2019 hasn’t been the best of years for Ellen DeGeneres. There was that defending Kevin Hart’s homophobic jokes thing, the rubbing shoulders with problematic former U.S. president George W. Bush thing, and the subsequent doubling down on her friendship with Dubya thing. Now she’s decided to cap it all off by picking a pointless fight with millennials and Gen Z by going after “OK boomer.”
The TV host who made a career by carving out a “nicest person in Hollywood” persona decided to tackle the whole “OK boomer” meme by getting a 17-year-old teenager and a 22-year-old woman to figure out how to use 80’s and 90’s era tech like rotary phones, type writers, and old-school film cameras.
Now this kind of premise would be pretty good if it were tackled with the same level of nuance and understanding of the cultural context behind “OK boomer” as, say, Seth Meyers, but Ellen skips right past all that and goes straight into mocking millennials and Gen Z for not knowing how to operate obsolete technology.
There are a few of things seriously wrong with this whole seemingly-innocent display of “wholesome fun” from Ellen DeGeneres.
“Millennials” refers to those folks born between 1981 and 1996. It is not an umbrella term for all young people. Those women Ellen were mocking on the show were 17 and 22, meaning they’re not even millennials but are actually part of Gen Z. Maybe get your facts right first before making fun of something, Ellen and Ellen’s writers.
It’s also difficult to see how “millennials don’t understand obsolete tech lol” is a funny premise. The whole point of new technology is to push society forward and making fun of young people for not knowing how to use something that no one even uses anymore is just short-sighted and cringey.
Put it this way, making fun of millennials for not knowing how to use a fax machine is no different than baby boomers making fun of middle-aged folk like Ellen for not knowing how to decipher Morse code.
It’s baffling why Ellen decided to roast millennials and Gen Z for “OK boomer” and yet she let things like Kevin Hart’s homophobic jokes and Dubya’s controversial tenure as U.S. president slide with nary a peep.
But when you’re a wealthy, middle-aged white woman who is pandering to an older crowd comprised of the “Karen generation” to pay the bills, punching down is perhaps the path of least resistance to rake in the views while still maintaining the “Ellen DeGeneres is nice and wholesome” facade.
Bringing back old technology just to “own young people” for making fun of baby boomers isn’t just petty, it’s unnecessary, which is perhaps the most apt description for both rotary phones and Ellen DeGeneres these days.