An injured Ellen DeGeneres stepped onto the stage of her daytime talk show with the help of crutches Tuesday — but before revealing the nature of her injury, she revealed something else.
The crutches, which she quickly tossed aside, were just a couple old comedy props!
That was what the 61-year-old called "the good news." On a more serious note, she added, "The bad news is I hurt my neck."
"You want to know how I did it?" DeGeneres asked her audience. "So do I! I have no idea."
She joked that she "spent the morning watching tennis, and then in the afternoon some bird watching, and then at night we did the hula-hooping on our necks," but the reality of what preceded her neck woe was much less obvious.
"I went to turn my head and then my neck disagreed with that situation," she explained. "It just seized up and then I felt like there was a rod going down my back, and I thought, 'Well, if I just ignore it, it would go away,' like a toothache or global warming."
Alas, like both of those things, "It did not."
Since the show must go on, DeGeneres decided to keep mining the moment for laughs.
"(My chiropractor) said my feet don't point in the right direction, one leg is longer than the other, my shoulders are humped, and my hips are uneven," she deadpanned. "Basically, he said nothing about me is straight."
The episode that followed that monologue revealed just how stiff the neck injury left the host, and in the next episode, things hadn't improved. In fact, by Wednesday, her arm was in a cast, too.
But not for long.
"I have good news and I have bad news," she declared once again. "The good news is I don't need this."
With that said, the cast came right off.
"But the bad news is I sprained my neck," she said, updating her audience on her injury. "I thought I strained it, but it turns out I sprained it. That's how the chiropractor 'splained it."