It takes a peculiarly modern chutzpah (or obliviousness) to say — on a Netflix special — that you were kicked out of show business.

To be fair, it might feel that way to Ellen DeGeneres, 66, whose hit daytime show, “Ellen,” ended in 2022 not long after reports claimed it had a toxic workplace. This followed years of people online pointing out that she was not as friendly as her television persona suggested. Leaving a successful talk show and ending up on the biggest streaming service in the world is not the worst trade, but these days, everyone receives 15 minutes of fame and an hour of cancel culture notoriety. DeGeneres handles hers with pointed offhandedness and light sarcasm, saying on her new special that she was kicked out of show business because she was mean.

“You can’t be mean and be in show business,” she adds flatly. “No mean people in show business.” Then she pauses just long enough for audiences to register the absurdity but not too long to test their patience. “I’m out,” she mutters.

Our social media-driven culture incentivizes phony likableness but makes maintaining that facade difficult. DeGeneres, who preached kindness on her talk show, has long been trying to escape this niceness trap. Her previous special, “Relatable,” positioned her as the kind of person who doesn’t want to hold your baby because it would mess up her sweater. This follow-up, “For Your Approval,” premiering Tuesday, mixes observational jokes with a newly confessional style.

We learn about her obsessive-compulsive disorder and ADHD and her arthritis and childhood neglect and how her need for approval damaged her mental health. It’s a messy, revealing self-portrait whose feathery jokes mask a heavier tone. In an old attention-getting gambit, she says this will be her last special, but it’s hard to believe. (Remember when Hannah Gadsby retired?)

One of the most gifted low-key comics who ever picked up a microphone, DeGeneres is part of the family tree of patient pausers like Jack Benny and Bob Newhart. She still gets a lot out of a little. Who else receives applause for a modest joke about the parking brake?

DeGeneres is a much better comic than actor. You see that in an unnecessary opening that pictures her backstage surrounded by angry headlines and highlights from her career. She spots an image from her sitcom, and then flashes a knowing smile as if she is pleasantly surprised to see it. It’s a corny gesture, but don’t underestimate those. DeGeneres built a huge fan base on daytime television in part because she’s deft at creating intimacy with the camera, making performing for a crowd seem like a dinner party.

But in her standup, she comes across as a more paradoxical figure: calm but neurotic, cheerful but also haunted, ordinary pal and alien superstar. What anchors her is trusty comic instincts and timing. She’s at her best leaning into her prickliness. She says people appreciate it when you tell them something is stuck in their teeth, but “as soon as you tell someone that all of their stories should be 50% shorter ...”

Then she stops and allows you to consider the specificity of this point. It sounds authentic. Dressed in sneakers, stretchy suit pants and an expensive-looking watch, DeGeneres wants to appear ordinary by saying she likes nothing more than wearing sweatpants around the house. But when she illustrates the point by saying she refused to attend a dinner party with Mick Jagger, you realize the limit to how relatable her jokes can be.

Becoming a mega-famous daily talk-show host can change a person. It’s a point that she makes. “When I’m at a party and I talk to someone for more than five minutes, I have the urge to say: ‘Sorry, we have to take a break.’” In an interview this year, Conan O’Brien said almost the same thing to me. (His version was a temptation to say, “Let’s take a break and be right back.”)

Leaving that grind can give one perspective. DeGeneres’ most insightful section is not when she’s pretending to be like you, but when she explores being a boss. No cultural figure earns less sympathy, which is part of the reason this section of the special stands out as so fresh. You don’t hear this point of view on social media as much. DeGeneres says she was an immature boss, a poor fit for the job. But she adds that female bosses are expected to act differently than male ones are.

This leads to a big speech in the special that feels like a dramatic monologue at the end of an Oscar-contending movie in which she describes herself in all of her complexity before abruptly adding: “I’m a strong woman.”

It elicits a roar of a response. In a moment when America is about to decide if it will elect its first woman president, some might even detect a political subtext here, a hope that we judge female authority with as much complexity as we do men’s.

You could see this as DeGeneres changing the subject or avoiding accountability. But that doesn’t mean she isn’t right.

Men are taught to be confident in a way that women are not, she says, and illustrates this by saying that you see only men, in the middle of any setting, practice an imaginary golf swing. It’s a joke that evokes, among other things, Johnny Carson, the gold standard in talk-show likability whose public image was carefully cultivated and who benefited from a media era in which it was easier to project an air of mystery.

“For Your Approval” starts with a dreamy scene in DeGeneres’ dressing room as she stares at a mirror showing a younger version of herself telling jokes on Carson’s “Tonight Show.” Mournful piano plays. Melancholy keeps creeping to the fore. In a serious interlude that stood out among many references she makes to caring what others think of her, she says that in show business you must care, because “it’s the only real currency.”

I believe she believes that. Popularity and how people see you clearly matter a lot. But there are other currencies to measure success: a joke well-told, the satisfaction of a thought perfectly expressed. DeGeneres has had a remarkable, pathbreaking career, but one of her greatest legacies — having her sitcom character, essentially an avatar for her, come out of the closet in the 1990s — led to a drop in the show’s ratings and ultimately its cancellation. Only a doomed worldview sees that as failure.

She probably understands this. But you hear it more in the jokes than in the serious parts, the punchlines about the little lies we tell ourselves. “I used to say I didn’t care what people thought of me,” she says wryly. “Looking back, I realized I said that at the height of my popularity.”