Chelsea Handler
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Chelsea Handler

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"Lately, Chelsea's Talkin'"

What's the difference between Chelsea Handler and all those other talk show hosts who keep America up at night?

There's this: Jay and Dave and the boys have never smushed a Jonas brother's face into their cleavage.

OK, it wasn't really a Jonas brother, and the bosom-smush was just part of a skit on "Chelsea Lately," Handler's nightly talk show on E! But, for a growing corps of hard-core fans, Handler's smarts, wit and unpredictability have made her show appointment viewing, and on a network known for its more obsequious treatment of celebrity culture to boot.

On Saturday, Handler returns to Las Vegas -- she performed almost a year ago at The Comedy Festival at Caesars Palace -- for a show at The Pearl at the Palms.

"I just love to do stand-up. That's how I started," Handler said during a recent phone interview. "As long as someone will pay to see me, I'll be happy to come and perform for them."

Handler -- whose TV credits also include Oxygen's "Girls Behaving Badly" and correspondent work on "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno" -- has been hosting "Chelsea Lately" for just more than a year.

"I slip under the cable radar," she said. "It's been a lot of fun. We're not really in the big leagues like Leno and Letterman. We're on a much smaller network, so we have a lot of fun and get away with a lot more than I imagine you can on NBC or CBS."

Handler suspects viewers enjoy her nightly deconstruction of pop culture because hosts on the usual outlets for entertainment news -- morning news shows, late-night talk shows and the rest -- can't voice the "things everyone is thinking. They always have to be somewhat politically correct, because those people are probably going to end up on their show."

In contrast, Handler said, "we're not trying to get those kind of people on the show."

Handler, 33, imagines her opinions about celebrity doings are "pretty much consistent for people my age. My thinking is, like, women and men 18 to 34 years old pretty much think Paris Hilton is an idiot. No one says, 'No she's not.'

"I just try to be honest about what I think and what my opinion is, because that usually works out best. People know if you're being sincere, and can smell (insincerity) a mile away."

"It's a fun show, so most people know not to take it too seriously," Handler added. "And I think that's really the fun of it. It's just good to be laughing at stuff. Especially when we care so much about pop culture, it's good to make fun of it."

Have any potential guests backed off because of the barbs? "Oh sure," Handler replied, "but everyone starts to come around. They start to realize it's just such a silly show. We're not attacking anyone. We're just making fun of idiots, and we don't really want idiots on the show anyway."

Besides, any celeb who takes the time to watch would realize that not even Handler is safe from Handler's barbs.

"I think if you're going to make fun of other people, you have to start by making fun of yourself," Handler said. "Otherwise, you have no business making fun of other people."

Take the titles of Handler's best-selling books: "My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands" and, more recently, "Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea."

The latter may be the best title for a memoir ever, but does anybody get the Judy Blume reference these days?

"Most girls my age, they read it and they get it," Handler said. "And gay guys."

Contact reporter John Przybys at jprzybys@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0280. - REVIEW-JOURNAL (October 2008)


"The acid-tongued blonde who is taking on America's chat kings"

BY: Christopher Goodwin


One of the last bastions of male media power in America, the late-night
television talk show, has been well and truly breached. Chelsea Handler, a
sassy, foul-mouthed, 34-year-old blonde, has taken on the stalwarts of
late-night television such as Jay Leno and David Letterman, winning viewers
with a rich diet of celebrity gossip, marinated in aspic.

Chelsea Lately, Handler's irreverent, celebrity-skewering late-night show,
has been steadily climbing in the ratings since it first aired nearly two
years ago on E! Entertainment Television, a small cable network. While her
viewing figures of 600,000 a night are still only a fraction of those
garnered by Leno and Letterman, she attracts a much younger and more
predominantly female audience, making her an advertisers' favourite. As a
result, E! has committed to broadcast the show until 2012.

Chelsea Lately is a cleverly pitched concoction of celebrity gossip - mainly
C- and D-list celebs such as Paris Hilton, Tori Spelling, Kim Kardashian and
the Olsen twins - overlaid with Handler's acid-tongued disembowelment of
them. "An ironic deconstruction of everything that passes for celebrity
today," W magazine said. When it emerged that the stick-thin Ashley Olsen
was dating cyclist Lance Armstrong, Handler quipped: "It must be pretty
serious, because he gave her one of his Livestrong bracelets, which she's
using as a belt."

Chelsea Lately gains a powerful frisson from the unsettling combination of
Handler's quintessentially American blue-eyed, blonde good looks - she was a
finalist in the Miss New Jersey beauty pageant and has turned down an offer
to appear naked in Playboy - and her cutting tongue and focus on sex,
alcohol and her own prominently displayed breasts. When Handler was asked
how she felt about competing against the likes of Leno and Letterman, she
replied: "I have two very meaty breasts. And I'm not going to let that hold
me back."

"She's the king of drunk, hot blondes," says Heather McDonald, a comedian
who often appears on the show. "They've been wandering the earth, they've
never had a leader, until Chelsea arrived with her boobs and hair and sassy
attitude."

Her show veers only slightly from the rigid template of late-night talk
shows. Like Letterman and Leno, Handler opens with a brief comic monologue,
before settling into a panel discussion with three guests about the pressing
celebrity issues of the day. The last segment is a rapid-fire interview with
lesser celebrities who need the publicity enough to put up with Handler's
provocative style.

Perhaps the weirdest aspect of Handler's show is her sidekick, a diminutive
Mexican called Chuy Bravo, who doubles as Handler's personal assistant.
Handler likes to joke that "Chuy's path to Hollywood stardom was long and
arduous - mainly because it takes him twice as long to get anywhere".

The success of Chelsea Lately has boosted other aspects of Handler's career.
She is also a stand-up comedian and has performed in front of sell-out
crowds at New York's Carnegie Hall, as well as a best-selling author. She
has published two books, My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night
Stands, a memoir of her alcohol-fuelled dating life, and a collection of
essays, Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea, which is being adapted for a
TV series.

In her books and comedy act, Handler riffs on her existential confusion at
being brought up Jewish in an upper-middle-class New Jersey home by her
Mormon mother and Jewish father, the youngest of six children. She came to
Hollywood when she was 19, hoping to act, but soon gave that up when she
realised that "auditions are humiliating and demeaning. You have to go in
and read other people's lines".

Despite having a hit show, Handler clearly has greater ambitions and
obviously chafes at the ludicrous vacuousness of what she gets paid to do.
"I'm sure in a couple years I'm going to want to move up and do something a
little more highbrow," she said recently. "There's only so much you can say
about celebrity."
- The Observer (May 17 2009)


"Chelsea Lately Review B+ "Naughty and Nice""

Naughty and Nice: Handler (with her sidekick, Chuy Bravo) may look innocent, but her one-liners can sting

By Ken Tucker

Here's a tip for future guests on Chelsea Lately: If you're going to be interviewed by the vodka vixen, the Grey Goose gabber, you'd better come prepared with the type of blunt opinions Chelsea Handler herself throws around like shot glasses in a barroom brawl. One of Handler's best guests of late was the beloved Cloris Leachman, who's reached the age where she delightfully doesn’t care what she says. Asked by Handler, ''Who do you think the biggest a-hole is'' in showbiz, Leachman said, ''The one who did the Gladiator.'' ''Russell Crowe?'' asked Handler. ''Yeah,'' said Leachman. ''He's just doughy and he's not smart and he's not funny.'' Oof.

This is typical of the kind of insult comedy in which Chelsea Lately revels. The stand-up comic and best-selling author has molded her E! network late-night talk show craftily: an opening monologue, a roundtable with mostly up-and-coming or never-gonna-make-it comedians she likes, a guest, and maybe a taped sketch. Most important, the topics rarely, if ever, stray from celebrity gossip or pop culture events. On a recent edition, reading an item about a park being built by the government of China, she said blithely, ''I didn't even know they had a government.'' Handler is one of those trash-is-fantastic people.

Well, no, she only seems that way — it's integral to her image as a hotsy blonde who'll mouth off about anything, outrageously. But you have to be more than In Touch-smart to do the kind of rapid-fire joking Handler does every weeknight. As with any good talk show, the host's strengths and obsessions emerge with regular viewing. Handler is frequently at her best when interviewing black actors and rappers — unlike her male talk-show counterparts, she's not hobbled by white ignorance or politically correct blandness. Her interview with T.I., for example, was fascinating because she pressed him on his weapons-possession charge and kidded with him about sex in a way that you could tell startled even him. (''I know what you're thinking, and I like it,'' she said.)

It's not as though Handler's style came out of nowhere. White female comics have been making risqué jokes since the heyday of Rusty Warren, whose most famous 1960s ''party album'' was called Knockers Up! Handler has created a boozy party-girl image, but you know from the machine-gun cadence of her jokes that she works hard on her punchlines…harder than most of the comics on her roundtable segment, it often seems.

Chelsea Lately is uneven, and I'm pretty tired of the repetitive quips both about and from her diminutive sidekick, Chuy. But anyone who's developed an ongoing, hilariously random vendetta against Dancing With the Stars' Samantha Harris — that's one junk-culture savant I can support wholeheartedly. B+ - Entertainment Weekly (June 2006)


"MAKE ROOM FOR CHELSEA"

MAKE ROOM FOR CHELSEA
NO WOMAN HAS EVER MADE IT IN LATE-NIGHT - UNTIL NOW
Chelsea Handler, a comedienne by trade, is putting it all out there. All of it. As in, nakedness, in this month's Allure magazine. "I mean, why not be naked?" she laughs.

It's a rhetorical question, of course, when you're gorgeous.

However exposed she may be, Handler, 34, finds herself sitting pretty right about now. Her late-night cable talk show, "Chelsea Lately," was just renewed through 2012 on the E! Entertainment Network. Her collection of essays, "Are You There Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea," has been on the New York Times best-seller list for 37 weeks, and she recently won a Bravo A-List award pronouncing her "A-List Funny," whatever that means.
"I think it means exactly what you would think it means," she quips.

Handler is the only woman who can hold her own in the late-night talk show boys' club. She is striking a chord with 18-34 women in particular who revere and fear her biting wit and brutally honest assessment of Hollywood celebrities.

She attributes her show's appeal to a gossip session where you can say exactly what you think about someone without any retribution. "No one says what they really think about people. I say what I'm thinking," she says.

Known as intimidating to her guests, Handler isn't afraid to outsmart anyone, male or female. There's no tact-checking or softball questions. And that icky feeling you get when a guest pushes his or her own agenda doesn't happen when you watch "Chelsea Lately."

Instead, she gets her guests to open up and sometimes makes them uncomfortable. Handler managed to make Snoop Dogg, the epitome of mellow, squirm in his seat when she asked whether meeting his wife in high school was like "a Jamie-Lynn Spears hookup."

She also caused Jennie Garth to slap her hand over her open mouth when she invited her and her husband, actor Peter Facinelli, to a weekend away from their kids, because, as she put it, "I wanted you guys to have a little penetration time."
Or take "Stargate Atlantis" star Joe Flanigan, whom she put on the spot. "Do you know that you're good looking?" she asked him as he visibly blanched. Handler then praised his ability to be a convincing actor given the subject matter, "because acting like you're on a spaceship is kind of ridiculous."

Handler keeps celebrities at the top of her search-and-destroy list. In the past, she has targeted Britney Spears and Paula Abdul; they have now been replaced by Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag, of "The Hills."
Spencer, whom she refers to as a "half-wit, douche-headed donkey nozzle," invites particular scorn as one-half of Hollywood's most obnoxious couple. Of Heidi's attraction to him, Handler has said, "I always assumed she was blind, or mentally challenged."

Still, Heidi and Spencer want to come on the show. "Their publicist was pushing to get them both on," she says. "But I just can't be so close to so much stupid."

That doesn't mean Handler isn't afraid to sit in the hot seat herself. For a girl who doesn't spook easily, she was definitely squirming when she interviewed Josh Radnor ("How I Met Your Mother").

As it turns out, the last time Handler had seen Radnor was several years earlier when they met after one of her stand-up shows and wound up making out later in the evening at his place.

"I literally ran out of the apartment," she says. "The next time I saw him, he was on the show. It was so awkward."

Handler, a Jersey girl who grew up with a Mormon mother and Jewish father, also has found unexpected success with two books. The first, "My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands" was a hilarious recount of sexual exploits, and the second, "Are You There Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea," is a collection of stories about her life thus far.

She's currently finishing up her third book, "Chelsea-Chelsea Bang-Bang," for publication next spring. It will be another collection of stories in the same vein as "Are You There Vodka." "I have so many stories from my childhood that I haven't even used," she says

This will be her final book, though, as she describes the writing process as tedious, especially with such a hectic life. "I'm not very organized or responsible. I'm a procrastinator," she says.

Handler's show, somewhat ironically, is on the E! cable network, that 24/7 celebrity gushfest, so the pressure to temper her rants can be painful. She confesses that she's been told to take it down a notch, in particular with Pamela Anderson, so as not to offend someone higher up the food chain.

If you're wondering who would quash such a rant, the answer is found right in Handler's home, where she lives with Ted Harbert, her boyfriend and, in a way, her boss.

Harbert is the president of Comcast Entertainment Group, the parent of E! "Oh, he will love that if you refer to him as 'The Boss,'" she says. "He makes me laugh. I'm not sure that it's always intentional, though."

The couple has no plans to marry. As for motherhood, she's first the admit she's the wrong woman for the job. "I like children too much to ever punish one by having me as its parent," she says.

Surprisingly, Handler's not interested in moving to a more family-friendly network or time slot. "I love cable. I love that I can say 'camel toe' when I want to and that I can say 'f*ck' and it's just bleeped out, because that's how I talk."

While Handler, who is developing companion shows to "Chelsea Lately," enjoys mocking contemporary celebrities, she says she would never have someone on the show just to make him or her look stupid.

Then she laughs and says, "I can't be mean all the time." - NY POST (April 2009)


"A late-night snark"

Nobody's sacred on Chelsea Handler's talk show. Not even her network or self. It's a joke. Get it?

From HER gossipy late-night perch on E! Entertainment Television, Chelsea Handler routinely mouths off about Tom Cruise, Angelina Jolie and almost everyone else in and around the gates of the Hollywood-industrial complex. And typically, the host of “Chelsea Lately” does so without incurring threats of bodily harm.

Then, she took on the Jonas Brothers, the squeaky-clean, heartthrob boy band from New Jersey. In a recent sketch, Handler mocked the band's masculinity, their mismatched and their "purity rings" (symbolizing the pop stars' pledge not to have premarital sex). Later in the bit, Handler sexually manhandled one of the faux brothers -- shoving her chest in his face and offering him carnal delights.



- LA TIMES (August 2008)


"A New Big Mouth on Late Night"

WHEN Geof Wills, a comedy booker, first signed the comedian Chelsea Handler for a stand-up stint in San Francisco almost a decade ago, he came away with one distinct memory.

"How do I put this the right way?" he wondered aloud in an interview. "She was," he began, and then paused. "I want to say she had a big mouth."

Ms. Handler would agree. And for the last 18 months she has been putting that particular characteristic to work on "Chelsea Lately," her 11:30 p.m. talk show on the E! cable channel.

Sitting in her office and dressing room here on a recent afternoon, Ms. Handler, 33, recalled earlier days, growing up, when her less-than-tactful tendencies were, as she explains, "never good."

"Oh," she said, pretending to be a high school career counselor, "you have a really big mouth and you don't seem to be able to filter anything. You know what, you could probably get a late-night talk show on E! and make fun of other celebrities."

Whether Ms. Handler is a celebrity along the lines of the VH1 reality star Bret Michaels or the rapper T. I. (both of whom have appeared on her show) is up to her fellow hosts on E! to decide. What is not debatable is that the ratings for her half-hour show are steadily rising and that her second book, a collection of personal essays called "Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea," has spent the better part of a year on The New York Times's nonfiction best-seller list.

Following in the mold of Joan Rivers and Kathy Griffin, Ms. Handler specializes in biting the hand that feeds: tearing down celebrities on a channel devoted to building them up. Her weapon of choice is a voice of sugary sarcasm, which she deploys to describe, say, the artistic merits of a recent Heidi Montag music video.

No one is immune. "If you're going to get your lip injected 12 times, Chelsea Handler is going to be the first person to point it out," said Jenny McCarthy, who co-starred with Ms. Handler on a Web series called "In the Motherhood."

And no one would call Ms. Handler's humor inaccessible: "Somebody stab me in the eyes with a fork," she said recently, bemoaning the news of a planned reality show produced by Paula Abdul.

Finally there is the matter of her looks, which are more soap opera star than stand-up comedian. Mr. Wills, now the president of comedy for Live Nation, said there was a dissonance between seeing her and hearing her. "She's a pretty stunning-looking girl, and she talks like a sailor," he said.

So with humor broad yet pointed enough to seem a little risqué, wrapped up in a telegenic package, Ms. Handler has a profile that some predict is only going to get bigger.

"When I saw a 70-year-old guy on vacation reading Chelsea's book, that told me a lot," said Robert Morton, a fan and a former executive producer of David Letterman's show in the 1990s.

On Friday Ms. Handler will headline a sold-out show at Carnegie Hall, the beginning of a busy season of stand-up she is squeezing in between tapings of her series. In contrast to the celebrity slant of her E! show, she said, her stand-up will be more personal, in the style of her books, dealing with her life and family.

Ms. Handler moved from northern New Jersey to Los Angeles at age 19 with ambitions of becoming an actress. While her personal exploits provided plenty of material for her books, she soon soured on reading other people's lines.

She said her stand-up epiphany came when she was arrested at 21 for driving under the influence of alcohol. It's an explanation Ms. Handler swore she had never given before, although readers of her best seller might recognize parts of the story.

At the end of a lengthy post-D.U.I. class, in which "they basically teach you how to get out of a D.U.I., which is great after the fact," Ms. Handler had to tell her arrest story to the group. "I was horrified," she said, but once she started telling her story - "I called the officer a racist; we were both white; my sister turned me in" - all her classmates were laughing. She calls it "the most orgasmic moment of my life."

With the help of Mr. Wills and others, Ms. Handler honed her stand-up talent and wrote her first book, "My Horizontal Life," about a series of one-night stands. Then came the long wait for fame. Development deals came and went. She taped a few correspondent segments for "The Tonight Show" and appeared on VH1, but mostly she waited.

"There's times where you think, 'Gosh, what if nobody ever wants to hear what I have to say?' " she recalled with uncharacteristic emotion.

She finally found opportunity on a hidden-camera show, "Girls Behaving Badly," for the Oxygen channel. When it ended she came to the attention of E!, which signed her up for a short sketch-comedy series and then asked her to host a topical, celebrity-oriented series at 11:30.

"I said the only way I could ever do a show like this is if I can make fun of everything E! stands for," she recalled. "I cannot be Mary Hart - or even worse, Samantha Harris - and stand there with my hip out talking about Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes taking Suri to an art museum without making fun of it."

"Chelsea Lately" draws nearly 600,000 viewers a night, only a fraction of the audience for the network late-night shows. But it is growing - December ratings were up 30 percent from the year before - and attracts a high proportion of young female viewers, who are valuable to advertisers. In December, E! ordered another year.

