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When David Letterman announced his retirement from the Late Show last week, comedienne and daytime host Ellen Degeneres was surprised to hear her name floating around as a potential replacement.
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“I heard a rumor that one of the people being considered to take over the Late Show is me,” she told her audience in Thursday’s episode. “I am flattered, but I really love doing my daytime show. And nighttime is very different. There’s a lot of political humor, which I don’t do. But I feel you don’t know if you’re good at something until you try it. So I’m gonna see what it would look like if I did do a late show.”
After introducing an announcer and struggling to enter from behind a curtain (“I haven’t had that much trouble coming out since 1997”), Degeneres gave her best late-night monologue, which included a weather-related punchline with Steven Tyler, an attempt at political humor (“Europe. Asia. Hillary Clinton. Am I right?”), the oft-mentioned topics of Obamacare and Colorado’s marijuana policies, and “Ellen’s Top Eleven List,” during which she kept reorganizing a list of her favorite pets.
“I’ll stick to daytime for now,” she said. “I would like to say, David Letterman, you are an incredibly brilliant and clever man. I’ve always been a fan. I loved watching you. You’ve made us happy for over 30 years.”
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Guest Pharrell Williams then performed his hit “Happy,” which Degeneres dedicated to Letterman. Watch the monologue and performance below:
Williams then sat down to discuss his nine Billboard Music Award nominations, thank Degeneres for being the first to support “Happy” and expand on the title of his recently released album.
“Instantly, I knew I wanted to give back to a demographic that had been giving to me and my family for over 20 years, and that’s women,” he said. “I knew it was gonna be called G I R L, capitalize the letters and put two spaces in between each letter, because I needed that word to read differently in any text that it would be lucky enough to be written about. I wanted that word G I R L to be bigger than anything else in that whole entire paragraph.”
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He then spoke on female inequality in the workplace. “Last I heard, the only way that this entire species can come into existence is through the portal of a woman’s body,” he said. “We’re a species that has a space station floating around the Earth for over 20 years. We even have a rover on the surface of Mars. How can we be the same species that is telling people — we have legislation in certain places that is telling women what they can and cannot do with their bodies?”
Degeneres then gifted him with a much taller hat. Watch their chat below:
Email: Ashley.Lee@THR.com
Twitter: @cashleelee
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