Comic's hellish Ellen DeGeneres gig: How one word made her blow her top

A stand-up comedian who worked for Ellen DeGeneres said success caused turmoil between DeGeneres and her staff.

Comedian Greg Fitzsimmons said he worked on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" in its first two years. The daytime talk show ran for 19 seasons from 2003 to 2022.

Fitzsimmons was hired as a writer and said he and other staff worked for about a month without DeGeneres before the show launched to figure out the upcoming format. Describing the feeling with the host as "good energy" with pranks and a ping-pong table, Fitzsimmons said that feeling changed when DeGeneres joined the production.

'She's a control freak.'

"She was rough. She was the 'C-word,'" Fitzsimmons said on the "We Might Be Drunk" podcast.

Wave bye-bye

Fitzsimmons said he took on the role of audience "warm-up guy" because DeGeneres selected him, and he agreed because he is already a stand-up comedian and enjoyed the extra pay on top of his writer's salary.

While Fitzsimmons told podcast hosts Mark Normand and Sam Morril he felt like a hack for doing cheesy material to warm up the crowd of "closeted Midwestern housewives," the very first day he came out before DeGeneres, he set her off.

Fitzsimmons recalled telling the crowd, "I go, 'All right, let's do the wave.' I said, 'When I say banana, you guys just do the wave.'"

"So I say 'banana,' and they do the wave, and we all laugh. ... Then [Ellen] comes out to do the monologue, and what I had forgotten was that the word 'banana' was in the monologue. And now she hasn't seen the warm-up," Fitzsimmons recalled.

"Oh no," Normand reacted.

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Victoria Sirakova/Rick Kern/Ulstein Bild Dtl./Getty Images

'Control freak'

After DeGeneres attempted the monologue multiple times, with the crowd reacting to "banana" with the wave, Fitzsimmons said he finally went onto the stage to tell her what happened. This was the beginning of the end.

"She's a control freak. So this is like the worst thing that could ever happen," the comedian said about DeGeneres.

After he told her the reason the crowd was doing the wave, Fitzsimmons said DeGeneres "was f**king seething."

"I thought, 'All right, I'm getting fired for that.' But I didn't."

Fitzsimmons said from that point on, "everything got weird," and DeGeneres progressively got worse the more successful the show became.

"We started winning Emmys," the 59-year-old said, noting that he won four of his own. However, it was those accolades that made DeGeneres "start to be mean."

"She was back on top," he explained.

Pitching fits

Host Morril asked for further examples of DeGeneres having an issue with her staff, and Fitzsimmons put it simply: If joke pitches were not in her wheelhouse, DeGeneres "looked at you like you had just f**king stabbed her puppy."

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Greg Fitzsimmons. Photo by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic for Comedy Central

Normand, an edgy comedian who has a rational fear of backlash, asked Fitzsimmons if he has been scared to talk about DeGeneres because of possible retaliation. Fitzsimmons said he really didn't care.

The remarks come at a time when DeGeneres is facing years-old allegations about her treatment of staff.

The former host has not responded to the claims and is reportedly living in the United Kingdom after selling off her Santa Barbara home for a staggering $96 million.

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