One unusual wrinkle in Ms. Handler's current platform is that she works for her boyfriend. Shortly after taping the final episode of her E! sketch show, she began dating Ted Harbert, the president of Comcast Entertainment Group, which oversees E!; they now live together. Their relationship is one of the few subjects she didn't joke about in the interview, but it did casually come up. She mentioned, for example, that he had broached the subject of product placement with her.

"My boyfriend showed me the live ads that Jimmy Kimmel has read on ABC recently," she said. "He said, 'Here, watch, he did it, it's easy!' " She winced. "Stay away from me with that stuff," she said, recalling the conversation.

E! has shown interest in expanding Ms. Handler's show to an hour, but she said that is not something she is keen to do. She doesn't have a thirst for sitcom work, either. There was the Web series she did with Ms. McCarthy, but she isn't involved in the TV version, in production at ABC. The director Barry Sonnenfeld is adapting "Are You There, Vodka?" for a possible television series, but she intends to be only a producer.

What does she want to do, then? Aside from mentioning the writing she is doing for her third book, she remains coy. "I'm sure in a couple years I'm going to want to move up and do something a little more highbrow," she said. "There's only so much you can say about celebrity, obviously." She said she admired both Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, and that the television in her office is usually tuned to MSNBC.

Were she to move to a more prominent stage, Ms. Handler might have to apply her filter more discriminately. As Mr. Morton noted, "You can't go out and talk about Angelina Jolie and then expect her to come on the show."

But other comics have managed to walk that line effectively. "I have racked my brain to find, as everyone in the business says, 'the next guy,' " Mr. Morton said. "And you know something? There aren't too many 'next guys. '"

But Ms. Handler, he suggested, could be one of them. "If I were an executive," he said, "I'd be going after her."
- The New York Times By: Brian Stelter (January 2009)


"Chelsea Handler brings back "After Lately""

NEW YORK — Chelsea Handler may have more jobs than James Franco -- award-winning actor, daytime television star, writer, director, novelist, academic.
Handler is a queen of late-night TV talk shows who has hosted "Chelsea Lately" on cable TV network E! since 2007. She is the author of four best-selling books, creator a new TV sitcom scheduled to air in January and recently signed a development deal with E! to create several new series.
And Sunday, Handler's "mockumentary" series, "After Lately," debuts for a second season of spoofing her guests, her "Chelsea Lately" staff and herself as they work on the show.
"It's fun and funny to just exploit what goes on at our workplace because there aren't a lot of workplaces like it. Everything is based on real situations. You get a real glimpse into what's happening in our real lives. We fight all the time but we're one big happy family," Handler told Reuters.
It may be hard to imagine the famously outspoken Handler holding her tongue about anything -- one of her books is titled "Are You There, Vodka? It's me, Chelsea -- she said she and her staff often use "After Lately" to communicate unspoken ideas and issues that come up between them.
"It's can be a passive aggressive way to tell people we think they're annoying. If someone does something stupid, we're like, 'let's write an episode about that,'" said Handler. "It's a good way to say, 'Oh wait, everyone in the office thinks I'm a narcissist.'"
The show's second season will poke fun at celebrity guests including Jane Fonda and Sharon Osbourne, as well as Handler's friends Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon -- the latter appeared on the first season of "After Lately."
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"They're all for it," said Handler of recruiting her A-list pals to be mocked on late-night television.
"We're all really good friends and they're totally into it. After we did the first episode with Reese she was like, 'I have to come back next season,' and when Jen saw Reese's episode, she was like, 'I want to do an episode too!'"
Witherspoon's episode spoofs her recent attempt to write a speech to honor Handler at an upcoming awards ceremony.
"I'm so annoyed with Reese hanging out at the office all day that I just go off on her," said Handler who is an amped-up version of herself on the show. "Jen (Aniston) ends up commiserating with the writers about how big my head has gotten. Then Jen says that they're only friends with me so that I don't talk about them on my show."
The deal Handler recently signed with E! guarantees that her inaugural series "Chelsea Lately" will air on the network through 2014. Handler told Reuters that among the projects she's developing are late-night shows for comics Ross Matthews and Whitney Cummings.
Cummings eponymous NBC sitcom "Whitney" has received mixed reviews and suffered a recent schedule shuffle, but "2 Broke Girls" the CBS series she co-created, is a hit. Handler's upcoming series based on her book, "Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea," premieres on NBC in January.
"I think it's the best time, possibly, to be a woman in comedy," said Handler. "It's good to be in a group of women that are succeeding. You're just trying to bring each other up so if one woman does well, we all do well. - MSNBC Today (November 2011)


"Trailer "This Means War" w/ Reese Witherspoon"

Check out the just released trailer for This Means War featuring Reese Witherspoon, Tom Hardy, and Chris Pine!

Here’s the official synopsis: The world’s deadliest CIA operatives are inseparable partners and best friends until they fall for the same woman. Having once helped bring down entire enemy nations, they are now employing their incomparable skills and an endless array of high-tech gadgetry against their greatest nemesis ever – each other.

Director McG recently told USA Today how he offered Reese the lead role.

“I told her, ‘You’re America’s sweetheart. Women love you. Men … like you. I want me to covet you.’ She took a deep breath and said, ‘Go for it,’” he shared. “I love strong female characters, and she had seen Charlie’s Angels. Between her physical readiness and the manner we photographed her, you get a sexy takeaway.”

This Means War, which also stars Chelsea Handler, hits theaters February 17, 2012! - Just Jared (January 2012)


"Chelsea Handler's After Lately Re-newed for second season"

And the Chelsea Handler Comedy Dominance Train continues to roll!

The comedian’s newest project to hit the air, After Lately — a mockumentary series centered around her staff at Chelsea Lately — has been re-upped for another season on E! “This series is comedic to its core and showcases Chelsea and her hilarious team in a fun and innovative way,” Lisa Berger, E!’s president of entertainment programming said in a statement. - Punchline Magazine (May 2011)


"Chelsea Handler: NBC Comedy Based on 'Vodka'"

Chelsea Handler’s book, Are You There Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea, is about to be turned into an NBC comedy!

The show will be based on the 35-year-old funnywoman’s life in her twenties. Deadline notes that although the protagonist will be named Chelsea and will have many of the same traits as Handler, she’ll have a different job than the comedian and author.

Chelsea recently booked a scripted comedy series on E! called After Lately and played a role in Reese Witherspoon’s new movie, This Means War. - Just Jared (November 2010)


"Chelsea the Handler"

Late-night star Chelsea Handler doesn't suffer fools, but when it comes to Hollywood "brat" Abigail Breslin, she's in for more than she can handle. Bazaar's take on the Hollywood "handler." Photos by Ben Watts.

Read more: Chelsea Handler and Abigail Breslin Photos - Photos of Chelsea Handler - Harper's BAZAAR - Harpers Bazaar (April 2010)


"Chelsea Greatly"

Chelsea Handler Has It Covered - Capitol File Magazine (May 2011)


"E! Renews ‘After Lately’ For Second Season"

E! has renewed After Lately, the mocumentary set behind the scenes of Chelsea Handler’s late-night show for the network, Chelsea Lately. Production on Season 2 of the reality/improv series is set to begin shortly. After Lately wrapped its first season April 24, averaging nearly 1 million total viewers each week and improving the 11 PM slot by 50%. “This series is comedic to its core and showcases Chelsea and her hilarious team in a fun and innovative way,” said Lisa Berger, E!’s president of entertainment programming. In addition to Handler, the cast of the show includes Chuy Bravo, Sarah Colonna, Brad Wollack, Chris Franjola, Heather McDonald, Jeff Wild, Johnny Kansas, Steve Marmalstein and Chelsea’s brother Roy. After Lately is executive produced by Chelsea Handler and Tom Brunelle. - Variety (May 2011)


"E! Renews ‘After Lately’ For Second Season"

E! has renewed After Lately, the mocumentary set behind the scenes of Chelsea Handler’s late-night show for the network, Chelsea Lately. Production on Season 2 of the reality/improv series is set to begin shortly. After Lately wrapped its first season April 24, averaging nearly 1 million total viewers each week and improving the 11 PM slot by 50%. “This series is comedic to its core and showcases Chelsea and her hilarious team in a fun and innovative way,” said Lisa Berger, E!’s president of entertainment programming. In addition to Handler, the cast of the show includes Chuy Bravo, Sarah Colonna, Brad Wollack, Chris Franjola, Heather McDonald, Jeff Wild, Johnny Kansas, Steve Marmalstein and Chelsea’s brother Roy. After Lately is executive produced by Chelsea Handler and Tom Brunelle. - Variety (May 2011)


"Handler to have an 'After' party at E!"

Talkshow host to star in half-hour laffer for net - Variety 2010


"Handler to have an 'After' party at E!"

Talkshow host to star in half-hour laffer for net - Variety 2010


"Chelsea Handler: Here, There and Everywhere"

Trying to track down Chelsea Handler is no easy task. Not because she’s reclusive or overly private—far from it, in fact—but because she’s that busy. Her nightly talk show, Chelsea Lately, continues to be a ratings monster for the E! Network, which just picked up season two of her scripted comedy series After Lately. This past April, she appeared in the number one movie, Hop, alongside Russell Brand and James Marsden, and can be seen this winter as Reese Witherspoon’s best friend in This Means War. On the heels of her successful book and comedy tour, Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang, she’s about to hit the road on yet another tour, this time called Lies Chelsea Handler Told Me—though, she insists, “this tour is only eight weeks, and I’m not adding second shows because I just don’t care. I’m spending more time in New York, and I’ll definitely be out in the Hamptons this summer.” - Hampton's Magazine (May 2011)


"Chelsea Handler: Here, There and Everywhere"

Trying to track down Chelsea Handler is no easy task. Not because she’s reclusive or overly private—far from it, in fact—but because she’s that busy. Her nightly talk show, Chelsea Lately, continues to be a ratings monster for the E! Network, which just picked up season two of her scripted comedy series After Lately. This past April, she appeared in the number one movie, Hop, alongside Russell Brand and James Marsden, and can be seen this winter as Reese Witherspoon’s best friend in This Means War. On the heels of her successful book and comedy tour, Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang, she’s about to hit the road on yet another tour, this time called Lies Chelsea Handler Told Me—though, she insists, “this tour is only eight weeks, and I’m not adding second shows because I just don’t care. I’m spending more time in New York, and I’ll definitely be out in the Hamptons this summer.” - Hampton's Magazine (May 2011)


"Chelsea Handler's Split Personality"

In the new Hollywood Reporter, she makes digs at Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter, the Kardashians and Ellen DeGeneres; “I want to utilize my brain...I want to do something that’s more mindful and isn’t celebrity centered.”

