Chelsea Handler is coming to New Zealand for two shows in July.
“That’s me,” Chelsea Handler says with a gleeful smile when asked about the title of the new stand-up comedy show she’s bringing to Aotearoa. “The show’s my origin story.”
The title is typical Handler. A little bit controversial, a little bit confrontational and a whole lot cheeky. In July, she’ll take to stages in Auckland and Wellington to perform Little Big B****, in which she’ll talk about growing up in a family of six children (“I looked around and thought, ‘Who the f*** is in charge around here?’”) before shifting gears to discuss cancel culture. Specifically, her interactions with the celebrity men who have been cancelled.
“I have a really funny Bill Cosby story. Not a lot of people can say that. I have a very funny Woody Allen story. Not a lot of people can say that either, actually,” she laughs. “I have a really funny story about going to George W. Bush’s family’s compound in Maine. I was on three edibles and looking at his art.”
I ask if Bush’s paintings looked better under the influence. She laughed and said, “Oh no. The art did not improve. I don’t know a lot about art, but I know that his is not that great.”
But before the dinners with disgraced Oscar winners and getting high around former presidents, there’s her childhood to talk about. Those years were filled with what she describes as “crazy antics”, all fuelled by an overriding urge to escape a life she quickly realised did not fit her at all.
“I had big plans for myself and my family did not fit into those plans. I had to become very entrepreneurial at a very young age. Once I realised I didn’t have a dowry and neither of my parents had a savings account, I realised that I was on my own,” she says.
Her first stab at financial independence was running a lemonade stand from her driveway. She cleared $5 a day and was not happy about it. That was nowhere near enough to fund her dreams.
“I was like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna have to reimagine the lemonade business’,” she grins. “I started a hard lemonade stand. At 8 years old, I was selling gin, whiskey and tequila to all the neighbourhood kids and parents - whoever wanted one and was willing to pay. I made a fortune doing that.”
Her next business was babysitting. Again, with a classic Handler twist.
“I was 10. I lied and said I was 15. I ended up babysitting for a 14-year-old kid the entire summer.”
A formative experience for the young Chelsea was a family vacation. She vividly remembers boarding a plane with her parents and five siblings and being ushered quickly past the first-class section and directed to her cattle-class seat at the back.
“I walked past first-class and I was like, ‘Who is this group? This smells like my group’.”
She asked her folks if she could sit down and was told no. The family would never be able to afford the premium seats.
“I thought, ‘Speak for yourself. I’m definitely sitting with those people. That’s my group’. I saved all my money from my babysitting empire, and the next time we flew I bought my own first-class ticket from a travel agent who lived down the street. I was flying with my two brothers and my mum. I didn’t tell them because they would have taken my ticket from me. So we got on the plane, I found my seat, sat down, looked up at my two brothers and said, ‘See you idiots later’.”
It’s a hell of a story, and one that highlights the ambition she harboured even at a young age.
“I was very ambitious,” she agrees. “I don’t know for what. I just needed to get out of my situation. I wanted to be an adult right away. I wanted to experience adulthood and be a woman. I felt like I was trapped in a little baby’s body and I wanted to burst out of it. I had this idea of what I wanted to be - and I’m living it now - but they were in my way. I told them, ‘Listen, guys, I’m going to the mountaintop and you can come with me or you can hang back, but I know which way I’m headed’. I was like a bowling ball. Anything that got in my way, I got rid of. I wanted fierce independence. I didn’t want to have to tell anyone what I was doing or be tethered to any one thing.”
That untethered spirit has stayed with her during her career. She’s been successful in multiple areas; stand-up, television - both on-screen and behind the scenes - and writing, with six New York Times number-one bestsellers under her belt. It’s fair to say her ambitious streak has not waned after her showbiz success.
But it was the Covid pandemic that pulled her back to the stage. She was feeling depressed, as were most people, and just woke up one day and thought she should positively use her comedic skill set to bring people back together. She put a show together and headed out. Little Big B**** is her third show and tour in four years.
“There’s a sense of responsibility in terms of my work. When the world is suffering, you want to lift people and provide a reprieve [from] all the madness we’ve been experiencing for some time in the States,” she says. “It feels very necessary to provide that service. To have people sitting together next to strangers laughing in an audience is a pretty awesome feeling.”
It’s an admirable stance. Especially as some of the biggest names in comedy are currently using their platforms to dig that divide even further by punching down on certain minority groups.
“Yeah, I just don’t feel like that’s a great use of our time. If somebody has a target on their back, why would you exploit that? We’re here to heal division, not sow it.”
She pauses for a second before continuing.
“I mean, I definitely had some bad habits when I was on Chelsea Lately,” she says, referencing her long-running, late-night comedy show that ran from 2007-2014 and clocked over 1000 episodes. “We would make fun of everyone. Then you learn that’s not cool and are like, ‘Okay, I can stop that’. If it’s so hard for you to stop making fun of other people, then you’re not a comedian. A comedian could find anyone to make fun of. I like parameters. I like when people say, ‘You can’t do this, this and this anymore’. Great! That makes it more challenging and makes you become a little bit more clever. I don’t think there’s any problem with guardrails being put up.”
Handler has copped a lot of flak over the years, which is not unusual for a successful woman in showbiz, especially one as uncensored as she is. Hate, she says, never feels good, but she put any problems with it to bed a long time ago and now brushes if off.
“If everyone likes you, then you’re not really saying anything at all,” she states. “So I don’t mind. And you always have to consider the source of where it’s coming from. I talk about being child-free and happy and conservative male talk show hosts are like, ‘How dare she!’ Why? I’m telling women that other things provide value and give value to you other than being married or a mother. There are plenty of contributions we can make societally. It’s really important to constantly be an ambassador for that group of people because millions of women feel the same way. I want to be a voice to the women [who] don’t have a voice, a voice for all the women who feel like they’re not understood or are misunderstood by society.”
With the rise of extreme conservatism in her homeland of America, with red states taking away women’s rights at alarming pace, it’s no surprise Handler is fighting the good fight.
“The people who were telling me what to do the most were men. I just looked at them like, ‘You don’t have any idea what I’m experiencing’. So why would I listen to men when I’m a woman? There’s a vastly different experience as a male and female,” she says. “It’s not that I don’t respect men and their opinions, but men’s opinions should be for men, and women’s should be for women.”
Then Chelsea Handler laughs and adds, “And I just always didn’t like being told what to do by any sex, really.”
Who: Comedian Chelsea Handler
What: Touring her new stand-up show Little Big B****
When: Auckland’s Town Hall on July 5 and Wellington’s St James Theater on July 6
NY Times: Universal believes audiences will take flight with Hiccup and Toothless again.