Ellen DeGeneres has carved out a special place for herself in the pantheon of stand-up comedy superstars, thanks to her honest observations and off-the-wall wit. Now, she’s back on stage and HBO subscribers have a front-row seat as she performs a full-length stand-up show taped live at New York City’s Beacon Theater. The show promises to be filled with her novel observations about life’s everyday realities, and will feature her whimsical take on any number of issues facing men, women and society today.

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With a loose, free-associative flow, Ellen DeGeneres glides through her 2003 HBO special, Here and Now. In just the first 10 minutes she touches on procrastination, new paint colors, television commercials, and mental disorders–topics that fit into the show’s subtitle, Modern Life and Other Inconveniences. By the end, she’s also spun out sneaky jokes about cell phones, memory loss, elevators, vocal inflections, pickle jars, and social embarrassment. Her genius is that she never seems like a genius; on the contrary, DeGeneres seems like your next door neighbor pointing out the obvious, yet somehow an hour whizzes by in complete enjoyment. It’s peerless observational humor–nothing groundbreaking or piercingly satirical, but simply fun. –Bret Fetzer