This story appears in the current issue of The Hollywood Reporter:
It's a late-March day, and Chelsea Handler is sitting behind a schoolteacher-inspired desk scribbling away on a pile of papers preparing for that afternoon's back-to-back tapings in Los Angeles of E!'s hit show, Chelsea Lately. As a hairstylist works her signature TV-worthy coif, Handler lifts her gaze momentarily and offers a reporter a drink: "We've got lemonade, and we've got water." The best-selling author of Are You There Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea, an ode to alcohol -- some would say addiction -- does not keep a martini bar anywhere nearby.
PHOTOS: The evolution of Chelsea Handler
Handler is distant but cordial. "This is my dog, Gina," she deadpans, pointing to the woman standing behind her. "And this is my hairstylist Chunk," she motions to the 100-pound brown and black mutt sleeping at her feet.
It's 1 p.m., and Handler is reviewing the two opening monologues she'll be performing and is editing blog posts writer Sarah Colonna drafted. A self-proclaimed control freak, Handler demands signoff on every decision. Her schedule fluctuates pending on her touring, but when in Los Angeles, she maintains a strict routine: 9 a.m. writers meeting; 11 a.m. workout and shower; 1 p.m. hair and makeup while editing, writing and rewriting; 4 p.m. taping.
"I have final say in everything I'm a part of, whether it's Chelsea Lately or my books and my stand-up," says Handler. "That [kind of power] doesn't happen a lot. And I didn't know it didn't happen until it happened to me and I realized I was the only one."
Something then catches her eye. It's Vanity Fair's May cover of a shirtless Rob Lowe, and her hairstylist has uncovered it on the makeup vanity. "Really, Graydon?" she says witheringly, with disdain, referring to VF editor Graydon Carter.
I inquire about the cover and ask to see it too. "Would you like a few minutes in private, Leslie?" she says with a small smile.
I can't tell -- am I being made fun of? Or is it just girls joking around? Am I in on the joke or the butt of it?
It's uncomfortable.
But that's Chelsea's charm. Isn't it?
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Later that day, there's just one hour to go before taping will begin on this day's Chelsea Lately. A production assistant enters Handler's second-floor office without so much as a knock to discuss an opportunity that has surfaced: Victoria's Secret swimsuit models. After a last-minute cancellation on Ellen, the company is looking to book three of its models (led by Adriana Lima) on that afternoon's taping of Lately to promote its new Miraculous Push-Up swimwear line.
"What would they do?" Handler snipes. "Sit next to [3-foot-7 sidekick] Chuy in bathing suits? Adriana Lima is a pretty big-time model. Wouldn't that be a little embarrassing?"
None of the three or so employees around her says anything as they await her decision. After taking a few moments to mull it over, Handler dismisses the idea with a wave of her hand.
"Tell them it's too late," she says tersely. "I don't really need Ellen's scraps." Another hint of a smile creeps across her lips.
To know Handler is to know that Ellen just got off easy. With a reputation as a grenade-throwing outsider (not too many A-listers can claim their first book was about their one-night stands) but a career resembling that of an insider, the 36-year-old comedian has engaged in headline-generating spats with everyone from Nick Cannon ("just heard nick cannon is starting a comedy tour," she tweeted in October. "Who's going to do the comedy?") to Tori Spelling ("I'm going to try my hardest not to tell her she looks like a man anymore. It's not nice. Even if it's true, it's not nice."). Late last year, the stand-up superstar -- who is in the midst of a 21-city tour of single-night engagements to promote her newest best-seller Lies That Chelsea Handler Told Me, a jaunt that will gross $6.5 million -- made gossip websites explode after scorching Angelina Jolie. "She can rescue as many babies from as many countries as she wants to," Handler said onstage in Newark in December. "I don't f--king believe you. … She gives interviews, 'I don't have a lot of female friends.' Cause you're a f--ing c--t … you're a f--ing bitch."
Sometimes, her bombshells are more personal in nature. In late May, Handler told a reporter from The New York Times that she had had an abortion when she was 16. "I'm pretty candid," she explains a few days later. "I'm not interested in hearing celebrities lie about stuff like that. I'm not proud of having an abortion, its just part of the fabric of my life. There's no reason to hide it."
Clearly, Handler the provocateur and Handler the businesswoman are two different entities. The latter, currently in the throes of contract negotiations with E!, of which she speaks openly, is not someone who makes random slips of the tongue; like any gifted comedian, Handler deploys shocking statements that only seem spontaneous, wild, dangerous. They are designed to generate the kind of attention that makes fans -- and Handler's are legion -- want to pay $60 a ticket to sit in anticipation, wondering just what in the world will come out of her mouth next. Thanks to that filterless relationship with her audience, Handler has built the rarest of creations in Hollywood: a female comedy empire (perhaps second only to Tina Fey's). Her fourth book, Lies, is resting comfortably, as of press time, at No. 3 on The New York Times best-seller list (hardcover nonfiction), and at NBC's recent upfront, E!'s new sister network announced it had ordered to series Handler's Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea, based on her 2008 best-seller, as a midseason replacement.
Through her late-night show (which dominates the coveted women 18-to-34 demographic and has a median age of 33) and 3.5 million Twitter followers, Handler has cultivated a loyal fan base of women who love her willingness to say what everyone else is thinking. "She'll poke fun at anyone, but she's also not afraid to poke fun at herself," says Bonnie Hammer, chairman of NBCUniversal Cable Entertainment. "That makes her vulnerable, open and funny and gives her permission to do the same to others."
That freewheeling making-hay-of-everyone formula is great for late-night but is somewhat uncharted turf for a play-it-safe network like NBC. "Part of what we need to do at NBC is to get people to know that we're doing things different and a little more in-your-face," explains entertainment chairman Robert Greenblatt. He says the goal of the series is to embrace Handler's caustic barbs without driving away viewers. "I think when you get into business with somebody whose voice you like, you need to let it go out there unfettered. She's smart enough to know that she's doing a mainstream network television show and there are things she would want to do that probably don't make sense in the bigger landscape."
And there are fewer bigger question marks in cable at the moment than what exactly that landscape is. Currently, Handler is knee-deep in negotiations with E! as the clock winds down on her contract that expires at the end of 2012 (it was extended in 2009). As nearly 1 million Lately loyalists continue to tune into her top-rated talk show (her nightly ratings come in fourth on the network behind the seasonal Kardashian-themed weekly series, Kendra and Holly's World), E! is scrambling to find a way to keep Handler on its payroll, even as it looks to expand its scripted programming under Hammer. "I'm sorry that we weren't able to do Are You There Vodka? for E!," says Hammer, laughingly adding, "and so the second-best choice is to do it for NBC. At least in my mind; Bob probably disagrees." For her part, E! president of entertainment programming Lisa Berger isn't afraid to show her hand. "Our hope is that we have a long relationship and that she continues to be one of the most important faces for our network. We're working with her to craft something where everyone wins."
Still, the comedian's future with both E! and her Lately mothership, whose bread and butter remains the celeb-fueled gossip Handler admits she has grown to deplore, remains far from clear. "We'll see how it goes and if it works out for me to stick around here," Handler says, without a trace of emotion. "It's a lengthy process. They tell you you're valuable, and then you get a counter and you think, 'I guess you really don't care about me at all.' Nothing is set in stone, so if things go south, then obviously I'll be moving along."
So what would Handler -- who brought in more than $40 million in ad revenue for the network in 2009 -- do next? She says she and her production partner Tom Brunelle are weighing those options carefully as they grow their newly minted production company, Borderline Amazing. Says Handler: "I talked with Bonnie about how I see myself growing as a producer and a performer. I'm not one to plan ahead, but I don't want to be doing the same thing for five more years."
Adds Brunelle: "We're not really sure what's going to happen, but we've got 18 months to figure it out. We're never going to have a drama department; we're comedy people. We're developing plenty of shows. Whatever it is, it has to be funny." Handler has shown a knack for finding, nurturing and supporting other talent, be it Whitney Cummings or Ross Mathews, both of whom have developed pilots with Borderline.
Greenblatt says Handler "could do more for us on NBC, whether it's late-night or primetime." But Handler isn't so convinced. In fact, it's not something she even wants.
"The next step for me is not The Tonight Show," she says. That's a job for Jimmy Fallon. I'm way too divisive for a show like that."
Her definition of what is funny, though, seems to be in some sort of existential flux. "I want to do something that's going to utilize my brain a little more than this show," she says. "If Lately is the show that I'm going to do, it's going to change. But it may turn out that I'm done with it altogether. I can't keep doing the same thing; my brain is bleeding. I want to do something that's more mindful and isn't celebrity-centered. I'm not looking to totally bail on E! They've done a lot for me, and I like it here." Beat. "If you take away the Kardashians."
"She'll poke fun at anyone, but she's also not afraid to poke fun at herself. That makes her vulnerable, open and funny and gives her permission to do the same to others." -- Bonnie Hammer, chairman of NBCUniversal Cable Entertainment
With a bank account brimming at $22 million and seven-figure checks coming in annually from her three previous best-selling books, Handler built a fortune lambasting the very inner circle in which she increasingly resides. Her 30-minute show won fans with an original recipe: a format that includes a self-deprecating opening monologue, celebrity interviews -- which recently has acquired a higher caliber of talent, including Handler pals Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon -- and a roundtable of Handler sidekicks she refers to as "misfits" who dissect the most ridiculous celebrity gossip. After 700-plus episodes, Handler is no longer just the wry outsider. Even after she was critically panned for her September 2010 MTV Video Music Awards hosting job ("You have to be an idiot to not know that was going to happen," she says), the show nabbed its highest ratings since 2002 (11.4 million viewers), becoming the third-most-watched MTV telecast ever.
Thus Handler is now in the fantasy mode of her career -- the part where you are so rich, so successful, that you can step off the treadmill and reassess. "I want to do something people aren't expecting from me," she says. In a nod to her current employer, the woman who cites Gloria Steinem and Fran Lebowitz as role models, adds: "I want to educate people and deliver news that isn't just surrounded by Charlie Sheen. I'd like to be able to do the serious stuff in conjunction with the comedy. I'd like to make an impact and have more responsibility than I do now."
Hammer, in her first discussion of what is ahead at E!, says there will be room for what Handler is seeking. "I would say that E! is a wide-open book right now in terms of where we go," she says. "We're about to launch into what I call a brand audit, not dissimilar to what we did at USA seven years ago, to figure out what E! is right now. E! is very successful, it's not broken, but the goal is to do to E! what we did to USA -- take it from a successful channel and have it just completely break out. I'm a big believer that E! can be a top 10 cabler, maybe even top five, in the not so distant future." She adds, "As we look at where the brand can go, Chelsea may be able to play a wonderful part in that. I don't know what that means yet in terms of new formats and points of view, but we will not be going downscale but instead moving to kind of a broad, upscale, fresh tone. There are a lot of possibilities."
And so it is that Handler's show, perhaps reflective of its host's celebrity fatigue, may seem a wee gentler lately. Once the voice of her nightly roundtable that unleashes on the likes of Lindsay Lohan, Handler now acts as a sounding board -- allowing her panelists to throw the necessary punches audiences as Handler interjects with an occasional one-liner either at her own or her comics' expense.
Four years ago, Handler joked to an audience: "Katie Holmes [said] Tom's turned on by the sight of her in a suit and miniskirt. Tom also likes it when she wears the monitoring bracelet on her ankle." Would she do the same joke today? Probably.
"I only have talked about people that I think are acting irresponsibly or are making fools of themselves," she says, putting her face in front of her dog Chunk and receiving a lick on the nose. "There's no reason to talk about Reese Witherspoon. I've never talked about those people and anyone I've become friends with. I'm not going to be friends with them if they're idiots in the first place."
And in her mind, she knows who the idiots are and the distance she wants to keep from them.
"Jennifer [Aniston] said she saw the Kardashians at dinner last night," Handler says. "She was like, 'They're nice.' And I said: 'Don't get photographed with the Kardashians!' People will blame me for it!"
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Blessed with a knack for one-liners at an early age, Handler headed to Los Angeles from Livingston, N.J., at 19 to pursue an acting career. The youngest daughter of a Mormon mother, who passed away in 2005, and a Jewish car salesman father, she says: "I wanted to be famous. It's embarrassing to admit, but I came out to L.A. thinking it would happen in no time," Handler says with a snort. "I thought, 'Once they see me, they'll be so glad I came.' I always had a ridiculous amount of self-confidence about what was going to happen to me."
But like many fame-seekers before her, Handler was met with the harsh reality of Hollywood and quickly wound up waiting tables at Le Petit Four on Sunset and the old Morton's steakhouse on Melrose. After nearly three years of failed auditions and answering cattle calls ads in the pages of Back Stage West, Handler decided it was time to do something to differentiate herself.
"It doesn't hurt to be attractive, but I thought about what I could do that would give me my own voice," Handler explains. With a sharp tongue from a young age, Handler -- who enjoyed comedy as a child -- began developing a stand-up act at a friend's suggestion. "I didn't know at the time it would totally dictate my career," she says.
In 2002, Handler, then 27, landed a role on Oxygen's hidden-camera sketch comedy series Girls Behaving Badly and quickly realized her own behind-the-camera potential. "I remember knowing what would work and what would be funny, but I still had to answer to these guys," Handler recalls. "I thought, 'This is never going to work for me.' "
Handler spent the next five years angling for guest spots on series including My Wife and Kids and The Bernie Mac Show and managed a fairly stable gig as a quick-witted, hyper-snarky talking head on a variety of E! countdown shows. Eventually, Handler caught the eye of Harbert, and he plucked her out in 2006 to create an original series for the network, The Chelsea Handler Show. At the time he developed the concept with Handler, E! was floundering with reality shows such as The Simple Life 4 and Gastineau Girls.
"Immediately, Ted noticed her and felt she had this unique comedic voice," says Berger. "We wanted to try and find the right vehicle for her on our network and ended up developing a weekly show."
The show was short lived, as the network canceled the series after its first-season run and created the idea for Chelsea Lately. Around the same time, Harbert and Handler began their four-year relationship (it ended in January 2010).
Handler teamed up with future production partner Brunelle, then a producer on MTV's Your Face or Mine?, to create the 12 episodes of The Chelsea Handler Show that would evolve into her nightly talk show and where Handler would become the boss she craved to be. Chelsea Lately premiered in July 2007 and after only one year on air was averaging more than 500,000 viewers at 11:30 p.m. In February 2009, Handler moved up to the 11 p.m. slot and developed a cultlike following that averages 1 million viewers. "There are little spikes here and there, but we have pretty steady ratings," she says. "Our same audience shows up five nights a week."
Handler, whose audience is overwhelmingly female (more than 80 percent of her viewers in the 18-to-34 demo are women), has maintained steady ratings for close to two years as she holds a monopoly on the thritysomething working-woman demo in late-night.
Earlier this year, Handler and Brunelle launched their documentary-style sitcom After Lately for an eight-episode run. The weekly show followed the Chelsea Lately cast and crew re-enacting the behind-the-scenes shenanigans of the nightly talk show. One part fake, one part real, the premiere season drew more than 1 million viewers a week. E! has already ordered a second season.
Now, Handler also personally is financing an autobiographical documentary, which she hopes to take to the Toronto Film Festival, following her throughout the 2010 Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang stand-up tour (which grossed more than $16 million). The documentary captures a vulnerable Handler as she struggles with her breakup with Harbert (the comedian lies in bed and tells the camera she's texting her ex, "You're not the boss of me anymore"). Even though the documentary catches a visibly exhausted, makeup-free Handler curled under the sheets of her hotel room bed, she maintains that she does not suffer the usual comedian demons, nor professional insecurities. "When I was starting out and I didn't have my own show, yes, I was insecure," Handler explains. "But no, I'm not insecure now. Once you've achieved success and you're making decisions that are working, I don't understand why anyone would be second-guessing themselves."
?????
It's another day back at Handler's office. "I flew in from New York yesterday," she says, attempting to describe the ridiculousness of her office when she arrived. "I walked in, and three people were in cheerleading outfits and another was naked with tape over them."
Handler has moved from the desk and now is sitting on the couch across from me. She has traded her Jimmy Choos for Havaianas flip-flops and is visibly more relaxed and more comfortable with my presence, here on our third day together. Now that I've withstood a few blows, I'm seemingly worthy. She continues: "I said, 'Wow, this is great. This is exactly what I want my life to be like.' "
Even with the faint stain of sarcasm in her voice, she's being genuine. That is exactly what she wanted her life to be like. I slowly begin to understand her method. She'll test and poke. And if you have the guts to come back for more, she'll slowly begin to lift the curtain. She doesn't trust easily. But once you're in, you're in (just ask her staff, who benefited from an all-expenses-paid Cabo vacation last summer).
"It was nice meeting you," Handler says. Oddly formal, she sticks out her right hand as she heads toward her maroon Bentley.
What Handler's future holds is anyone's guess. She avoids comparisons to other female comedians, even Joan Rivers, who long ago also was criticized for raunchy humor and rough treatment of celebrities. When asked her thoughts about the Rivers documentary A Piece of Work, Handler says, "I thought, 'I hope I'm not doing stand-up at that age.' "
So what will it be? She makes it clear, whatever she does, she will do it her way. "I have really strong opinions; I'll never sell out," Handler says. "I'm not going to wake up one day and have a perfume. That's never going to happen." She adds, "It would smell like rubbing alcohol."
-- Lacey Rose contributed to this report. - The Hollywood Reporter (June 2011)


"'Chelsea Lately' tops 'Conan' in ratings. What's she doing right?"

Team Coco better call for backup, because Chelsea Handler is coming for them. According to ratings reports, Chelsea Lately surpassed His Gingerness in ratings for the first time in June, averaging 959,000 to Conan‘s 851,000.
A number of half-baked theories could be used as reasons why ratings fell in Handler’s favor this month (Pilot buzz? Book/tour success?), but one thing is clear: She’s doing something right.
I was tardy to Chelsea’s late-night, booze-soaked party. But once I arrived, I found myself simultaneously shocked and appreciative — shocked by the amount of bad language and rated-R conversation topics (pearls = clutched) and appreciative of her candidness, especially with celebrities. (Among my faves? When she semi-mocked Justin Bieber’s hair wiggle.)
Admittedly, the celebrity portion is usually the part I tune in for. In addition to her calling out people on douche-tastic behavior, it’s become a game of sorts for celebrities to make Handler squirm. (Pharrell offered her… what?). It’s uncomfortable at times, often awkward, but mostly just different — albeit pleasantly raunchy. I can appreciate that. I’d even consider myself a proud member of the non-lame, Chelsea Handler-equivalent of Team Coco — The Handle Bars, perhaps? Team Hanandler? The Chelsea Peers? - Entertainment Weekly (June 2011)


"Chelsea Handler Inks New Two-Year Deal With E!"

The deal will keep the late-night host's "Chelsea Lately" with the network through 2014.
- Hollywood Reporter (Fall 2011)


"Chelsea Handler Inks New Two-Year Deal With E!"

The deal will keep the late-night host's "Chelsea Lately" with the network through 2014.
- Hollywood Reporter (Fall 2011)


"Buffett, Handler and Steinem walk into a party..."

It's strange to fathom Chelsea Handler, Gloria Steinem, and Warren Buffett collaborating to reform America's tax code. But at the recent Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, the edgy late-night talk-show host, the feminist icon, and the famed investor united around the "Buffett Rule," his proposal to lift taxes on the super-rich and equalize tax rates across classes. "I couldn't be more pleased," says Buffett, clearly pumped about his new supporters. "If I can get Chelsea and Gloria to command an army, I don't need more commanders."
The trio is strange enough--and certain to prompt serious eye-rolling over another celeb-backed cause--but stranger still and very amusing is the play-by-play of how they came together. The love story began, actually, with a wardrobe malfunction in the "green room" of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Laguna Niguel, California. Handler was relaxing back stage, after interviewing Arianna Huffington before a crowd of 400 women leaders and Buffett (the event's only male speaker), when Steinem walked in to introduce herself. Handler noticed, at that moment, that her ripped camisole left one cup of her bra entirely exposed to her lifelong role model. "The perfect intro to Gloria Steinem," says Handler, recalling the wardrobe malfunction that turned out to be an ice-breaker. The two women hit it off instantly and quickly agreed that Buffett, of all the day's speakers, had been the most interesting and provocative.
It was Steinem, typically, who prodded Handler to start a movement in support of the Buffett tax plan. "There are so many great ideas here, but we need action to come out of it," said Steinem about the Summit. As she went on to riff passionately about the widening gap between rich and poor, Handler started emailing her Hollywood friends, including Reese Witherspoon, to ask if they would be willing to pay more taxes a la the Buffett Rule, in order to equalize the system. "I can get the celebrity crowd," she vowed to Steinem.
An hour later, at the Summit's cocktail reception, Buffett heard about the movement and was particularly pleased to learn that his heroine was an instigator. "I remember seeing Gloria 40 years ago, giving a lecture at Creighton University. She blew me away," Buffett said, noting that Steinem "expresses ideas forcefully without being obnoxious." Over in a corner, Steinem was deep in conversation with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. "Can we put a petition out in the hall tomorrow, for women to sign in support of the Buffett Rule?" Gloria asked as I walked up to them. "You could put it online," quipped Sandberg, meaning it seriously.
Not much would have come of all this if Handler and Steinem had not made their way to Buffett's dinner table that evening. "Oh, hello girls, I'm excited to see you," the billionaire said to the power duo. Handler, a standup comic, steered the talk in a sexual direction ("I'm an older man," said Buffett, playing along. "I'm 77," replied Steinem flirtatiously). Before they left his table, Buffett directed his new advocates: "I'd love for you to get on board and spread the word."
Since the Summit in early October, Steinem has been collecting supporters of the Buffett Rule on, "pardon the expression, my Facebook fan page," she says. Steinem is asking for zip codes so she can send names of supporters to the appropriate people in Congress. She also talked up the Buffett Rule on Chelsea Lately, Handler's late-night talk show on E! (CMCSA).
Handler, meanwhile, is Tweeting and urging her pals who have millions of Twitter followers (as she does) to Tweet about Buffett and his tax reform idea. Rosie O'Donnell is signed on. When Handler emailed her asking for help, Rosie replied: "yes I am in. let me know how I can help. Don't u love knowing Gloria? She is better than Jesus."
Who knows how far this will go? A lot of celebs won't love the Buffett Rule, and many who sign on will look to dodge it with the aid of their accountants and lawyers. Nonetheless, Buffett is basking in this unexpected advocacy. "This is what I was hoping would happen," he says. Since he's not a TV watcher, he had never heard of Chelsea Handler before the Summit, but, he says, "I fell in love with her." He adds, "Anything I can do to help her, with facts or backup materials, tell her to call me. Tell her I have an 800-number for her, straight to my office." - Fortune Magazine (Fall 2011)


"The Anti Oprah"

CHELSEA
Handler says i must thicken my skin. She tells me I am not going to make it in this business if I let people push me around, if I get upset easily when someone I've written about is angry with me. She asks repeatedly if I am listening to her.
"You are one of the worst journalists I've ever met," she declares when I can't repeat back to her what she has just told me.
We are sitting in a back booth in a Japanese restaurant in Brentwood, Calif., facing each other over plates of sushi. Handler picks off the...

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2099694,00.html#ixzz1jwsjyTvr - Time Magazine (Fall 2011)


"A&E Biography"

blunt and candid comic, Chelsea Handler was born on February 25, 1975, in Livingston, New Jersey. She moved to Los Angeles at 19 to become an actress. While working as a waitress, Handler turned to stand-up comedy. She landed some television work and then turned to writing, hitting the best-sellers list in 2005. In 2007, Handler made her late-night debut, which continues to be a success. - The Bio Channel (Fall 2011)


"THR's 2011 Women in Entertainment Power 100"

THR's 2011 Women in Entertainment Power 100
NUMBER 97 Chelsea Handler

Executive producer and host, "Chelsea Lately"
- Hollywood Reporter (December 2011)


"TRAILER NEW MOVIE "This Means War" w/ Reese Witherspoon"

Check out the just released trailer for This Means War featuring Reese Witherspoon, Tom Hardy, and Chris Pine!

Here’s the official synopsis: The world’s deadliest CIA operatives are inseparable partners and best friends until they fall for the same woman. Having once helped bring down entire enemy nations, they are now employing their incomparable skills and an endless array of high-tech gadgetry against their greatest nemesis ever – each other.

Director McG recently told USA Today how he offered Reese the lead role.

“I told her, ‘You’re America’s sweetheart. Women love you. Men … like you. I want me to covet you.’ She took a deep breath and said, ‘Go for it,’” he shared. “I love strong female characters, and she had seen Charlie’s Angels. Between her physical readiness and the manner we photographed her, you get a sexy takeaway.”

This Means War, which also stars Chelsea Handler, hits theaters February 17, 2012! - Just Jared


"Chelsea Handler signs new deal with E!"

Insult queen Chelsea Handler has signed a sweet deal to stay on as host and exec producer of her E! late-night talk show through 2014.

According to Deadline.com, it is worth $25 million.

And according to Page Six, Handler gave each of her 138 staffers $1,000 as a thank-you once the deal was sealed.

She also will develop and produce shows through her production company, Borderline Amazing Prods, which will have a first-look deal with E! and NBC Universal.

Deadline says that since Chelsea Lately's July 2007 launch, the late-night talk show has grown into a strong franchise, highly rated among women 18-34.

Handler's other E! show, the mocku-series After Lately, also will return, beginning its second season Nov. 27. And Handler is exec producing the upcoming NBC series, Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea.

"It's a great time for women in comedy, and it's a great time to have real breasts," Handler said of the deal, reports Reuters.
- USA TODAY- Fall 2011


"Chelsea Handler: The Queen of the Night"

She is a Woman of the Year because: “She’s a multimedia mogul…and she believes that the better one woman does, the better all women do.”
—Reese Witherspoon

“I’m not sure you’ll print this,” Chelsea Handler warns before riffing about, er, lightening up one’s nether regions. “First, it was laser hair removal. You put yourself through that torture, and then it’s ‘Sorry, laser hair removal’s out of style!’ And you’re like, What? So I’m not going to be tricked into this other thing. I might put a Crest Whitestrip up there, but I will not go and bleach it.” She lets out a throaty laugh. “My mouth has gotten me in trouble my entire life. I just happen to be making a career out of it.”

And what a career it is! Handler, 36, is the only woman to succeed as a late-night-comedy host, ever. Though her E! show, Chelsea Lately, is not for the fainthearted—sex, drinking and masturbation are all on the table—it has pulled in an average of one million viewers nightly. She’s even beaten Conan. (To cleanse her brain between shows, she reads literary classics; right now it’s Edith Wharton’s tragic The House of Mirth. “It’s making me want to shoot myself in the face,” she says. “Isn’t mirth supposed to be joyful?”) She recently finished a successful live tour; her books have simultaneously held the #1, #2 and #3 spots on the New York Times best-seller list; and she has a sitcom, Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea, in the works. Says an admiring Jay Leno, who hired her early on as a Tonight Show correspondent: “I’m amazed at how she’s built an empire.” She’s built a fanatical following, too. “I think women see themselves in me,” says Handler. “I’m making a fool out of myself for us. I’m happy to do it.”

“Chelsea’s not ‘funny for a girl.’ She’s funny, period,” says Handler’s friend comedian Whitney Cummings, who hit it big as a regular on Chelsea Lately. “And she’s single-handedly undoing the stereotype that women aren’t supportive of women in the business.” Handler likes to think of it this way: “It’s better to hold a woman up or to step aside and let her shine. It makes your own star shine brighter.”
- Glamour Magazine- Fall 2011


"Sex, sleep, and power: A conversation with Chelsea Handler and Arianna Huffington"

Talk show host and comedian Chelsea Handler interviewed AOL Huffington Post Media Group's president and editor-in-chief Arianna Huffington at Fortune's Most Powerful Women Summit.

