Twitter Drags Ellen DeGeneres for Comparing Her Mansion to Jail

Since it’s incredibly unsafe to go outside if you’re not an essential worker these days, many celebrities have been social distancing in their gigantic homes while slowly unraveling. We saw it happen with Gal Gadot and her celebrity friends who decided to sing “Imagine” instead of donating some of their millions, we saw it happen when Vanessa Hudgens went on Instagram Live and said deaths related to coronavirus were “inevitable,” and we’re seeing it again with Ellen DeGeneres.

As part of her new temporary Ellen Show setup, Ellen sat in her living room in front of a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking lush greenery. After giving some “words of encouragement” to her fans, Ellen then compared her new normal to being in jail.

She first joked, “Today, I am filming this in my living room because it has the best light and sound and all the other rooms in my house are filled with toilet paper.” Then she added, “This is like being in jail. Mostly because I’ve been wearing the same clothes for 10 days and everyone in here is gay.”

Obviously, this is a tone-deaf comment to make at any time, but it’s especially grating now as inmates have an increased risk of catching coronavirus and feel like “sitting ducks.” One man at a facility in Louisiana even told NPR, “They have not done anything to isolate anybody here! At all! People are still coughing every night, man! There are a bunch of sickly people in this camp! I just pray something happens soon!” Surely, that’s not what’s happening in whichever mansion Ellen decided to social distance and film her daily talk show in. Just a hunch!

Predictably, after people watched this segment, they dragged Ellen for the comparison, making this one of the many times in recent memory that people were not laughing along with her. (Remember the Dakota Johnson interview and when she hung out with George W. Bush?)

One Variety writer Caroline Framke tweeted, “What a great look for Ellen as thousands of people sit in actual jail cells just hoping for the best without soap and basic protection,” as others said, “Ellen really is the worst” and “People are dying, I’m afraid to leave my house every day but I have to, but okay, go off, Ellen. Social isolation is bad, stressful, and causes increased depression and anxiety but it ain’t jail.”

I mean, there are so many tweets about this:

Uh, yeah, Ellen might want to address this on her next YouTube video.