Ellen  DeGeneres was a nightmare to work for, Emmy-winning staffer claims

Greg Fitzsimmons is setting the record straight on his former boss.

The comedian, 59, worked on the first two years of “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” which debuted in 2003.

“She was rough,” Fitzsimmons admitted about the show’s host, Ellen DeGeneres, while on the “We Might Be Drunk” podcast Tuesday. “She was the C-word.”

“First of all, I wanted to write for her because I really do think she’s one of the great comics,” he elaborated. “She was a great comic. Then, the show comes out and I get approached by the head writer and turns out I am good friends with the show runner. So I write a couple pages of jokes and I get hired.”

Fitzsimmons recalled that, at first, the atmosphere was a good time.

“We were there for like a month before the show launched, figuring out the segments and all that stuff, and it was like fun, goofy, pranks. A ping-pong table and it was all good energy,” he recounted. “The show was good, and I knew things were going to go wrong because I was a producer, writer, and then they asked me to do the audience warm-up.”

DeGeneres, 67, had said no to every other warm-up guy in Los Angeles, which left the spot open for Fitzsimmons to take.

“She said, ‘Greg, you’re going to do it,’” the actor shared. “And I was like, ‘I don’t want to be the warmup guy on a daytime talk show,’ and they were like, ‘Well it’s an extra four grand a week and it’s 10 minutes a day.’”

So, Fitzsimmons agreed to the role.

He called the crowd a “bunch of closeted mid-western housewives who loved her,” so instead of warming them up, he had to warm them down.

Fitzsimmons then had the audience do the wave whenever he said the word banana.

“So then she comes out to do the monologue, but what I had forgotten was that the word banana was in the monologue,” he continued. “Now, she hasn’t seen the warmup. So she says banana, and the crowd does the wave, and she’s a control freak, so this is like the worst thing that could ever happen. She stops and goes ‘Okay, that’s weird. Whatever that was, don’t do that.’”

However, Fitzsimmons shared that when DeGeneres said banana again, the crowd repeated the wave.

“She said don’t do it. They do it again. Finally, I just go up on stage and I explain to her what happened. And she was f–king seething,” confessed Fitzsimmons. “I thought, ‘Alright, I’m getting fired for that.’ And I didn’t, but then everything got weird and we started winning Emmys. I won four Emmys on the show, but that made things bad.”

According to the writer, once the series started taking home trophies, DeGeneres became “mean because she was back on top.”

One alleged moment in particular stuck with Fitzsimmons.

“If you didn’t pitch in her wheelhouse, then she looked at you like you had just f–king stabbed her puppy,” he added. “Then there was this process of pushing people out of the circle. You want to be in the circle because there is a lot of fear going on. So you’re in or out.”

For Fitzsimmons, it didn’t “really bother me that much.”

“I had written on a lot of shows before, and I knew what it was like to have tough bosses. I wrote for Bill Maher. I was tough enough, but then there were these first-time writers who cried. It was a lot of crying always,” he noted.

The Post reached out to DeGeneres’ rep for comment.

“The Ellen DeGeneres Show” ran for 19 seasons from 2003 to 2022. The show’s end came on the heels of 2020 allegations of a toxic work environment.

DeGeneres addressed the accusations during the opening monologue on the first episode of her 18th season. She issued an on-air apology and called herself “a work in progress” before adding she is “especially working on the impatience thing.”

DeGeneres finished her last stand-up tour in 2024 and has since retired.

In November, the host and her wife, Portia de Rossi, relocated to the UK after Donald Trump’s presidential win.

Due to the comedian stepping out of the spotlight, Fitzsimmons isn’t afraid to talk about his time on the series.

“I think she’s out of the country,” he teased. “I don’t really care.”

In fact, Fitzsimmons never ran into DeGeneres again after working on the talk show.

“My next job after Ellen was I went to ‘The Man Show’ and she heard I was on ‘The Man Show’ and apparently she couldn’t stop laughing,” he elaborated. “And then I hosted the Porn Awards and they were in Vegas doing a show and she saw my face up on a billboard for the Porn Awards and she just thought it was so f–king funny.”

“I don’t think she really knew me – and that was me.”

In November, DeGeneres was spotted rocking brunette hair in a video shared by a local pub in Burford, UK called The Farmer’s Dog. In the clip, she sat smiling next to her wife, 52.

The footage surfaced after insiders told The Wrap that DeGeneres and de Rossi moved to the UK and were gearing up to put their Montecito, Calif., mansion on the market in an effort to start a new life abroad.

The source claimed that the couple, who tied the knot in 2008, will likely “never” return to the US on a permanent basis.

Separate sources told TMZ that the duo decided to “get the hell out” of the country immediately following the president-elect’s victory, which left them feeling “very disillusioned.”

Despite enjoying her new life in the English countryside, DeGeneres admitted last month that there are many things she misses about hosting her own show.

“I mean, I wish it did, because I would do the same thing here,” she told broadcaster Richard Bacon, per the BBC.  “I would love to do that again, but I just feel like people are watching on their phones, or people aren’t really paying attention as much to televisions, because we’re so inundated with information and entertainment.”

These days, DeGeneres is “very carefully” taking her time to decide on her next career move.

“I want to have fun, I want to do something,” she stated. “I do like my chickens, but I’m a little bit bored.”