Below is an unedited transcript:

Arianna Huffington
CHELSEA HANDLER: Hello, hello. I am very, very, very excited and thrilled to be doing this interview, because it's finally something serious out of my life, and I would like to go on the record and say that I am a proud holder of an AOL e-mail account, and for the first time in my life not embarrassed to say it. (Laughter.)
We spoke last week on the phone to discuss what we would be talking about today, and first I want to talk about your passion for sleep.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Yes. You know, I thought when I read your book, My Horizontal Life, I thought if I had written a book called My Horizontal Life, it would have been about sleep, not sex. (Laughter.) And I kind of came to sleep late in life. I basically -- (laughter) -- came to it because I fainted from exhaustion, and hit my head on my desk, and broke my cheekbone and got five stitches on my right eye. And that's what started my love affair with sleep. (Laughter.)
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But in the course of doing that, I kind of discovered that we are paying a heavy price by being a sleep-deprived society, that if we actually could up our sleep portion every day, we would become wiser. You know, I feel that we are -- we have so many leaders at the moment, in media, in politics, in business, who are incredibly smart, high IQs, great degrees, and no wisdom, they're making terrible decisions. And I think one of the reasons is sleep deprivation. Bill Clinton said that some of the worst decisions in his life were made when he was tired. He didn't specify which worst decisions in his life -- (laughter) -- but if only he'd gotten eight hours sleep, we would have missed all those months of impeachment hearings. (Laughter.)
CHELSEA HANDLER: So, how do you propose one gets a full eight hours of sleep every night?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: I think first of all it's prioritizing. Like everybody here is incredibly busy, you know, they could work 24 hours a day, but the reality is that once we look at the medical evidence, sleep deprivation leads to health problems. It actually reduces your sex drive, did you know that?
CHELSEA HANDLER: I have a great sex drive, so I don't know anything about that. (Laughter.)
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: No, but I mean, if you -- but if you are exhausted, isn't your sex drive diminished?
CHELSEA HANDLER: Never, no. (Laughter.) That's why I've been able to write so many books about it.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: She's so sleep deprived that even her perception is kind of damaged. (Laughter, applause.)
But it's also like I know that when I've had a good night's sleep I feel more creative, less reactive, I enjoy my life more. And, you know, at my age, you know, I'm 61, and at my age I find that I don't want just to be effective, I want to enjoy my life. That's really important to me. You know, I want to enjoy every day, every hour. Even when difficult things happen, as they happen in each of our days, even when I have to face challenges and problems, it makes all the difference in the world if I've had a good night's sleep. End of commercial.
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CHELSEA HANDLER: Can I ask, so what do you look forward to most throughout your day? Is it walking into work, is it your day at work or is it walking home at night and able to have dinner with your friends or family or what have you? I mean, what gets you going each day, what's your favorite part of it?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Well, I'm lucky that no two days are alike. I've moved from Los Angeles to New York when AOL (AOL) bought the Huffington Post, and took down the cubicles on the fifth floor, brought editors and tech together. So, when I walk into our offices now -- incidentally I also installed two nap rooms. I forgot to mention that. (Laughter.)
CHELSEA HANDLER: Yes.

Chelsea Handler
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Yes. And because we also own MapQuest, and nap rooms are called Nap Quest One and Nap Quest Two. (Laughter.) Although I must say, Chelsea, that the other day as I was going by, I saw the door of one of the Nap Quest rooms opening, and three people come out of it. (Laughter.) So, I don't know if we should rename it ménage a trois. But as long as people are happy at work, I'm fine. (Laughter.)
CHELSEA HANDLER: Well, you also have cocktail Thursdays, right?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: No, you have cocktails.
CHELSEA HANDLER: Oh, that must be me. I'm confusing it.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: You have margarita Thursdays.
CHELSEA HANDLER: We have margarita Thursdays every Thursday at work, yes.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: I thought maybe margarita Mondays would be better. It alliterates, and then like triple-shot espresso Thursdays to get through Friday.
CHELSEA HANDLER: Well, that brings me to another point. I mean, I think creating a work environment as a female is or can be very, very different than the environment that's created by men. So, can you speak to that, and how you feel about that?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: I do feel very maternal about our work environment. I love celebrating things. Like yesterday we launched two new sites, Huff/Post 50, our boomer site, with Rita Wilson as our editor. So, we brought Rita into the office with champagne to celebrate the launch of Huff/Post 50. We also launched Gay Voices, and today we launched High School and Weddings, which we launched a year and a half after divorce. We do things a little unconventionally. (Laughter.) Divorce was the brainchild of Nora Efron, who's been here, and everybody loves her here.
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And one morning, I was staying with her in Long Island, and she said to me, you know what we must launch, a divorce section, because, she said, marriage comes and goes, but divorce is forever. (Laughter.)
CHELSEA HANDLER: How do you feel about creating the kind of environment -- I know in my experience running television shows, which is different than obviously what you do, but it's -- you know, I have a business partner who's a man, who says it's okay, our policy needs to be that it's okay for a woman to cry at work but not about work.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: I like that.
CHELSEA HANDLER: So, you can cry at work if it's a personal issue, and I am a big proponent of that as well. I feel like everyone should feel like they have a place that's safe, and when you come to work I want everyone to be excited to get there.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Absolutely, I love that. I cry a lot. You know, my friends here will tell you I love crying. (Laughter.) Almost as much as I love sleeping. (Laughter.)
The reason for that is that I like to sort of get it all out. I like to start the next day fresh, you know, to put it all behind me. I like to really be able to say I have no grudges and no regrets. And in order to do that, you have to cry about the things that upset you and get them out of you.
You know when people say I have a thick skin, I don't let things upset you. I don't believe that, and I don't want to have a thick skin, because if you have a thick skin, you don't let the good things in either.
So, I prefer to be permeable, like a child. Have you seen how children are? You know, they can be really upset, they can cry, and then five minutes later, you look at them and it's over. And that's how I like to be. You know, the older I get, that's my ideal way of being, watching little kids and emulating them.
CHELSEA HANDLER: What is your relationship like with your daughters?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Well, that's like the biggest thing in my life. That's why, Chelsea, you know, you and I have just met but how much time did we spend backstage with me urging you to have a child? (Laughter.)
CHELSEA HANDLER: She said, do you want children, I said no, and she said, yes, you do. (Laughter.) I said I'm pretty sure I don't, and she said, you're wrong. (Laughter.)
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: She's going to London with her boyfriend. I said London is a great place to get pregnant. (Laughter.)
So, I'm now going to be e-mailing her on her AOL account, you know, reminding her, a good time of the month, I found that out.
So, anyway, from -- it's just women here, right?
You know, I had my children late. You know, I lost my first child that was stillborn, my first pregnancy. My first child was at 38, my second at 40. And there's nothing I love more than spending time with them. They are both at college. You know, one is 20, one is 22. One is an artist. You went to her website.
CHELSEA HANDLER: I went to her website, yes.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: IsabellaHuffington.com, a commercial for my artist daughter. And the other wants to be a journalist; she's a senior.
And what I love -- now, you know, as anybody here with adult children knows, they become your friends. They're always your children, because you always mother them. And the reason why I keep saying that you should have children is because you are so nurturing. I mean, look at the tribe that you surround yourself with. I don't know if you know it, but her brother lives with her and he's her chef. You have your Pilates teacher living with you. You have a couple of gay friends living in your guesthouse. (Laughter.)
10 global women on the rise
Are you sure you're not Greek? (Laughter, applause.) Because it reminds me of my life, my home. You know, there are days when I would walk into my kitchen and know half the people there, because my mother was like that. You know, whoever would come in, the FedEx man, my mother would say, oh, come and sit down, I just baked something. You know, she could not have an impersonal relationship. And I love that way of being, and I have a sense that that's how you are. I mean, you are nurturing to younger comedians like Whitney Cummings (ph), whom you helped so much.
And that's another thing. Mentoring has been such a big part of this conference, and whether you are mentoring like you all did yesterday -- I just arrived today unfortunately -- or the way you're mentoring younger comedians, it's just such an important responsibility for women whose lives have worked out.
CHELSEA HANDLER: Yeah, I agree with that wholeheartedly, and I think when you can create opportunities for women -- and not just women, when you can create opportunities for other people that are in your field, you know, especially women, because we all know those types of women that are out there that aren't doing that, that don't think there's room for everyone, and to have the ability and the confidence to not be in the center of the spotlight at all times and to share the stage, which I think is a huge lesson for a woman, and I think it comes a lot from the way you were raised, and I know your relationship with your mother was obviously a hugely impactful one. Can you talk about her a little bit and maybe something that she said or an experience you had with her that's stayed with you for a long time?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Well, she was the foundation of my life, because she -- you know, growing up in Athens without any money, I literally saw a picture of Cambridge in England, and I said to my mother, I want to go there. And everybody around us said, don't do be ridiculous, you're never going to get in, you have no money, most English girls don't get in. And my mother said, let's make it happen. But it wasn't let's make it happen like a stage mother with pressure, it was more like let's make it happen, and if you don't make it happen, I won't love you any less. You know, go for it, but my love doesn't depend on you getting there.
You know, earlier, when the conversation turned around risks, you know, I really believe that we women especially are so afraid of failing, that so often we don't try new things, because the chances of failing are always there. And my mother always kept saying that failure is not the opposite of success, failure is a stepping stone to success. That was one of her favorite things to say.
And the other one that you would appreciate was that angels fly because they take themselves lightly. So, it was all about humor and not taking yourself and your life too seriously.
CHELSEA HANDLER: I like that. My mother passed away as well, so I have a very --
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: In 2005.
CHELSEA HANDLER: Oh, thank you. And I feel, I don't know if you feel this way, but I feel like I almost feel her presence around me more since she passed away than I did before. I feel very protected and I feel very close to her, which I think happens to a lot of people who had kind of close relationships with their parents. Do you feel that?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Yes, I feel that, and I also kind of do believe actually that there is another dimension to life, and when we open ourselves to it, we do have these experiences, whether it's through dreams or meditation, which I've been doing every day for many, many years.
CHELSEA HANDLER: You meditate every day?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: I do.
CHELSEA HANDLER: What time of day does this happen?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: I do it in the morning before the day starts, because if I don't, I'm not going to get it done. The same with yoga or exercise or something, I've learned that if I don't do it right away, I'm not going to do it.
And then all these things that nurture us are really important. I mean, shall we share our secret?
CHELSEA HANDLER: Yes, what is it? Oh, our facialists. We have the same facialist.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: We have the same facialist.
CHELSEA HANDLER: This woman who basically beats the shit out of your face so you look younger an hour later. (Laughter.) She calls it contouring; I call it something else. (Laughter.)
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: But she's really great, Mila Moorse (ph). Let's give her a commercial. She's in Los Angeles. And she said to me that Chelsea and you are the two women who don't stop working while you're having a facial. We make calls, we sit there, and when there is kind of something noisy happening, we say, so sorry, we're on the tarmac. (Laughter.)
Sherry Lansing (ph) taught me that. She said, if I'm blow-drying my hair, there are two kinds of people in my life: the ones to whom I say, I'm blow-drying my hair, and the others to whom I say, I'm so sorry, I'm on the tarmac. (Laughter, applause.) Because women, you know, are never supposed to have to take any time blow-drying their hair or doing anything, we're supposed to be picture perfect getting out of bed. (Laughter.)
CHELSEA HANDLER: Can we talk about your father, too, because you had a different kind of relationship with your dad?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: You know, I kind of worshipped my dad. He was brilliant, he was an intellectual. He published an underground newspaper during the German occupation of Greece, and he was arrested and spent the war in a concentration camp.
So, when he -- he actually met my mother in a sanatorium. She was recovering from TB, he was recovering from the camp. And she was told that she could not have children, and she got promptly pregnant before they were married, and that was me.
And he never kind of wanted to play by the rules. He was a huge philanderer. When my mother complained, he said to her, you should not interfere in my private life. (Laughter.)
So, I was kind of in awe of his intellect, but I also kind of resented how much pain he caused my mother. I actually kept urging her to leave him, because I could not stand seeing her so sad. And she did leave him when I was 11, but never really stopped loving him. It's sort of ironic how --
CHELSEA HANDLER: So, what are your thoughts to obviously be as successful as you are? And I know you've been married. I mean, what are your thoughts on marriage?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Oh, I feel that for me having children sort of satisfied that desire to have a family. So, I'm not ruling anything out ever in life, but I'm not either looking forward to it in any way. You know, I feel that my life is -- I feel very grateful for my life right now.
One of my favorite sayings is Collette, you know, the French writer, who said, "I had such a wonderful life, I just wish I had realized it sooner." And I feel so many of us are very blessed. You know, there is no life that hasn't carried problems and crises and challenges, but we are blessed.
I really, really want to recognize that every day. I tell my children, you can experience any emotion in the world you want, but I also want you on a daily basis to experience gratitude, because if we don't, we just take far too much of our life for granted.
CHELSEA HANDLER: Do you feel proud of yourself?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: No, actually that was interesting, but my mother, whenever they would say to her, you must be so proud of your daughter, she said, no. Pride is not the way she related to me or to life, and it's not the way I relate to it. I feel very lucky that I'm doing something I love, and that every day I go to work and I love it.
And what Sheryl Sandberg was saying about feeling that you can make a difference, and that we have all those ways available to make a difference, and that the world needs all of us to make a difference, it's not like we can't be spectators, we need to be involved and discover sort of the leader in the mirror. We can't wait for somebody else to solve problems.
And that's partly why I love what we are doing at work, because we are constantly bringing more and more people into the conversation and turning conversations into action.
CHELSEA HANDLER: I know we're out of time already, but I would love for people to have the opportunity to ask questions. Is there anyone who wants to ask a question? If you do, please raise your hand like a civilized lady.
QUESTION: Hello, hello, hello.
CHELSEA HANDLER: Oh, there's the woman right over here. Oh, I'm sorry, you work here. (Laughter.)
Nobody wants to ask -- oh, here we go, sorry. Do you want to stand up?
QUESTION: I'm Kim with (She Dappers ?).
And it's actually the same question I've been trying to ask most of the panelists all day, but just because you're talking about family and mothers, and the theme kind of this afternoon has been around -- you know, Gloria Steinem said, we're not crazy, it's the institution that's crazy, and Sheryl talking about mothers leaving too early or women leaving too early, taking their foot off the gas.
So, I'd love to hear if you have thoughts, what can the business community do to try to encourage women, after they do have kids, so they don't have to make that choice of all or nothing, stay at home or work?
There's so many incredibly talented women who feel there's no option and it's one or the other, and I feel like business has the opportunity to lead in this area, not wait for governments, although I'd love governments to be involved, but not wait for policy but to say, you know what, business structure doesn't fit our society anymore, we have to change from businesses to create a platform that's more family centered.
So, do you have any thoughts on that?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: I think actually a lot of businesses are beginning to do that, and a lot of women are beginning to recognize that this juggling act is really ultimately about the decisions we make every day. It's not about the big decision, are we going to work or are we going to have a family; it's often about the little decisions like am I going to leave this meeting earlier to pick up my daughter from school, am I going to skip something in order to be present at something that matters to my child. And businesses need to acknowledge that, not just for mothers but increasingly for fathers.
You know, we just brought in, we just hired Lisa Belkin from the New York Times. She's been writing a column there called Motherlode about parenting. And we are renaming the column Parentlode, because we want to acknowledge the fact that I work with many men with young children, and they're also a big part increasingly of their children's lives. And as a culture we need to acknowledge that. And when we acknowledge that, it's going to be easier for women to be able to do the famous juggling act.
There's a tremendous amount of redefining of success and happiness going on in the world, and I think we women are leading the way, because let's face it, you know, men define success in a very unhealthy way, you know, working around the clock, having a heart attack in your fifties, and that's the price you pay for the corner office, and we are saying no, we are going to do it differently. And as we are doing it differently, I think we are going to make a big difference for women who are following us. (Applause.)
CHELSEA HANDLER: Well, I would like to say thank you very, very much for sitting down with me, and that this was very entertaining, to say the least, and you're a lot funnier than I am. So, thank you. (Laughter, applause.) - Fortune Magazine- Fall 2011


"Lies Chelsea Handler Told Me NUMBER 1 on NY TIMES"

Week of May 23rd
New York Times Best Sellers List
Lies Chelsea Handler Told Me NUMBER 1 - New York Times Best Sellers List


"Chelsea Handler: Keys To A Multimedia Empire"

When Chelsea Handler's last book, Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang, was released in 2010, the comedian turned writer accomplished something very rare: She had three books on the best-seller list, all at the same time. Not only that, but she beat Karl Rove to the top of the list.

"When we found out that I came in 1 and he came in 2," Handler recalls, "my sister said — she called me and she said — 'Do you think Karl Rove is sitting in his study in his boxer shorts thinking, Who the hell is Chelsea Handler?' "

Handler is a stealth celebrity. From her late-night perch as the host of Chelsea Lately, on the E! cable network, she has built a sizable fan base for her brand of raunchy insult comedy. But her string of best-selling books — titles include My Horizontal Life and Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea — have sold so well that her publishing company has given Handler her own imprint. Its first book, Lies that Chelsea Handler Told Me, has just been released.

Handler seems surprised at her own success. Not so long ago, she says, she was doing standup at Starbucks. Now, she regularly hosts celebrities like Will Ferrell and Jennifer Aniston on her talk show. She's known for quick comebacks in conversations with stars like the pop singer Rihanna, recently on the receiving end of a bawdy come-on when she appeared on Chelsea Lately.


As Handler tells it, she began thinking about doing standup comedy after speaking in front of her court-mandated driving class following DUI arrest.

"I got up there and I told my story and how my sister turned me in and I was using her fake ID and I called the cop racist and he was white and we all were white and nothing made any sense. And people were laughing and I remember thinking, 'This is the best feeling.' I mean, the instructor came and said, 'You have to get off the stage.' And then I thought, 'Wow. Maybe I should do standup.' "

Lies That Chelsea Handler Told Me
By Chelsea's Family, Friends and Other Victims
Hardcover, t304 pages
Grand Central Publishing
List price: $24.99
The youngest of six children, Handler admits she was a spoiled child and that her comedy does have a "bratty kid" quality to it. She likes to make fun of people and play practical jokes. On her show she surrounds herself with a motley crew of regulars including a Mexican dwarf named Chuy Bravo.

Handler says she first started thinking about writing after she read a book by humorist David Sedaris.

"Before I read David Sedaris, I didn't know you could just kinda write disparate stories and put them together and have them be about whatever. That kind of opened my eyes and when I read one of his books I thought, 'Wow, I could do this. I could write like this.' "

Handler, who can be brutal about other people, is brutally honest about herself. In her first book, My Horizontal Life, she mined her own sexual exploits for a laugh.

"She doesn't play by nice-girl rules," says Beth DeGuzman, vice president and editor-in-chief at Grand Central, the company that published Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang and has printed books by other comedians like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. DeGuzman says that when it came time to promote her book, Handler was tireless.


