cho had worn to his concert the night before — and that DeGeneres left those comments on the cutting room floor.
“The producer, who’s a really good friend of mine, had to call me and tell me, ‘I can’t believe she did this, but she cut it out of the show. But you need to know that he was going on and on about your outfit. He loves you. God said your name,’” Cho said.
Cho told Mantle she thought that omission was “so rude” but conceded DeGeneres might have cut Bowie’s comments for time. “But still, I’m going to take it personally, just because I decided to,” she quipped.
Other celebrities spoke out about DeGeneres in 2020, after Ellen staffers alleged that her talk show had a toxic workplace culture riddled by racism, intimidation, and sexual harassment.
In a now-unavailable tweet, Everybody Loves Raymond alum Brad Garrett alleged that the alleged toxicity came “from the top” at Ellen and that it was “common knowledge” that DeGeneres treated people “horribly,” per People.
Back to the Future actor Lea Thompson vouched for Garrett’s statement, tweeting, “True story. It is.”
That same year, Cho gave her take on the Ellen controversy on the Hot Takes & Deep Dives podcast. “She definitely is scary,” the comedian said at the time. “I’m still scared of Ellen. … Everybody should be scared of Ellen.”
Back in 2016, comic Kathy Griffin said in her book Celebrity Run-Ins: My A–Z Index that she was “almost positive a certain beloved daytime talk show host once had [her] kicked out of a backstage dressing room at the Emmy Awards,” per Us Weekly.
Griffin added, “I can’t prove it, but this person, who has short [blond] hair, has a mean streak that all of Hollywood knows about.”
DeGeneres reflected on her talk show’s controversy and her public persona in her 2024 stand-up special, Ellen DeGeneres: For Your Approval. “Yeah, the ‘be kind’ girl wasn’t kind, that was the headline,” she said, per Entertainment Weekly. “Here’s the problem: I’m a comedian who got a talk show and I ended the show every day by saying, ‘Be kind to one another.’ Had I ended my show by saying, ‘Go f*** yourselves,’ people would’ve been pleasantly surprised to find out I’m kind.”
She continued, “I didn’t go into this business for money. It was about healing my childhood wounds. I thought if I could make people happy, then they’ll like me. And if they like me, I’ll feel good about myself. All I can say about that is, thank God for the money.”