Ellen DeGeneres Cancels Upcoming Shows on Her Stand-Up Tour

In June, Ellen DeGeneres commenced her Ellen’s Last Stand… Up tour, planning to stop in a number of cities while she addresses her public cancelation after her show faced allegations of sexual misconduct and a toxic workplace environment. But now, it’s being reported that DeGeneres has pulled the plug on some performances, including shows in Dallas, San Francisco, Seattle, and Chicago. 

According to Ticketmaster, tickets are no longer available for those events. “Unfortunately, the Event Organizer has had to cancel your event,” it says in a statement on the website. “You don’t need to do a thing. We’ll issue a refund to the original method of payment used at time of purchase, as soon as funds are received from the Event Organizer. It should appear on your account within 14-21 days.”

Representatives for DeGeneres and Live Nation didn’t immediately respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment. There are still tickets available on the website for other dates.

Back in April, DeGeneres started performing her stand-up routine to small audiences in Los Angeles after hinting that she was working on new material. DeGeneres has opened up about her former talk show, her time away from the spotlight, and how she says she got “kicked out of show business” twice — once when she came out on national television in her self-titled 1990s sitcom, and a second time in 2020 “for being mean.”

“The ‘be kind’ girl wasn’t kind,” she said. “I became this one-dimensional character who gave stuff away and danced up steps. Do you know how hard it is to dance up steps? Would a mean person dance up steps? Had I ended my show by saying, ‘Go fuck yourself,’ people would’ve been pleasantly surprised.”

At the time, DeGeneres told the audience that she was going to film a Netflix special when she went on tour, which Netflix confirmed in May. 

“To answer the questions everyone is asking me – Yes, I’m going to talk about it. Yes this is my last special. Yes, Portia really is that pretty in real life,” DeGeneres said in a press release.

The last few years have been rough for DeGeneres. Her public image took a hit in 2020 following a series of reports by BuzzFeed News in which employees at her long-running Ellen DeGeneres Show alleged racism, sexual misconduct, and intimidation at the hands of executive producers. Three top producers were fired in the fallout, and DeGeneres issued an on-air apology. (While she stated that she had been unaware of the toxic work culture, she acknowledged that “I’m in a position of privilege and power and […] I take responsibility for what happens at my show.”)

Still, the show — and her popularity — seemed not to recover. After 19 seasons, The Ellen DeGeneres Show came to an end in May 2022.  Since then, DeGeneres has mostly laid low, save for a 2023 Discovery Channel documentary, Saving the Gorillas: Ellen’s Next Adventure, and some routine social media activity.