Ben Symon/Foxtel/Getty Images
Chelsea Handler interviews Rihanna on an episode of her show Chelsea Lately broadcast from Sydney.
"Usually, you try to make sure that a celebrity will give you two weeks. She came to us and said, 'I want to do a comedy tour. I want to do book signings.' And it went on for months and months and months," DeGuzman says. "So after we saw how good the book was and how committed she was to supporting the book, we knew we wanted to continue to be partners with Chelsea."

So when Handler's agent proposed that she get her own publishing imprint within Grand Central, the company said yes. That means Handler will not only write books but will also publish other writers' work.

The first book on the imprint is a hybrid of those two ideas. For Lies That Chelsea Handler Told Me, Handler commissioned her oft-abused colleagues, friends and family to write about the ruthless lies and practical jokes she has inflicted upon them over the years.

"This book I just kind of oversaw and edited and kind of added stuff at the end of people's chapters and added a bunch of pictures," Handler says. "But this book to me is kind of like ... the end of the road as far as my practical jokes go, because I don't know who's ever going to believe anything I say again after this. It's like the girl who cried vodka."

Handler says she'd love to discover a great comic writer. She knows one thing: She wants to publish books that make her laugh — a lot.

"It's so relaxing to laugh really hard. I mean, there's no better feeling, even if you are not in on the joke, to see someone else hysterically laughing when they can't contain themselves," Handler says. "And we've all had that, where you really think you're going to pee, you know, you're laughing so hard and you can't get it together and you know it's totally inappropriate. That's what I want people to be doing."

Handler's not sure exactly what her next book will be, but she says her dog, Chunk, is working on his autobiography. - NPR


"Chelsea Handler Launches Publishing Imprint At Grand Central"

Chelsea Handler Launches Publishing Imprint At Grand Central
By MIKE FLEMING | Monday November 15, 2010 @ 5:21pm PST

Tags: Book Deals, Book Publishing, Books, Borderline Amazing, Chelsea Handler, Chelsea Handler Borderline Amazing, Grand Central Publishing, Hachette Book Group, Lies That Chelsea Told Me, Tom Brunelle

EXCLUSIVE: After cranking out three bestsellers, E! Entertainment Chelsea Lately host Chelsea Handler has taken the next step forward. She has been given her own imprint by her publisher, the Hachette Book Group USA division Grand Central Publishing. The imprint, called Borderline Amazing/A Chelsea Handler Book, will kick off with Lies that Chelsea Handler Told Me, a book that will be published May 2011. The imprint starts with a three-book deal. The second will ostensibly written under the byline of her long-suffering dog, Chunk (the pooch has a co-writer, who has been helping with a Twitter feed that apparently has a rabid following). Borderline Amazing Productions, the shingle she runs with Tom Brunelle, will oversee the publishing venture.

Handler, who has become increasingly entrepreneurial since her E! show premiered in 2007, said the imprint gives her the opportunity to hatch books from some of the talent that appears on her show. Handler is also embracing the inevitable: once up and comers get established, the public wants to see them taken down a few pegs. Why shouldn't the latter process be handled by loved ones who can profit from it?

Said Handler: "I've written three books now, and while they throw money at you after awhile, I completed the Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang book tour, went out every weekend and signed all those books, and I don't know if I can do it again. I'm 35 years old, I'm tired. This is a different approach, getting all my friends and family involved, telling them how I've screwed them over. I'll be editing and overseeing, while my family and friends make money off me and get something back from the torture I've put them through. I've got a couple other ideas and people I want to see write books." Of the Chunk opus, Handler told me: "Chunk has it tough. All he wants is to be with me, but I leave him with all the misfits in my life while I go on the road. This will be an easy book for him to write."

Handler, who aside from the show and the three books has headlined 80 dates of the Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang comedy tour and rang up 33rd on the Forbes list of 100 Most Powerful Women. One of her books, Are You There Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea, was sold for an NBC comedy series on which she'll be exec produce and play a recurring character. ISB New Media made her publishing deal. - Deadline Hollywood - Nikki Finke (Fall 2011)


"Handler Announces Comedy Tour"

It kicks off May 10, the same day her next book, Lies That Chelsea Handler Told Me, hits stores.
Chelsea Handler has announced another comedy tour.
Lies That Chelsea Handler Told Me kicks of May 10. A book of the same name will be released on the same day.
Joining her on the road are regulars from her E! show, Chelsea Lately: Brad Wollack, Josh Wolf, and Heather McDonald. Tickets go on sale Feb. 18.
TOUR DATES
May 10, 2011 Boston, Mass. Agganis Arena
May 11, 2011 Chicago, Ill. Chicago Theatre
May 12, 2011 Denver, Colo. Wells Fargo Theatre
May 13, 2011 Phoenix, Ariz. Comerica Theatre
May 14, 2011 Los Angeles, Calif. Pantages Theater
May 15, 2011 Oakland, Calif. Paramount Theatre
May 20, 2011 Philadelphia, Pa. Tower Theatre
May 21, 2011 New York, N.Y. Beacon Theatre
June 3, 2011 Detroit, Mich. Fox Theatre
June 4, 2011 Minneapolis, Minn. US Bank Theater at Target Center
June 10, 2011 Atlanta, Ga. Chastain Park Amphitheatre
June 11, 2011 Washington, D.C. DAR Constitution Hall
June 12, 2011 Austin, Texas Bass Concert Hall
June 17, 2011 Houston, Texas Verizon Wireless Theater
June 18, 2011 Dallas, Texas Verizon Theatre at Grand Prairie
June 19, 2011 Kansas City, Kan. Starlight Theatre
June 24, 2011 Portland, Ore. Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall
June 25, 2011 Seattle, Wash. Paramount Theatre - Hollywood Reporter (February 2011)


"She’s With the Brand"

She’s With the Brand
Chelsea Handler isn’t just a trash-talking comic. She’s a bestselling author, talk-show host, and money machine.
by Jennie YabroffJanuary 23, 2011
Art Streiber / August
Chelsea Handler

Chelsea Handler is onstage at a New Jersey concert arena, complaining about one of her politically incorrect pet peeves: names African-Americans give their babies. (Other things the blonde, blue-eyed equal-opportunity offender tells the audience bug her: Russians, Asians, the Kardashians, and Angelina Jolie.) She mimics a fan at one of her book signings, who complained when Handler misspelled her daughter’s name. “You spelled it wrong! It’s B-a-i-l-e-i-g-h.” To which Handler snapped: “Look, bitch, you spelled it wrong. If you’re going to name your daughter after a liqueur, at least have the courtesy to f--king spell it right.” Don’t even get her started on people who use numerals in their names, like the woman she met named L’4sha. “Can you imagine having sex with someone with a number in his name?” Handler says as she sticks out her butt and moans, “Give it to me, 50, give it to me!” It’s a clever wink at the rumors that she’s dating the rapper 50 Cent. The crowd goes insane.

For Handler, the personal is not only public; it’s profit. In just under a decade, she’s gone from a stand-up comic touring the nightclub circuit to a full-fledged brand—call it Chelsea Inc.—with books, TV shows, concerts, movies, and sponsorship deals that raked in a reported $20 million last year alone. Her act—think Joan Rivers’s irreverence, Howard Stern’s prurience, and Chris Rock’s rage—hasn’t changed much, but her fan base, which is largely women and gay men, doesn’t mind. Their insatiable appetite for her stories of sexual mishaps and other personal humiliations keeps her first two books on the bestseller list. (Together they’ve sold 1.7 million copies and counting.)

Handler is currently touring in support of her third release, Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang. She recently signed a deal with Grand Central Publishing to head up her own imprint, Borderline Amazing; the first title, Lies That Chelsea Handler Told Me, is a collection of essays by family and friends and comes out in May. NBC is developing a sitcom based on Handler’s second book, Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea, and the comic is working on After Lately, a behind-the-scenes program to follow her Chelsea Lately talk show on E! Between all this, she found time to host the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards, film This Means War with Reese Witherspoon, and voice an animated role in the film Hop. Katie Couric, who is friendly with Handler, calls her “the hardest-working girl in showbiz.”

Yet unlike Tina Fey or Jon Stewart, Handler is not a darling of the media elite. She rarely appears on magazine covers. She’s never hosted Saturday Night Live (though a Facebook group is lobbying for this to happen). Her books aren’t reviewed by The New York Times. And when they do notice her, critics are unkind. After Handler hosted the Video Music Awards, the Times called her performance “among the worst in the show’s history.” The New Yorker described Chelsea Lately as “too sloppy by half.” “It’s like she’s a certain radio station,” says her friend Jenny McCarthy, the former Playboy model turned actress. “If you tune into that frequency, she’s huge, but people who don’t tune in don’t connect.”

Handler claims to enjoy having a lower profile than some of her counterparts. “I like being a bit under the radar,” she says over dim sum the morning before her New Jersey show. “In terms of income, I probably have a lot more than most everyone in my business, so it is interesting ...” she trails off.

Part of the reason Handler isn’t embraced by critics may be her refusal to wrap air quotes around her sexuality. On Saturday Night Live, Maya Rudolph, Amy Poehler, and Kristen Wiig have lampooned overtly sexual female characters: think Rudolph’s drunk, orange-skinned, libidinous Donatella Versace. By contrast, there’s nothing ironic about Handler’s sexiness—lots of cleavage, lots of heels, and the frequent assertion that her pubic hair is waxed in the shape of the E! logo. In publicity shots, she often has a hand on a cocked hip and a come-hither smile—a pose Fey might adopt, but only with one eyebrow satirically arched.

In her books and onstage, the comedian’s tales of sexual encounters gone awry mix bathroom humor with putdowns of her partners. Her former boyfriend Ted Harbert, CEO of E!’s corporate parent, Comcast Entertainment Group, has been the butt of numerous jokes: Handler’s routine includes a bit about how she smeared chocolate cake on the sheets while Harbert was in the bathroom with food poisoning. (He did not react well to the prank.) She claims to have a sexual obsession with midgets, and likes to fondle her dwarf sidekick on Chelsea Lately, Chuy Bravo.

Handler calls herself a “hot mess,” but hers is a controlled explosion. She says she has no patience for starlets like Lindsay Lohan who flash their “hot pockets,” and points out that the number of successful assignations detailed in her first book, My Horizontal Life, is in the single digits. Though much of her comedy trades on her party-girl persona, Handler’s work ethic and knack for monetizing her peccadilloes (Belvedere Vodka sponsored her latest tour) suggest otherwise. In fact, she says her busy schedule means she’s usually in bed by midnight.

It’s unclear if her fans get the nuance. During her show in New Jersey, a drunken young woman repeatedly interrupted a riff on Angelina Jolie (Handler expertly humiliated the fan into shutting up). After the show, the train to New York City was filled with knots of girls proudly discussing such Handleresque topics as “blackout sex.” But if Handler herself were to have blackout sex, she’d likely make her partner sign a nondisclosure agreement—and then spin the experience into a special for E! (She confirms to NEWSWEEK that she’s now dating 50 Cent, a.k.a. Curtis Jackson, saying that “he’s sweet and not a thug.”)

Handler grew up in New Jersey, the youngest of six children. Her mother was a housewife, and her father sold used cars. When she was 10 her oldest brother died. “The whole family dynamic shifted,” she says. “My dad went nuts, and I kind of got lost in the shuffle.” After high school, she moved to Los Angeles and wound up doing what every other wannabe does in Hollywood: waiting tables. It wasn’t until she told the story of a drunken driving arrest in a court-mandated DUI class and got laughs that she realized there was another way to get the audience she craved.

Handler launched her E! talk show in 2007 and initially featured quasi celebrities like MTV’s Tila Tequila, on the premise that they were more likely to match her level of candor. But as Handler’s profile has risen, so has the caliber of her guests, and now she books the same stars who make the rounds of Leno and Letterman. Her approach remains more Howard Stern than Oprah, and it can be fascinating to watch polished, platitudinous stars like Gwyneth Paltrow and Demi Moore adjust gears to match Handler’s style. When Jennifer Aniston appeared on the show, the normally circumspect actress volunteered that she had dated a Mormon once, which meant “no sexy time” and “no vodka.” (Aniston and Handler’s friendship has since become fodder for the tabloids: the two went to Cabo San Lucas together over Thanksgiving, and when a video of Handler calling Angelina Jolie a “home wrecker” and a “c--t” went viral last month, tabloids were abuzz with speculation that the comedian was helping her new BFF get back at Jolie.)

“She’ll never be Chelsea Plugged unless she shows up on Sesame Street,” says Couric. But the comic, whose contract with E! expires in 2012, may be ready for a reinvention. “I can’t keep doing this show forever; it’s too stupid,” she says. “It makes your brain melt.” At times she has expressed interest in doing a serious, topical show or taking her program to a major network. “We’re both not really sure where she’ll be in five years,” says her business partner Tom Brunelle, who declines to confirm reports that she’s been offered a network spot already. When asked about rumors she might replace Jay Leno, Handler deadpans, “I don’t really know if The Tonight Show is the wave of the future.”

Paradoxically, the woman who has built a small industry around her outsize personality says what she really wants is to move offstage. Handler, who is 35, says, “The whole idea is to get the hell off camera by the time I’m 40.” It’s impossible to know if this is another put-on (she’s also said her next goal is to buy a dolphin), though she is already developing shows for several of the comics who are regulars on Chelsea Lately. “It’s a happy gravy train,” Handler says, “and it’s happier when everyone’s getting a little bit of the gravy.” - Newsweek (January 2011)


"After Lately in NY Post"

'If everybody likes you, you're obviously not doing something right'
By MICHAEL STARR
Last Updated: 12:24 PM, February 17, 2011
Posted: 11:41 PM, February 16, 2011
Chelsea Handler has made a career out of skewering celebrities.

And she's not shy about skewering herself, either.

"I think people who find me incredibly annoying will probably love this show," she says sarcastically about "After Lately," her new E! show premiering March 6 (11 p.m.) that will follow the behind-the-scenes lives of Handler and her on-air cohorts (Chuy Bravo, Sarah Colonna, Brad Wollack, et al.).

"It's pretty stupid -- I mean, more stupid than we usually are, if that's possible," she says of the show. "This is the real stuff that goes on . . . it's that immature and kind of chaotic and filled with nonsense all the time.

"We have stuff that was shot at my house and at some other people's houses but it's mainly focused in the office," she says.

"We physically wrestle each other and throw balls at each other and send e-mails from each other's accounts -- well, I do all those things, and nobody can really say anything because it's my office.

"It's 'Romper Room' with less mature people."

Handler's late-night success with "Chelsea Lately" has been built on poking fun at Hollywood and the cult of celebrity.

So it's no surprise that she comes down firmly in support of Ricky Gervais, who caused a kerfuffle at last month's Golden Globes by openly mocking stars, including Robert Downey Jr., Tim Allen and unnamed show-biz Scientologists.

Handler herself took a lot of guff for her celebrity jabs while hosting the VMAs last September.

"I think it was ridiculous that people were upset with [Gervais]," Handler says. "He was hilarious and all these people should be laughing at themselves -- they're making ridiculous amounts of money doing what they do.

"So, yeah, I have no sympathy for [celebrities] whose feelings get hurt . . . for people not to embrace it and act that way is really disappointing.

"You just have to keep making fun of them.

"I got beat up after the VMAs, but you have to expect that going in," she says. "The minute I said yes [to hosting] they said, 'Expect the day after to be a complete nightmare,' which it was.

"As a comedian you should have a lot thicker skin and you get over it pretty quickly -- if everybody likes you, you're obviously not doing something right."
- NY Post- Michael Starr (Winter 2011)


"Blonde Ambition: Chelsea Handler"

Celebrity 100
Blonde Ambition: Chelsea Handler
FORBES MAGAZINE
Mary Ellen Egan,
06.28.10, 6:00 PM ET
LOS ANGELES -
Chelsea Handler is a repeat offender. As the host, co-writer and co-producer of Chelsea Lately, a raucous late-night talk show that airs four times a week on E! Cable Television Network, Handler, 35, spares no one. She goes after celebrities ("Tyra Banks is a narcissist. She has no business having an empire"). She attacks her family ("My dad wears house slippers to temple and has hair growing out of his eyes") and her buddies ("My friend Sarah is a lot of fun to be around. She's smart, she's funny, she drinks like a fish but has way too much energy for someone without a crystal meth addiction").

Her bawdy obsessions--drinking, midgets, bodily functions, minorities, relatives, overinvolved mothers--brought in $19 million-plus for the 12 months ended June 1. That's $10 million from comedy tours, $4 million from her E! show, $3 million of book sales, $2 million in book advances and $500,000 from a Belvedere Vodka sponsorship. She is a newcomer to the Forbes Celebrity 100 list, No. 98. A handful of years ago no one in entertainment had heard of her.

Raised in Livingston, N.J., she was the youngest of six children (one brother died when she was 9 years old) of a Jewish used car dealer and a Mormon housewife. "As I understood it, 'dealing' meant buying and selling," she says. "[But] cars would pile up in our driveway for years at a time, and none were made in the decade in which we lived." By her own account, Handler was an indifferent student who distinguished herself by making up elaborate fibs.

She decided to pursue acting and moved to Los Angeles when she was 19, waitressing while she auditioned for parts. She soon realized, however, that "I wasn't great at it," she recalls. But she was good at telling stories and making people laugh, so she started doing stand-up in small L.A. clubs, landing small parts on such TV series as My Wife and Kids and The Bernie Mac Show. Those appearances led to her first big break in 2002, when she joined Girls Behaving Badly on the Oxygen channel. The show featured Handler and other women playing Candid Camera-like pranks. In one, she dressed up in a pregnancy suit and convinced makeup artists to give her a full-body makeup so she'd look "hot for the birthing video."

Between seasons Handler toyed with the idea of writing a book. "I always had great stories about hooking up when I was in my 20s," she recalls. My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands (Bloomsbury USA, 2005) is an unflinching retelling of her dating escapades. In one tale she recounts spending the night with a midget she'd met in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. "The first thing I saw when I awoke were two tiny feet scurrying across the Spanish tile to the bathroom. I was so confused at first I thought, 'Oh, great, I had a baby.' And then I felt under the covers. My underwear was still on. I knew you could never have a baby with your underwear still on."

In 2004 Handler caught the eye of Comcast Entertainment Group Chief Edward (Ted) Harbert. Now 55, Harbert spied Handler on one of E!'s "ubiquitous countdown shows" and thought she could reach higher. "She was sharp, funny, well spoken and incredibly attractive," he says. The duo, who dated for four years until their split last winter, created The Chelsea Handler Show, which debuted on E! in 2006 and ran for just two seasons. "It was expensive to produce and didn't always hold up well in repeats," says Harbert. What about hosting a late-night talk show? Reluctant at first, Handler agreed when Harbert said she could skewer the very celebrities the E! channel usually worships.

Chelsea Lately debuted in July 2007, making Handler the second woman in TV history to host a late-night talk show (Joan Rivers was the first). The half-hour show opens with a short monologue, often drawn from Handler's life. Recently she mentioned renting a big house this summer so that all her friends could hang out. "I've doubled the height of the fence around the house to keep out the paparazzi. And my father," she deadpans. "But then I looked around, and reality gave me a swift kick in the coslopus [her code word for vagina] because this is who I hang out with." Cue the video of her family and friends lounging by the pool or playing paddleball. "If you judge a person by the company they keep, then I'm retarded."

