Ellen DeGeneres received the Second Carol Burnett Award at the 2020 Golden Globe Awards. Unsurprisingly, she started her speech with the topic of the fires which are currently on-going in Australia.
DeGeneres started by saying, “It’s a prestigious award, and what I like most about it is I knew coming in I would win. She continued There’s nothing worse than sitting there and, like most of you, waiting and wondering if you’re going to win.”
She joked about how people receiving the awards go on and on and on with their acceptance speech, and then she said hers would be a quick one, “although I don’t have to because it’s a special award and they don’t play me off.” She then again joked. “I don’t have to end at all because it’s a special award.”
She shared her origin and how she s started on a rainy day in New Orleans with her birth and parents driving a car, “pretty sure was a Buick”. Then she said, “Before I knew it, I had a successful sitcom, and I came out, and then I lost that sitcom, and then I got another sitcom, then I lost that sitcom, too. Then I got to do something that I had never been able to do before, and that makes my whiskey, and after that, I got my talk show, and I was able to be myself, and that was 17 years ago.”
She made some funny remarks again and said, “I feel like you’ve all gotten to know me over the past 17 years. I’m an open book, and I couldn’t have done it without my husband, Mark. Mark, you are my rock” She also made up some fake kids and thanked them and to go to bed now, “That’s funny because they’re in college now.”
She went back to her serious speech “The point is, you all know me, and you know me, or you wouldn’t have laughed at that. I feel like we all think we know someone — there’s a connection when we watch someone on TV for as long as we are on TV, and that’s what it was like for me with Carol Burnett”.
She talked about Burnett and how her life has influenced her. “I felt like I knew her. I felt like she showed us who she was every week. She was larger than life. We counted on her to make us feel good and she delivered every single week. I always felt like she was speaking to me. At the end of the show, every time she pulled her ear, I knew she was saying, ‘It’s OK. I’m gay, too.”
The famous talk show host concluded about the power of television, saying, “All I ever wanted to do was make people feel good and laugh, and there’s no more excellent feeling than when someone tells me I’ve made their day better with my show or that I’ve helped them get through a sickness or a hard time with their lives.
“The power of television for me is not that people watch my show, but that they watch my show, and then they’re inspired to go out and do the same thing in their own lives. They make people laugh or be kind or help someone less fortunate than themselves, and that is the power of television, and I’m so, so grateful to be a part of it.”
Congrats on your Golden Globe win, Ellen DeGeneres.
Read More: Brian Cox at the 2020 Golden Globe Awards