Her opening bit is followed by a roundtable discussion of current and celeb-related events. On a recent night Handler and her retinue riffed on a viral video of a 2-year-old Asian boy with a two-pack-a-day smoking habit. "I understand if you're Indonesian and a baby and need to smoke because you just got off a 15-hour shift at the Nike factory," she goes on dryly, "but there are other ways to take out your aggression."

Her caustic humor, often at her own expense, resonates strongly with women ages 18 to 34 and with gay men. She has 2.2 million Twitter followers and 54,000 fans on her Facebook page. Her TV audience has grown 30% in the past year (to 900,000). That fan base pushed her second book, Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea (Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 2008), onto the New York Times bestseller list when it debuted in April 2008, where it still sits. Sales of her first book have since rocketed; the two titles have sold a combined 1.7 million copies, according to Nielsen BookScan.

In March Handler released her third confessional, Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang (Grand Central Publishing). Many escapades star her now ex-boyfriend. In one, Handler convinces Harbert that she accidentally killed a friend's dog by feeding it a crab appetizer. The story culminates in a mock funeral on the Santa Monica Pier and makes Harbert look like a gullible patsy. (Harbert is good-spirited about the ribbing and, because he wanted to be supportive, signed a release.)

Four times a week Handler is in the office by 9 a.m. to work with her writers on material for that evening's show. Every weekend she flies somewhere to perform three to four shows. "I might go to Kansas City on Friday, do a book signing at 3 p.m. and then do a show at 8 p.m., followed by three book signings the next day and two shows that night," she says. Hard work pays. "I make a ridiculous amount of money," she adds.

Six months ago Handler and head writer Tom Brunelle founded Borderline Amazing Productions to produce and develop other comedy shows. They're negotiating with Logo, a gay and lesbian channel, for a satire about show business and are busy pitching other shows featuring a few of the Chelsea Lately comics. Handler is in talks with HBO about turning her books into a movie or a cable series.

Is there life beyond the potty mouth? When her E! contract is up in 2012, Handler says she'll be eager to move beyond making fun of celebrities. "I feel like there's only so long I can go around talking about Lindsay Lohan and Tiger Woods," she explains. "There are a lot of issues I'm really interested in--government, politics--that I'd like to explore. Comedy is still the most important thing, but I definitely think I'll move on to something else after this."

There's something to that. Each Chelsea Lately show ends with a five-minute interview, where the host drops a bit of the confrontational humor. Her guests tend to be a mix of B- and C-list celebrities who have a new project to shill. Among them: actor Stephen Moyer, a star of the HBO hit True Blood; singer Sarah McLachlan; writer Michael Lewis. In a recent one-on-one with former American Idol contestant Clay Aiken, Handler held her sharp tongue while encouraging him to speak at length about the silliness of a public announcement about being gay. "I totally agree with you," Handler told him. She couldn't resist adding, "You don't have to come out as black."


- Forbes Magazine (Summer 2010)


"NBC Picks Up Comedy Pilots From Chelsea Handler"

NBC Picks Up Comedy Pilots From Chelsea Handler
By NELLIE ANDREEVA | Wednesday January 26, 2011 @ 12:02pm PST
Tags: Are You There Vodka? It's Me Chelsea, Are You There Vodka? It's Me Chelsea Pilot, Are You There Vodka? Pilot Pickup, Chelsea Handler, Chelsea Handler NBC Comedy, Dottie Zicklin, Julie Larson, NBC Pickups, NBC Pilots, TV, TV Deals, Warner Bros. TV
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UPDATED: It's a big comedy pilot pickup day at NBC. The network just picked up 4 half-hour pilots, including two multicamera sitcoms based on the comedy of two edgy, good-looking female comedians, Chelsea Handler and Whitney Cummings, one written by Peter Tolan and one written by Cathy Yuspa and Josh Goldsmith and produced by Jack Black.

Handler's Are You There Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea is a multicamera comedy inspired by latenight star's autobiographical book of the same name about her life in her 20s. The project, written and executive produced by Dharma & Greg co-creator Dottie Zicklin and Julie Larson, centers on a 20-something woman who has a very honest and provocative point of view on dating, friends and family. Vodka, from Warner Bros. TV and Werner Entertainment, was developed at NBC after landing at the network in a competitive situation with a put pilot commitment in November. Handler, who won't be starring in the comedy, is executive producing with her producing partner at Borderline Amazing Prods. Tom Brunelle, Werner Entertainment's Werner and Mike Clements. The casting on the project promises to be interesting, looking for a 20-something Handler. In addition to Vodka, Zicklin has another comedy project in contention at Fox.

The untitled multicamera Whitney Cummings project, from UMS and Scott Stuber Prods., will star Cummings. It focuses on a young couple and the ups and downs of a committed relationship in today’s complicated world. Cummings wrote the script and is co-executive producing, with Stuber, Quan Phung and Barry Katz exec producing. Additionally, Cummings has Two Broke Girls, a pilot at CBS, which she wrote and es exec producing with Michael Patrick King. - Deadline Hollywood - Nikki Finke (January 2011)


"World's Most Powerful Women CHELSEA HANDLER #33"

Age: 35
Title: Talk show host and author
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Country of citizenship: United States
Marital Status: Single
Handler heads up the only late-night show for which half the staffers are women, and is the second woman in television history to host a late-night talk show. Thanks to the popularity of her three New York Times bestsellers based on her raunchy adventures, she recently got her own book imprint.Her production company, Borderline Amazing Productions, produces Chelsea Lately, and she's currently shooting a pilot about her staff's post-work antics. - Forbes Magazine (Fall 2010)


"Chelsea Handler, the acerbic author, late-night host and comic, has become, ironically, an A-lister"

If you haven't noticed, Chelsea Handler isn't a fan of Angelina Jolie. During a stand-up routine Dec. 3 in her native state of New Jersey, the incendiary comic let loose on the pillow-lipped goodwill ambassador, calling her a "homewrecker," and other adjectives so unprintable even bloggers used ellipses. As you'll no doubt recall, Brad Pitt dumped sun-kissed sweetheart Jennifer Aniston for Angelina after the photogenic specimens starred in the largely forgettable flick "Mr. And Mrs. Smith."
"I hate her," Chelsea told the Jersey crowd, then trashed Angelina for admitting she didn't have a lot of female friends, a cardinal sin in the girlfriend rule book. (A girl without girlfriends is like a guy who watches "Oprah" -- can't be trusted).





And that's one reason women love Chelsea. Though the 35-year-old comic has made a fortune cataloging her conquests -- her first book is called "My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands" -- men who belong to other women are off-limits.
Gossip sites rushed to point out that Chelsea and Jennifer, who share a publicist, recently vacationed in Mexico together. But, as Chelsea quipped on "Chelsea Lately," her bawdy gabfest on E!, "I've been making fun of Angelina Jolie since she made out with her brother."
Aside from being catnip to pop-culture watchers, the tempest in the blogosphere proved one thing: Chelsea, who brings her acerbic humor to The Q tonight, is one hot piece of A-lister. It's an ironic career twist for the woman who makes a living skewering the narcissistic life and times of the rich and infamous.
In September, she became the first woman to host the Video Music Awards since Roseanne. After descending from the ceiling a la Cirque du Soleil, a giant dollhouse on her head in homage to the infamous get-ups of MTV darling Lady Gaga, Chelsea demurely lifted her skirt and released caged doves.
Viewers who had never gotten a taste of the leggy blonde with the sailor's mouth were not disappointed. As Chelsea strode across the stage on her endless tan gams, she was positively radiant, like Brigitte Bardot after a rough night.



"This is the first time in 16 years that the VMAs has been hosted by a woman!" Chelsea crowed in a voice smooth as sandpaper. "That means it was 1994 and Justin Timberlake was still in the Mickey Mouse Club pretending he wasn't having sex with Britney Spears, the Situation was just a classy way to refer to a teenage pregnancy and Justin Bieber's mom had just given birth to her 401(k) plan!"
Her boozy late-night shtick is an antidote to Jay Leno's tepid patter, and her books sell like John Grisham thrillers.
Her latest, "Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang," garnered the top spot on The New York Times' best-seller list the day it was published in March, joining her other titles, "Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea" and "My Horizontal Life," which, respectively, held the No. 2 and 3 spots in the nonfiction-paperback category.
The monster comedy tour that brings Chelsea to town -- appropriately sponsored by her spirit of choice, Belvedere Vodka -- sold out so quickly, her PR team added 15 more shows to her 21-city roster. Tickets to the Cleveland show, not one of the original dates, were still available at press time.
And, most potently, last month, NBC gave a green light to a pilot based on Chelsea's memoirs. While "Chelsea Lately" averages 900,000 viewers a night, if the new series catches fire, it has the potential to make the edgy queen of after-hours cable into a Nielsen household name.
But before Vanity Fair dubbed her comic royalty alongside other pretty, funny women like Tina Fey, Amy Poehler and Sarah Silverman, before she made the front page of The New York Times' Style section and regularly yukked it up with the gals from "The View," the brassy comic paid her dues at local clubs like Cleveland's Hilarities.
She had a following even then, says John Lorince, director of marketing for the East Fourth Street theater. Booked the week of Valentine's Day four years ago, Chelsea drew fans -- and lots of women -- clutching copies of "My Horizontal Life."
"It wasn't like she was a complete nobody, but I do know the audience that was here for her was certainly her crowd -- I mean you could tell."
In a 2006 interview with Plain Dealer reporter Mike McIntyre, Chelsea admitted she had yet to have a one-night stand in Cleveland. Sadly, we'll never know if she ever hooked up for a few blissful hours with a local Prince Charming as the much-in-demand comedian was "too slammed" to do an interview before her upcoming set at The Q.
Women still line up to see Chelsea, though now the setting isn't so intimate. When she takes the stage today, she'll be delivering stinging bons mots in a 6,500-seat arena (sections of the usual 20,500 seats will be blocked off). Crack one of her books and it's easy to see why so many women "get" Chelsea. Sure, she writes about downing one too many margaritas and waking up between the sheets with dwarfs and (shiver) redheads -- but she also regales readers with X-rated, "I Love Lucy"-style adventures perpetrated by her and a cast of reliable girlfriends.
(Chelsea and her pal Sarah visit a London restaurant famous for forcing diners to nosh in the dark. They are ejected after the waiter learns Sarah, to relieve a panic attack, has removed her shirt, and Chelsea, in solidarity, has removed her pants. Chelsea and friend Lydia get popped for DUI, and Chelsea winds up in the Los Angeles County women's jail, appalled by the sorry lack of waxing practiced by female inmates.)
Think of Chelsea's oeuvre as a vodka-soaked, "Sex in the City" set in L.A. only with more sex and less shopping.
Chelsea -- a "Beverly Hills bimbo, with a Borscht Belt mouth," as New York Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley famously described her -- has her fair share of male fans.
But as Joan Rivers has said, "men find funny women threatening. They ask me, 'Are you going to be funny in bed?' "
Worse, as a published author with more books on the way -- one in the works will purportedly be penned by her dog Chunk -- she might just make fun of you the morning after. And then write about it.
Of course, some guys consider that a turn-on. Just ask bad boy 50 Cent.
"I think @chelseahandler is beautiful I wanta see what that dog lookin at on her page," the rapper Tweeted, referring to the cover of "Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang," which features Chunk looking up Chelsea's short black skirt.
The Tweet went viral and was followed, weeks later, by grainy paparazzi shots of the two getting cozy in a booth at the Blue Nile jazz bar in New Orleans. They're just friends, Chelsea insists.
Wonder what the old Chelsea would have said about that.
- The Plain Dealer (Winter 2010)


"Chelsea Handler On Her Own Again"

See URL for full article - The Chicago Tribune (Spring 2010)


"I'm Chelsea Handler. And You're Not."

See URL for full article. - The New York Times (Spring 2010)


"Red-Hot Chelsea Handler, Has She Broken the Female Comic Stereotype?"

See URL for full article - The Women on the Web (Spring 2010)


"Goodbye, Oprah. Hello, Chelsea."

See URL for article PDF. - The London Times (Fall 2010)


"A Pop Savant, Up Late and Armed With Wit"

Shar Jackson: know who she is? I’m sorry. Of course you do. She’s the mother of two children by Kevin Federline, the onetime Mr. Britney Spears. And moreover you know that Ms. Jackson was pregnant with little Kaleb when Mr. Federline and Ms. Spears became engaged, before they had their own two children and then divorced, kicking off Ms. Spears’s current troubles, troubles too numerous to mention.

And if for any reason you don’t know this, if the name Shar Jackson doesn’t even faintly vibrate your phone, then you know right off that “Chelsea Lately,” the late-night talk show on E! that started in July, holds nothing for you.

This is a demanding tabloid seminar that assumes a high degree of pop literacy and spends little time in review. Each weeknight Chelsea Handler interviews minor celebrities and clicks through a series of jokes and sketches about the foibles of the famous. So far the show has been almost embarrassingly watchable.

She’s just good, this Handler girl. She’s a writer, above all, so she can turn a joke around fast. She’s also genuinely good looking, and has a way of saying withering things through a smile that works. She makes late-night look pretty easy.

Her sketches — a recent one about a self-obsessed Hollywood poseur trying to go green, and a YouTube favorite about hiring an assistant — can be uproarious. And her spiteful interviews with narcissists who hardly know they’re being satirized are simply good for the health of the body politic.

Ms. Handler, one of four or five stand-ups who have lately emerged as heiresses to the great bad-girl comic Joan Rivers, probably comes across as trashy to those who don’t speak her language: the bullet-point speech of entertainment-news punch lines. But to audiences who appreciate the collision of hyperliteracy with parables from the tabloids, she’s an outstanding M.C.

Her style is a friendlier, more workaday version of the haughty self-abasement practiced by Sarah Silverman, another junior Rivers, leavened by the everywoman spirit of Kathy Griffin. (To summarize the difference: Ms. Handler and Ms. Griffin, in the spirit of celebrity envy, will say they’re fat and dye their hair, while Ms. Silverman’s line is usually that she looks great, sorry for you.)

Ms. Handler doesn’t have Ms. Griffin’s middle-brow quality. And she’s missing the alien aspect of Ms. Silverman, who favors non sequiturs and periodically bombs but magically gets away with it. Ms. Handler seems like a cruel queen bee from an expensive college: There’s something suspiciously sophisticated about how her jokes line up that suggests the moral austerity of a comic not of Ms. Rivers’s bad-girl school: Tina Fey.

“Chelsea Lately” is all about Ms. Handler, who apparently runs her interviews, sketches, panels and monologues single-handedly. She is almost never given guests who can pull in an audience. The hope is that E-listers like Kim Kardashian (I’m not even going to explain who that is) will become interesting in the crucible of Ms. Handler’s wit. It’s not surprising that often they don’t. What’s surprising is that sometimes they do.

- New York Times- By Virginia Heffernan (Sept 2007)


"Make Room for Chelsea- No Women Has Ever Made it in Late-Night UNTIL NOW"

MAKE ROOM FOR CHELSEA
NO WOMAN HAS EVER MADE IT IN LATE-NIGHT - UNTIL NOW

Chelsea Handler, a comedienne by trade, is putting it all out there. All of it. As in, nakedness, in this month's Allure magazine. "I mean, why not be naked?" she laughs.
It's a rhetorical question, of course, when you're gorgeous.
However exposed she may be, Handler, 34, finds herself sitting pretty right about now. Her late-night cable talk show, "Chelsea Lately," was just renewed through 2012 on the E! Entertainment Network. Her collection of essays, "Are You There Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea," has been on the New York Times best-seller list for 37 weeks, and she recently won a Bravo A-List award pronouncing her "A-List Funny," whatever that means.
"I think it means exactly what you would think it means," she quips.
Handler is the only woman who can hold her own in the late-night talk show boys' club. She is striking a chord with 18-34 women in particular who revere and fear her biting wit and brutally honest assessment of Hollywood celebrities.
She attributes her show's appeal to a gossip session where you can say exactly what you think about someone without any retribution. "No one says what they really think about people. I say what I'm thinking," she says.
Known as intimidating to her guests, Handler isn't afraid to outsmart anyone, male or female. There's no tact-checking or softball questions. And that icky feeling you get when a guest pushes his or her own agenda doesn't happen when you watch "Chelsea Lately."
Instead, she gets her guests to open up and sometimes makes them uncomfortable. Handler managed to make Snoop Dogg, the epitome of mellow, squirm in his seat when she asked whether meeting his wife in high school was like "a Jamie-Lynn Spears hookup."
She also caused Jennie Garth to slap her hand over her open mouth when she invited her and her husband, actor Peter Facinelli, to a weekend away from their kids, because, as she put it, "I wanted you guys to have a little penetration time."
Or take "Stargate Atlantis" star Joe Flanigan, whom she put on the spot. "Do you know that you're good looking?" she asked him as he visibly blanched. Handler then praised his ability to be a convincing actor given the subject matter, "because acting like you're on a spaceship is kind of ridiculous."
Handler keeps celebrities at the top of her search-and-destroy list. In the past, she has targeted Britney Spears and Paula Abdul; they have now been replaced by Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag, of "The Hills."
Spencer, whom she refers to as a "half-wit, douche-headed donkey nozzle," invites particular scorn as one-half of Hollywood's most obnoxious couple. Of Heidi's attraction to him, Handler has said, "I always assumed she was blind, or mentally challenged."
Still, Heidi and Spencer want to come on the show. "Their publicist was pushing to get them both on," she says. "But I just can't be so close to so much stupid."
That doesn't mean Handler isn't afraid to sit in the hot seat herself. For a girl who doesn't spook easily, she was definitely squirming when she interviewed Josh Radnor ("How I Met Your Mother").
As it turns out, the last time Handler had seen Radnor was several years earlier when they met after one of her stand-up shows and wound up making out later in the evening at his place.
"I literally ran out of the apartment," she says. "The next time I saw him, he was on the show. It was so awkward."
Handler, a Jersey girl who grew up with a Mormon mother and Jewish father, also has found unexpected success with two books. The first, "My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands" was a hilarious recount of sexual exploits, and the second, "Are You There Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea," is a collection of stories about her life thus far.
She's currently finishing up her third book, "Chelsea-Chelsea Bang-Bang," for publication next spring. It will be another collection of stories in the same vein as "Are You There Vodka." "I have so many stories from my childhood that I haven't even used," she says
This will be her final book, though, as she describes the writing process as tedious, especially with such a hectic life. "I'm not very organized or responsible. I'm a procrastinator," she says.
Handler's show, somewhat ironically, is on the E! cable network, that 24/7 celebrity gushfest, so the pressure to temper her rants can be painful. She confesses that she's been told to take it down a notch, in particular with Pamela Anderson, so as not to offend someone higher up the food chain.
If you're wondering who would quash such a rant, the answer is found right in Handler's home, where she lives with Ted Harbert, her boyfriend and, in a way, her boss.
Harbert is the president of Comcast Entertainment Group, the parent of E! "Oh, he will love that if you refer to him as 'The Boss,'" she says. "He makes me laugh. I'm not sure that it's always intentional, though."
The couple has no plans to marry. As for motherhood, she's first the admit she's the wrong woman for the job. "I like children too much to ever punish one by having me as its parent," she says.
Surprisingly, Handler's not interested in moving to a more family-friendly network or time slot. "I love cable. I love that I can say 'camel toe' when I want to and that I can say 'f*ck' and it's just bleeped out, because that's how I talk."
While Handler, who is developing companion shows to "Chelsea Lately," enjoys mocking contemporary celebrities, she says she would never have someone on the show just to make him or her look stupid.
Then she laughs and says, "I can't be mean all the time."
- NY Post Sunday Edition By NICOLE HOMEWOOD Spring 2009


"Naughty and Nice: Handler"

Naughty and Nice: Handler (with her sidekick, Chuy Bravo) may look innocent, but her one-liners can sting a tip for future guests on Chelsea Lately: If you're going to be interviewed by the vodka vixen, the Grey Goose gabber, you'd better come prepared with the type of blunt opinions Chelsea Handler herself throws around like shot glasses in a barroom brawl. One of Handler's best guests of late was the beloved Cloris Leachman, who's reached the age where she delightfully doesn’t care what she says. Asked by Handler, ''Who do you think the biggest a-hole is'' in showbiz, Leachman said, ''The one who did the Gladiator.'' ''Russell Crowe?'' asked Handler. ''Yeah,'' said Leachman. ''He's just doughy and he's not smart and he's not funny.'' Oof.

This is typical of the kind of insult comedy in which Chelsea Lately revels. The stand-up comic and best-selling author has molded her E! network late-night talk show craftily: an opening monologue, a roundtable with mostly up-and-coming or never-gonna-make-it comedians she likes, a guest, and maybe a taped sketch. Most important, the topics rarely, if ever, stray from celebrity gossip or pop culture events. On a recent edition, reading an item about a park being built by the government of China, she said blithely, ''I didn't even know they had a government.'' Handler is one of those trash-is-fantastic people.

Well, no, she only seems that way — it's integral to her image as a hotsy blonde who'll mouth off about anything, outrageously. But you have to be more than In Touch-smart to do the kind of rapid-fire joking Handler does every weeknight. As with any good talk show, the host's strengths and obsessions emerge with regular viewing. Handler is frequently at her best when interviewing black actors and rappers — unlike her male talk-show counterparts, she's not hobbled by white ignorance or politically correct blandness. Her interview with T.I., for example, was fascinating because she pressed him on his weapons-possession charge and kidded with him about sex in a way that you could tell startled even him. (''I know what you're thinking, and I like it,'' she said.)

It's not as though Handler's style came out of nowhere. White female comics have been making risqué jokes since the heyday of Rusty Warren, whose most famous 1960s ''party album'' was called Knockers Up! Handler has created a boozy party-girl image, but you know from the machine-gun cadence of her jokes that she works hard on her punchlines…harder than most of the comics on her roundtable segment, it often seems.

Chelsea Lately is uneven, and I'm pretty tired of the repetitive quips both about and from her diminutive sidekick, Chuy. But anyone who's developed an ongoing, hilariously random vendetta against Dancing With the Stars' Samantha Harris — that's one junk-culture savant I can support wholeheartedly. B+
- Entertainment Weekly By Ken Tucker June 2009


"Chelsea Handler Interview! Brace Yourselves!"

I'm a Chelsea queen! What I mean is I enjoy Chelsea Handler, the chatty host of E!'s Chelsea Lately who is advertised on every remaining phone booth in town as "the sharpest tongue in late night." Leno with bigger boobs, she happens to pooh-pooh a lot of the things I hate, too, and she expresses her distaste far more articulately, such as tidily dubbing Heidi and Spencer "Herpes Simplex I and II" and asking Jesse Metcalfe what it was like to go "cameltoe hunting."
So I called Chelsea's handlers and set up a phoner, anxious for the piercing tongue.

Me: Hi, Chelsea. Are you a gay man in a woman's body or just a gay man?
Chelsea: Sometimes I feel like I'm a gay man, sometimes I'm a gay man in a woman's body, and sometimes I'm a gay woman. It depends on the time of day.

Me: Well, you're doing an event with Wanda Sykes on October 24—a benefit for the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center. That's your chance to be a gay woman and dive on her.

Chelsea: Yeah! White-on-black crime!

Me: But I'd imagine a take-charge gal like Wanda has a girlfriend.

Chelsea: She's getting a late-night talk show, so she's got to have somebody living with her. I can't get rid of my boyfriend! He's good right now. We'll see how he behaves himself this week.

Me: Seeing as he happens to be Ted Harbert—the CEO of the company that oversees E!—if you dumped him, couldn't he nullify your TV contract?

Chelsea: I don't think that's legal at this juncture. But if anybody gets thrown to the curb, it'd be me. I'm a nightmare. I'm annoyed in general, especially with him, and when you remodel your condo, everything's annoying. That's why I'm at work at six in the morning right now, trying to do interviews!

Me: Well, since you do still have the show, let's talk about it. Has there been any guest that just didn't get you?

Chelsea: They don't say to my face, "I don't get you." But I definitely don't get some of them. I had Tila Tequila on because everyone made such a big deal about this girl from MTV who's bi-curious. [Laughs.] I almost fell asleep during the interview. So boring! The girls from The Hills are cute, but I like people who have energy and have something fun to say. But luckily, the interviews are so quick, and it's on to the next.

Me: Wait, don't hang up! Are you still all panty-twisted over the Herpes Simplexes?

Chelsea: I don't want to discuss them because they don't deserve to be talked about.

Me: No problem—I don't even know who they are. What about Tori Spelling, whom you've generously ragged on?

Chelsea: I like Tori. I actually think she's done very well considering what she's been through. And she looks better.

Me: They made her eyes closer together.

Chelsea: Well, I think she had her boobies and eyes done on the same day. Two for one!

Me: Hello. Why are there so many tart-tongued female comics today, like you, Kathy Griffin, and Sarah Silverman? (Not that I'm complaining, mind you.) Is being catty and cutting the only way the girls are let into the boys' comedy club?

Chelsea: I've always been this way. You don't want to get into a tussle with me! But I'm probably a lot less edgy than when I started out. I was very angry, probably because I spent so much time waiting tables that I was spent emotionally. And you don't know if you're ever going to get a break—it's really hard. I was a lot crasser and more violent-minded than I am now. This is the softer side of me. It's less angry and more jocular. That's what I love about doing the show—you get to make fun of everything E! represents and the attention we all pay to celebrities.

Me: So, in mocking the E! ethic, you've become their biggest star. [Significant pause.] You have Jennifer Aniston scheduled as a guest. I hope she doesn't play the victim.

Chelsea: She's not playing the victim! The press plays the victim for her. All the stories about her—"She's so lonely." Please! She's having the time of her life! She goes to Mexico every other weekend with her girlfriends, while Angelina and Brad shuffle their kids across country. Would you rather wake up with a margarita or eight children?

Me: Eight margaritas, actually.

Chelsea: And you can make them all different colors!

The next day, I woke up with eight invitations, so I set to work engulfing various creative artists with my own less angry, more jocular side. At an Oak Room lunch for Jane Campion's sensual Bright Star, I asked Campion if John Keats's remark that he was uncomfortable with women meant the poet was as bi-curious as Tila Tequila. Au contraire, she said: "It means they meant so much to him. In the company of men, he feels at ease, but with women present, he's tongue-tied and can't be natural." So the effusive Romantic poet was straight? That's really putting the per back in verse.
Same place, same digging for subtext when I learned what was bubbling under the surface of the Ricky Gervais comedy The Invention of Lying, mainly because it was sliced right out. "There was a caveman scene," co-writer/co-director Matthew Robinson volunteered. "It was a parable for the entire film, with Patrick Stewart narrating. But we couldn't get it into fighting shape in seven minutes. It cost three and a half million dollars, so it's the most expensive DVD extra in history!" The CG wild boar alone cost more than an entire season of The Hills.
The subtext of The Damned United—the new bio-drama about a charmingly loony British football coach—was laid out for us by its bright star Michael Sheen at a whole other event. The high-minded Sheen said that in pretty much every Peter Morgan–written film, "one character is Theseus going through the labyrinth and the other is the Minotaur, waiting for him in the center of it." Are you with me, Heidi and Spencer?
I spent the rest of the week caught in the labyrinth while running from Lindsay Lohan at about a dozen parties and waiting for Lady Gaga at 15 or 20 other ones. (By the way, Gaga might drop her poker face when she finds out that a children's book accompanied by a CD that she recorded a song for, pre-fame, will actually be coming out soon. They might even use her real name!)
The Warholesque creature would have been spewing blood with delight at an event last Friday—an Andy-related art show in a storefront at the Chelsea Hotel, with a big "Prime Real Estate Available" sign posted outside. Inside, the place was coated with tin foil, so I felt like a giant turkey, especially as people came at me wielding 30-year-old press clippings about their most recent achievements. Onstage entertainment was provided by the dashing duo Whore's Mascara, who've added a female singer and two dancers they picked up on the subway, all cavorting to lyrics like, "There's a dance party up my butt tonight." And there's even room for a VIP area.
But the gay nightlife event of the year was the grand opening of Club 57, the new Saturday-night thingie at Providence via the Rockit/Key Klub team, Tony Fornabaio and Brandon Voss. The three-floor club—which is very Gothic-church-meets-upstate-pancake-house—was filled with swarms of well-groomed men prancing, dancing, and downing eight margaritas. And suddenly, I'm an HK queen!
- The Village Voice By: Michael Musto (Fall 2009)


"Girl Interrupts Interview with Chelsea Handler"

Chelsea Handler's brand of satirical comedy has won her legions of fans. As a late-night talkshow host she’s also battered down the door of the last men-only club in American television. Now she’s setting her sights on us.
The manic warm-up man at Chelsea Handler’s show is sweating profusely as he shouts at the studio audience. 'C’mon,’ he screams. 'You’re letting Chelsea down. You’ve gotta keep the energy going. Laugh more,’ he yells, 'longer, louder.’ His panic is unfounded; the audience is laughing uproariously: Chelsea Handler is hilarious.
If you haven’t heard of the Chelsea Lately show, which has already gained a cult following in Britain since its arrival 14 months ago, you soon will. It’s a phenomenon in America, and its acid-tongued host, Chelsea Handler, 34, recently anointed by Vanity Fair as one of the 'queens of comedy’, is well on her way to superstardom – a rarity as she is the sole female going head to head with the all too male colossi of American late-night talkshows, David Letterman and Jay Leno.
Handler is – incredibly – only the second woman in American history to host a late-night talkshow since Joan Rivers’ ill-fated 1986 show on Fox. No one was interested in Rivers’ bold, bitchy humour, yet it’s something that Handler embraces with gusto, while deftly dismissing any comparison with her fellow comedian ('I’d have to get some plastic surgery’).
It’s hard to believe that women, while shattering glass ceilings in almost every other area of modern life, have been so unsuccessful as late-night talkshow hosts. Is it simply that Americans are less than comfortable with funny, in-yer-face women?
One gets the feeling this is finally changing with a new wave of successful comic women such as Sarah Silverman and Tina Fey, and Handler at the vanguard. 'I think comedy comes in cycles,’ says Handler, her tone suggesting either weariness or wariness of the subject. 'And there are just more successful women comedians at the moment than there used to be.’
When not hosting her show, Handler is one of America’s fastest-rising female stand-ups, performing sell-out shows across the country, while her books, My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands and Are You There Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea (she’s currently writing a third, Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang), fast propelled themselves on to the New York Times bestseller lists, where they stayed for weeks on end.
Chelsea Lately is one of the most popular entertainment shows on E!, a channel filled with fluffy reality programmes featuring Playboy bunnies or minor celebrities – the television equivalent of OK! or Hello! magazines. In such a saccharin-drenched environment, completely lacking in any sense of proportion, perspective or irony, Handler’s show comes as welcome refreshment. The format is part chat show (Jonathan Ross, Graham Norton and the Mighty Boosh are recent guests) and part comedy round-table, where a group of comedians and culture pundits dissect and lampoon the week’s celebrity stories. It’s such a success that it has been granted an extension to run until 2012, while in Britain it was recently moved to a prime-time slot.
'I’m here for a while,’ says the petite, blonde and focused Handler, with confident certainty after the show has wrapped for the afternoon. We’re now in her office in Los Angeles, which is covered floor to ceiling in pictures of Handler’s many nephews and nieces, friends and sidekicks – including Chuy, a midget who sits on the stage throughout the show and is occasionally called upon to impart his wisdom. Handler’s BlackBerry, inches away from her on her desk and constantly on charge, doesn’t stop beeping. She glances at it briefly then turns determinedly back to face me.
It’s interview time – nothing’s going to distract her.
As the show’s writer, producer and host, Handler has a clear idea of what works. 'For the moment I just want to continue making fun of people’s dumb obsession with celebrities,’ she says. 'I think about what I talk about when I’m sitting down with my girl friends. You open a magazine and it says that Suri Cruise wants to move from New York to LA. You look at your girl friend and go, “Really? Suri Cruise is two. She really told her parents that?” You have to talk about how inane it is. That’s where I’m coming from. The banality and nonsense of it all.
'I want to do a different take on the celebrity interview,’ she continues. 'The last thing I want to see is Nicole Kidman talking about what movie she’s going to be in. I want to talk to Nicole Kidman’s neighbour about what’s going on with Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban.’
The list of candidates she enjoys lampooning is long, and no one is safe from her skewer. Of Angelina Jolie’s adopted son Maddox she recently joked, 'He probably thought he was scoring the biggest deal of his lifetime, getting adopted by this famous movie-star who was going to rescue him from his third-world Cambodia, only to find she was going to take him to every third-world country in the world. He’s probably like, “When are we going to get to Malibu?”’
Handler grew up in New Jersey, the youngest of six children. Her father, Melvin, was Jewish, while her mother, Sylvia, was a Mormon (who converted to Judaism). 'I just felt out of place,’ she says. 'I think every comedian feels that way. My father was a used-car salesman and there were cars all over the place. It was a mess. My childhood was pretty embarrassing, but I think that’s why I have so much material.’
Her stand-up and her books are rife with purported disdain for her family – she constantly mocks her father (her mother died of cancer some years ago) and siblings, but they are all still close and the family pictures that cover her office walls clearly display a strong bond between them.'They’re used to me making fun of them,’ says Handler.
'I did this show the other night talking about my dad and Father’s Day. I said he needs to stop dating his cleaning lady, change his clothes more often and start brushing his teeth. The thing he was most upset about was that people would think that he wasn’t available and single.’
Though pretty enough to become a finalist in the Miss New Jersey pageant when she was 15, Handler readily admits that she was bullied at high school. Now, of course, those girls who tortured her come to her weekly stand-up shows to wish her well. 'I’m so over it now I don’t even care,’ says Handler. 'I’ll always get notes… Someone’s here to watch a taping and I’m like, “Who? The girl who used to chase me down the hallway?” By the time you can have revenge and say, “Ha ha,” you don’t even care about them anymore, you know? It would be sad if my career was built on that.’
At 19 Handler moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career, but hated the 'humiliating and demeaning’ auditions, and didn’t like the fact that she was always reading other people’s lines:
'I wanted to say my own stuff. I wanted to talk. And I realised that stand-up was the perfect way to do it. So I had to do that. I’ve always been a loudmouth.’Was it hard being the only woman on tour? 'It wasn’t,’ says Handler. 'I think it’s easier because there aren’t so many women. There is not as much competition. Being a stand-up comedian is not a career that women are drawn to. You’re on the road and touring and living in disgusting hotel rooms, which is what you have to do at the beginning. You have to work your ass off. I was like, “Why am I staying in this motel? This is awful.” And I was making about $100 a week. It’s really hard to do, but once you get good at it, it’s totally worth it.’
Within a few years she was making a name for herself and, after some spots on the Jay Leno Show, was hired by the E! Network to present the Chelsea Handler Show, the precursor to Chelsea Lately. Her boyfriend, Ted Harbert, who oversees E! Entertainment Television (the couple insist they didn’t start seeing each other until she got the show), felt she’d be ideal for a nightly show. Handler, however, had reservations.
'I was saying I couldn’t do a serious show about entertainment unless I was allowed to make fun of everything E! represents,’ says Handler. 'I mean, E! is ridiculous. I don’t want to be reporting entertainment news, with my hand on my hip, that Leonardo DiCaprio was stung by a bee. I mean, I can’t. And so they went, “OK, you can make fun of everything.” It really was perfect.’
To succeed in being outspoken and critical of celebrities on a channel that makes its revenue from the very people she knocks down is some achievement. How does it affect her relationship with Harbert? 'We get into fights all the time – “You can’t say this, you can’t do that.” I’m like, “Yes, you can.” He’ll say, “You can’t talk about Denise Richards [Charlie Sheen’s ex-wife, who starred in the Bond film The World Is Not Enough].” Yes, I can. She’s ridiculous. That’s why I have a show. To make fun of people like that. Then he’ll say, “She has a show on the network. We want you to lay off.” No way.’
Handler is charming to talk to and commands respect – deftly balancing her on-screen jokey persona with her off-screen alter ego of determined career woman. Indeed, despite her reputation as someone who doesn’t take anyone seriously, when it comes to Handler herself it’s a deadly serious business, with her television show and books the mere tip of the iceberg. She readily admits that she is sure she will 'get sick of talking about celebrities’, and is constantly thinking about the next project.
One project she won’t be pursuing, however, is children. 'I have no desire to have children,’ says Handler with absolute certainty. 'People keep saying that it’ll change. I’m like, “No, it’s not going to change.” I think it would be really selfish to have a child right now. I’m never home. People don’t always think about the quality of life when they’re having a child. I love children but I have no desire to have my own child. I’m too nervous to procreate my own genes.’
Her email pings. It hasn’t stopped pinging. And now, her BlackBerry has almost sprung to life as it buzzes across the busy desk. A photo-shoot for Stella beckons, then, finally, she is taking a five-day 'holiday’ to St Barts where she plans on finishing her latest book. Handler’s make-up artist swishes over. The hour is over. She’s moved on to her next task for the day.

'Chelsea Lately’ is at 10.30pm on weeknights on E! Entertainment Television - UK Telegraph By: Noam Friedlander (Fall 2009)


"Chelsea Handler gets 3-year deal Comcast renews E! host's contract thru 2012"

E! Entertainment late night host Chelsea Handler has sealed a rich deal with E! parent Comcast Entertainment Group that keeps her at the cabler for at least the next three years.
Deal, said to be worth as much as eight figures, means Handler will continue as the host and exec producer of "Chelsea Lately" through 2012.
She'll also produce series for Comcast's stable of nets (which also includes G4, Style and the on-demand FearNet service) via her new shingle, Borderline Amazing Prods. Comcast Entertainment Group gets first-look rights on any projects that come out of Borderline Amazing through 2012.
Handler runs the shingle alongside "Chelsea Lately" head writer Tom Brunelle, who also will continue as exec producer of the gabber.
Handler is currently dating Comcast Entertainment Group prexy-CEO Ted Harbert; her deal was actually announced by Lisa Berger, E! exec VP of original programming and series development.
"Chelsea Lately" is a "breakout hit that has significantly grown E!'s latenight audience, particularly among young women," Berger said.
The talkshow, which bowed in July 2007, last month moved up to the 11 p.m. slot, where the network immediately posted ratings gains. "Chelsea Lately" averages 746,000 viewers, up 31% over the slot's average last year.
According to the cabler, Handler scores more women 18-34 viewers than "Jimmy Kimmel Live," "Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson" and "Last Call With Carson Daly."
Separately, Sony Pictures TV is currently adapting Handler's book, "Are You There Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea," with Barry Sonnenfeld aboard to exec produce.
Both that book and "My Horizontal Life" have spent months on the New York Times bestsellers list.
Handler's credits also include Oxygen's "Girls Behaving Badly" and the online series "In the Motherhood" (although she doesn't appear in the upcoming ABC TV version due to her E! commitments).
The Handler pact means two of E!'s biggest stars are now locked in for the next several years. Comcast sealed a deal with Ryan Seacrest last year that also keeps him at the company through 2012.


- Variety By: Michael Schneider (Spring 2009)


"Chelsea Handler's Late-night Snark"

Celebrity-bashing is her calling card. Now, the comic has added a bestselling memoir to her résumé. 'Sitcom star' may not be far behind.

FROM HER gossipy late-night perch on E! Entertainment Television, Chelsea Handler routinely mouths off about Tom Cruise, Angelina Jolie and almost everyone else in and around the gates of the Hollywood-industrial complex. And typically, the host of “Chelsea Lately” does so without incurring threats of bodily harm.

Then, she took on the JonasBrothers, the squeaky-clean, heartthrob boy band from New Jersey. In a recent sketch, Handler mocked the band's masculinity, their mismatched hair and their "purity rings" (symbolizing the pop stars' pledge not to have premarital sex). Later in the bit, Handler sexually manhandled one of the faux brothers -- shoving her chest in his face and offering him carnal delights.
Chelsea Handler: In Sunday's Calendar article about Chelsea Handler's talk show, a sentence describing her Jonas Brothers parody left out the word "hairdos." The sentence should have read: "Handler mocked the band's masculinity, their mismatched hairdos and their 'purity rings' (symbolizing the pop stars' pledge not to have premarital sex)." —
________________________________________


Legions of outraged Jonas Brothers devotees unleased their wrath. "Chelsea Handler can go die in a whole! [sic]," read one missive directed at her. Some merely called her names, others were more specific -- suggesting Handler die sooner rather than later. The group's publicist weighed in, albeit more respectfully, threatening to withdraw the cable network's access to the brothers, Miley Cyrus and other Disney Channel megastars, said Handler.

" 'Go die in a whole' -- I mean, really, it doesn't get better than that," said Handler after the offending sketch aired and was posted on YouTube. "We were all laughing so hard in the office. It's a lesson on why we have this show in the first place."

Brandishing wicked humor with a wide smile, Handler, 33, delights in mocking the shallowness of Hollywood while embracing its tackiness. Since its premiere a little more than a year ago, "Chelsea Lately" has evolved into a Tinseltown version of "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" and is one of the cable network's top daily series that frolics in the culture of tabloid celebrity, averaging over half a million viewers each weeknight.

Her show, which airs opposite "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno" and "Late Show With David Letterman," enters a crowded realm of Hollywood gossip shows but jumps enthusiastically into a daily pile of tabloid headlines, often from network companion "E! News."The dirt is dished with a revolving panel of comedians and her sidekick, a 4-foot-3-inch gentleman named Chuy, whom she lovingly refers to as "my little hot tamale."

She dishes it out -- and takes it

THROUGHOUT the show's banter, and interviews with guests -- who usually hail from cable or reality series -- one of her biggest targets is herself. She pokes fun at her eating habits and her penchant for sex and vodka. "I certainly hope this is not the pinnacle, but things are certainly the best they've ever been for me," said Handler, whose stand-up career has spanned more than a decade. "It seems like all my ducks are going in the right direction. I just hope they don't drink too much Grey Goose on the way -- like their owner."

The show has propelled Handler ever higher in the entertainment world pecking order and paved the way for additional projects, including a bestselling memoir and TV deals. Handler's "Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea" debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list, and this week is in the Top 10 of the Los Angeles Times nonfiction bestseller lists after 15 weeks.

The book is a series of hilarious, disconnected memories about family and dating that cleverly straddles the line of the absurd. For instance, in a bid to deal with rejection, she tells elementary school classmates she's slated to play Goldie Hawn's daughter in the never-produced sequel to "Private Benjamin." Producer-director Barry Sonnenfeld is in final negotiations to turn the book about growing up, family and dating into a TV series.

Meanwhile, on weekends, she's drawing standing-room-only crowds at her comedy concerts around the country. A recent Vanity Fair cover story on the funniest women in today's comedy scene placed Handler alongside Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Wanda Sykes and Sarah Silverman.

And although she makes vicious fun of E! programming, biting the hand that feeds her hasn't hurt her personal life. Her boyfriend is E! Entertainment Television head Ted Harbert, a veteran TV executive who has held top posts at ABC and NBC. It's a relationship she frequently jokes about on her show. Pictures of the couple hugging and smiling hang in her dressing room.

"For other people, it may be awkward, but it's certainly not for us," she said. "The minute you see us, it's clear what we're about -- it's a very playful relationship."

Other than managing issues related to broadcast standards or legal issues, Harbert said, he is totally detached from Handler's show. "I recuse myself from dealing with Chelsea's salary, the business dealings," he said. But he is undeniably proud of the series' success and claims not to cringe when she makes fun of other E! shows. "I know exactly what E! is. You have to get some fun out of it."

The daily production of "Chelsea Lately" is loose, controlled chaos. The writers and producers plan each day's show in the morning, writing material for the panel discussion and shooting comedy bits, either on location or in the hallways and cramped office spaces in West Los Angeles. The show tapes around 3:30 p.m. in front of a live audience and wraps in about an hour.

For the show, Handler sports stylish but non-flashy suits in a conscious attempt to downplay her looks. "I've just never been that kind of person," she said. "I don't have a lot of respect for women who play up their sexuality. I know I'm attractive, but that's not my best feature. What's up here in my head is more important."

Initially, club owners such as the Laugh Factory's Jamie Masada told Handler her looks might be a problem. "I told her very early in her career that it was very hard for a beautiful woman to get laughs," he said. "All the audience sees is the beauty. But Chelsea pulled it all off brilliantly."

A little target practice

TARGETS range from A-listers (Brangelina and TomKat) to D-listers (Dina Lohan, Denise Richards). "It's great to go see ' American Idol' being taped because Paula Abdul has absolutely no idea what's going on," she once joked.

When scenester Kim Kardashian (E!'s "Keeping Up With the Kardashians") -- a frequent subject of gossipy websites -- dropped by, Handler opened up the interview with "First of all, let's talk about your ass."

Then there's this about Tom Cruise: "He's such a hot mess." And of her favorite target, Tori Spelling: "Everybody knows who Tori Spelling is, because no one else has a face like that! I just can't control myself when it comes to Tori," she added. "I'm so sorry."

Of course, not everyone finds Handler so amusing, including Variety's television critic Brian Lowry, who reviewed her first few shows.

"In theory, a snarky, nightly half-hour devoted to entertainment culture makes considerable sense for E!," wrote Lowry last year. "But in 'Chelsea Lately,' the network has gotten the idea right and the talent wrong. A poor-woman's Kathy Griffin with a grating voice that could curve the spine, comic Chelsea Handler has bulldozed her way through the first three episodes, unpleasantly lurching from one snide comment to the next."

But, she maintains, she's not mean-spirited. "I make fun of myself, so that allows me to make fun of others," she said. "It's better if celebrities have a sense of humor about themselves. Take Denise Richards. She has no sense of humor. She's not in on the joke."

Handler realizes her show attracts only a fraction of the viewership of her late-night male counterparts. Even though the domino effect of Leno's exit from "The Tonight Show" may create upheaval in the late-night wars, she has no plans to leave E!.

"Those shows are graduate school and we're community college," said one of the show's executive producers, Tom Brunelle. "If we keep doing the show we're doing, we'll be fine."

Although she's already planning another book and is on the lookout for a film role, Handler's top priority is still her show. Which means bad news for the Jonas Brothers. "I told their publicist I would make a donation of $1,000 to the charity of their choice every time I make fun of them," she said.
- Los Angeles Times By- Greg Braxton (August 2008)


"Too Hot to Handler"

“This is gonna be good,” says Chelsea Handler, with a mischievous look in her eye. The taping of her late-night talk show, Chelsea Lately, is imminent, and her L.A. office is buzzing about some juicy breaking news: A recording has surfaced of Charlie Sheen inexplicably calling his then wife Denise Richards the N-word. Two hours later, Handler’s on camera delivering the punchline. “That’s offensive!” she declares. “There are so many better words to call Denise Richards.”
The 33-year-old comedian and author has been building a niche for herself in late night by daring to say what everyone else is thinking. While taking shots at pop culture luminaries and lowlifes isn’t groundbreaking, conquering the 11:30 p.m. time slot as a female talk-show host is. (Joan Rivers was the only woman to get a shot in that hour on a network—in 1986.) Handler’s year-old show is building a loyal audience on E!—it averages 500,000 viewers, with a median age of 35, which is significantly younger than the crowd tuning in to its time-slot competitors on the networks. (Take that, Jay and Dave!) No doubt many of those viewers are the same devotees who propelled Handler’s second book, Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea, to No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list in May. Her show is no Ellen-style, stay-at-home-mom nicefest; Chelsea Lately is more like The View, but with a lot of bleeping. A rotating roundtable of comics riff on the day’s news, often followed by taped segments of Handler and her diminutive Mexican assistant Chuy (a.k.a. her “little nugget”) on such adventures as making sushi and serving it on their naked bodies. Each half-hour show wraps with Handler interviewing a low-wattage celeb like Fran Drescher or Michael Lohan.
It’s tempting to compare Handler to D-list doyenne Kathy Griffin or sass sister Sarah Silverman, but Handler says the only thing they all have in common is anatomy: “There’s nothing similar about any of [us] girls except that [we] all have hot pockets.” Comic Heather McDonald, who routinely appears on the show’s roundtable and opens for Handler on tour, explains her friend’s appeal like this: “She’s the king of drunk, hot blondes. They’ve been wandering the earth, they’ve never had a leader, until Chelsea arrived with her big boobs and long hair and sassy attitude, and they’re like, ‘She’s me!’” In 2005, Handler provided her followers with a guidebook in the form of her memoir, My Horizontal Life, documenting her innumerable one-night stands, with such chapters as “Guess Who’s Leaving Through the Window?” and “Skid Mark.” In her latest collection of essays, Handler chronicles her childhood, her dating life, and her ongoing love affair with vodka. “I’m not falling down drunk every night and blacking out,” she insists. “I drink like a man.” (And with a little help from her fans, who often bring Handler bottles of her beloved Grey Goose during her frequent sold-out weekend stand-up gigs.)
A Jersey girl more in the mold of Bon Jovi’s down- the-shore partiers than Zach Braff’s Garden State mopers, Handler is the youngest of six children, raised by a Mormon mom and a Jewish dad. At 20, she set off for L.A. “I thought I’d become an actress, but then I realized I eat too much,” she says. While waiting tables and performing stand-up in 2003, Handler landed a role on Girls Behaving Badly, Oxygen’s hidden-camera comedy series. With a steady part-time job, she started writing her first book. Handler’s an unlikely best-selling author (“You think?” she deadpans); she never set out to write a book, but her friends loved hearing about her outrageous dating escapades, and they encouraged her. “I wrote 10 short stories that I sent to my manager. I had three [publishing] offers in two days. And I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I just wrote a book!’ ” Actually, she hadn’t; she had 10 more chapters to write. She reacted with her usual grace: “I have to sleep with 10 more guys? Like, by when?” Most of Handler’s stories end in humiliation—like the time she had a lot of tequila and spent the night with a little person. When she woke up, she writes, “I was so confused. At first I thought, ‘Oh, great, I had a baby.’”
By 2006, periodic gigs doing wiseass commentary on E! and The Tonight Show had led to her first E! series, The Chelsea Handler Show. It featured comedy segments in which Handler would, for example, interview senior citizens about such pressing topics as Carrot Top or Fergie. Soon, the network wanted her to do an entertainment news show. Handler wasn’t so into that, but she had an idea: “I could make fun of everything that E! reports.” And Chelsea Lately was born.
Around the same time, her love life took an upward turn as well. In 2006, Handler began dating Ted Harbert, 54, president and CEO of Comcast Entertainment Group, E!’s parent company. “He asked me at the Chelsea Handler Show wrap party to dance, and I was like, ‘With who?’” Handler recalls. “I thought if I dance with the president of the network everyone is gonna make fun of me. [But] once I got over it, everyone else got over it.” Months later, she and Harbert moved in together.
Harbert insists he has no say in Handler’s financial dealings with the network, but the couple do tussle over Chelsea Lately’s sometimes raunchy content. “Have Chelsea and I had loud arguments about whether or not she could say something?” Harbert asks. “Yes. Is it personal? No.” He says he had similar conflicts when he oversaw programming at ABC. “I’ve had close personal relationships with all the stars I’ve worked [with], from Roseanne on down,” he says. “My relationship with Chelsea is perhaps closer than my relationship with Roseanne, but I’ve been fighting with talent for a long time.”
Like Roseanne, Handler could become a sitcom star in her own right—she’s just not sure she wants to. She, Jenny McCarthy, and Leah Remini (King of Queens) have been starring as harried moms in a series of online webisodes called In the Motherhood. ABC now plans to turn those shorts into a midseason sitcom, but no actor deals have been secured, and Handler is ambivalent about signing on. “I don’t love reading scripts and saying lines the way they’re written,” she says. “I can only say what’s on my mind.” Yeah, we noticed.
- Entertainment Weekly- By Ari Karpel (July 2008)


Discography

CHELSEA HANDLER BOOKS
My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands
Are You There, Vodka? It's Me Chelsea
Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang
Lies That Chelsea Handler Told Me-

TV SHOWS
Chelsea Lately on E!
After Lately on E!
Are You There Chelsea? on NBC

MOVIES
HOP | Universal Pictures
THIS MEANS WAR | FOX
MALL | Release TBD

STAND-UP COMEDY TOURS
2010 Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang Tour
2011 Comedians of Chelsea Lately Tour
2011 Lies That Chelsea Handler Told Me Tour

BORDERLINE AMAZING PRODUCTIONS
Chelsea's Big Interview Special- 1 & 2
Chelsea Lately Bloopers- 1,2,3 & 4
Comedians of Chelsea Lately Stand-up Special
Hollywood Today Tonight
Chelsea Handler E! THS
Pretty Wild
Whatever Whitney
Love or Hate
After Lately
Chelsea Lately
Are You There Chelsea?
Big Loud Lisa

SHOWS
Girls Behaving Badly on Oxgen
The Chelsea Handler Show on E!
Chelsea Handler Biography- The Bio Channel

Photos

Bio

Chelsea Handler
Biography

Chelsea Handler has one of the most exciting careers in entertainment with a resume that includes bestselling author, talk show host, comedian, and actress to name a few. Recently named one of Glamour Magazine’s 2011 “Women of the Year”, Chelsea is a permanent fixture in pop culture as she continues to build a multiplatform media empire. In July 2007, Chelsea broke into the world of late-night talk shows with her E! Entertainment series, “Chelsea Lately,” airing weeknights at 11:00 p.m and is consistently one of the network’s highest-rated programs. Both Handler and the show have also been recognized as pioneers in late night with the show boasting five female writers to account for half of its writing staff. This is unprecedented in the late night arena that has historically been dominated by male hosts and writers.

Capitalizing on the continued success of “Chelsea Lately”, Handler introduced audiences to her spinoff series “After Lately” last spring which garnered impressive ratings and an immediate cult following. “After Lately” returns to E! on November 27th for its second season and promises to be even more entertaining and unpredictable than the last. The semi-scripted series follows the outside lives of “Chelsea Lately” stars including Chelsea, Chuy Bravo, as well as the comedians and writers who appear regularly on her late night show. Made to feel like a true reality show, each episode is outlined (a la CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM) and draws upon the entirely ridiculous – yet absolutely real – stories, events and people encompassing the world of “Chelsea Lately”. The show has also featured cameos by A-listers including Reese Witherspoon with more celebrity appearances to come in season two.

Going in front of and behind the camera on yet another TV project, Chelsea is currently shooting a new scripted series for NBC “Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea” as both an executive producer and a recurring guest star. The show is based on and titled after her second bestselling book. Laura Prepon of former “That 70’s Show” fame will star as the notoriously deviant and relentlessly amusing Ms. Handler while the real Chelsea will frequently appear throughout the season as her sister Shoshanna. Warner Brothers Television is producing the show for NBC Universal.

Chelsea is not only a beloved household name among television audiences but is also one of the leading nonfiction authors in publishing. Publisher’s Weekly recently named Chelsea one of “the clear winners for the year” with both Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea and Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang debuting at #1 on the New York Times bestsellers’ lists and ranking among the top ten highest-selling nonfiction books of 2010. Her first book, entitled My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One Night Stands, published by Bloomsbury, was released in the U.S. and over twenty other countries to become a bestseller for several weeks running and has sold over a million copies. Her second book, Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea, published by Simon Spotlight, debuted at #1 on the New York Times Best Sellers list in 2008 followed by Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang, published by Grand Central Publishing, in March of last year. On March 28th, 2010, Chelsea’s three books held the #1, #2, and #3 spots on the New York Times’ Best Seller lists simultaneously.

In November of last year, Grand Central Publishing signed Chelsea for her own imprint “Borderline Amazing/A Chelsea Handler Book”. Chelsea is currently signed on to pen three books for the imprint, the first of which was titled Lies Chelsea Told Me and debuted once again at #1 on the New York Times Bestsellers List when it hit shelves last May. The second title, still in its preliminary stages, will be written through the eyes of Chelsea’s affable dog, Chunk. The third book is undecided at this time.

Last year, Chelsea partnered with Live Nation for her “Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang” comedy tour sponsored by Belvedere Vodka. Due to high demand and several sold out venues, Live Nation extended the tour three times since its launch in March of 2010. Chelsea performed 79 shows in 53 markets across the United States and in Canada. The “Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang” tour sold over 250,000 tickets total to become one of the highest grossing of 2010. In May, Chelsea once again partnered with Live Nation and Belvedere for the “Lies Chelsea Handler Told Me” tour based on her recent book. This time, Handler hit the road with fellow comedians Brad Wollack, Heather McDonald, and Josh Wolf in tow. The “Lies” tour sold out in venues across the country in the top 20 US markets.

In 2011, Chelsea had her first feature film role with a cameo in Universal Pictures’ HOP opposite Russell Brand and James Marsden. In 2012, she will star in two studio films – the first in February opposite Reese Witherspoon and Chris Pine in Fox’s THIS MEANS WAR, and the second in October fo