Denver Magazine / Denver Magazine October 2008 / Deep Inside Chelsea Handler

 Email  Print  Feed

Deep Inside Chelsea Handler

We arrive in Los Angeles on a Thursday morning for our interview with Chelsea Handler, the hottest female comic working in America today. After a taping of her hit celebrity-skewer show, E! Television's "Chelsea Lately," we're ushered into her office, Handler herself seated directly in front of a corkboard collage of recent tabloid cutouts.

Earlier, during the drive to the studio, we speculated about what to expect. To thousands of fans, it's Handler's ability to cut to the quick, her verbal jabs hitting at the soft underbelly of today's heavyweight Hollywood culture that defines her as a comedian. But it is also the tell-all honesty in her own published memoirs that have admirers embracing her as an everywoman, the superstar who readily admits in her New York Times bestselling memoir "Are You There Vodka? It's Me Chelsea," to starting a rumor at school that she was working on a sequel to "Private Benjamin" just because she forgot her homework.

"I lie all the time," she says. "I started lying as soon as I could talk. Now that I make fun of people for lying, I tend to tell a little more of the truth. I can't be that hypocritical."

Handler is frank with the media, and little about her life prior to comedy is unknown. She's a Jersey girl, born in Livingston in 1975, the youngest of six children. In our conversation, she is blatantly honest about her childhood, explaining that her mother "was the softie, my dad the big A-hole." Her Jewish father and Mormon mother met at a winter supply store in New Jersey, and the clash of cultures, Handler says, "didn't mix well, but was very funny."

"My mom was Mormon, and we all kind of agreed that she wouldn't talk about it for the better part of her life," she says. "When she did, my father would say, "˜I thought I told you not to talk about that.'"

Handler's roots in the Colorado comedy scene run deep. She's played the Larimer Square Comedy Works three times and has performed in front of sold-out audiences at HBO's Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen. This month, she will be headlining the Paramount Theatre in support of Denver's New Genesis. "I love Colorado," she says. "I'm a big skier. It's a bonus that you can drink more vodka. You have the perfect excuse for bad behavior at a higher altitude."

This openly confessed love of the neutral spirit grabs as many headlines as her comedic wit. At book signings and live performances, dozens of devoted fans show up bearing bottles of her favorite brand, Grey Goose, adding to the speculations about her alcohol consumption.

"I don't drink an immense amount of vodka," she says. "People ask me all the time if I'm a drunk, and I say, "˜No, I don't get drunk because I have a very good relationship with [vodka]. I get a nice buzz; I enjoy myself, and then I go to bed like a normal person. I don't go dance on the tables in some club. If I'm going to dance on tables, I do it in the privacy of my own living room or at my relatives'."

The last two years have been a whirlwind for Handler, who admits that she wasn't always this popular. She arrived in L.A. in 1995 and spent nearly a decade waiting tables and performing stand-up before landing her role on the Oxygen Network's hidden camera show "Girls Behaving Badly." Seemingly overnight, Handler's brand of sincere, yet unapologetically barbed, comedy made her a household name. "She's the king of drunk, hot blondes," says friend and Lately regular Heather McDonald in a recent interview. "They've been wandering the earth, [but] they've never had a leader."

Beneath the bad girl exterior is a very considerate woman, says Eva Magdalenski, Handler's tour publicist who also handles media relations for Denver's Comedy Works. During book signings, Handler personalizes every autograph, making sure to spell every name correctly. Magdalenski recalls a recent signing: "We always slip out the back door because people have a tendency to run after Chelsea. While we were driving away, we saw a little girl who was in hysterics. Chelsea told her driver to stop the car; she jumped out, snapped a couple of photos and signed an autograph right there on the side of the road. Chelsea does that sort of thing everywhere she goes."

It is that down-to-earth, celebrity-next-door persona that has solidified the cultish "Chelsea Lately" among the coveted women age 25-35 demographic who have money to spend. Lately draws an average of 500,000 viewers a night, propelling Handler and her private life most notably her highly publicized relationship with Ted Harbert, the president and CEO of Comcast Entertainment Group, E!'s parent company " into the gossip pages.

"We try not to talk about [work] if we know we're going to fight about it," Handler says about separating her career from her time with Harbert. "He's not really involved on a day-to-day basis, but if I get stressed out about something or frustrated, then I go to him. But we try to keep our noses out of each other's business. We like to focus more on the bigger picture. Like happy hour."

Chelsea Handler is, in no uncertain terms, a phenomenon. And with the rise in popularity comes an increase in the caliber of stars clamoring to appear on her show (Snoop Dog, Vivica A. Fox and Jenny McCarthy have all made appearances). But one interview still eludes Handler. "Paris Hilton, she says. "She's a ridiculous person, so I would love to find out if she's actually had an official lobotomy. I would love to give her a flashcard and ask her if she knows what six times five is to see what level of stupidity we're dealing with."

***

Chelsea Handler will perform at the Paramount Theatre this month to raise money for New Genesis, a Denver-based program to help end homelessness. "I like helping people who don't have the privileges that other people do, especially people on the street. It's pretty brutal out there," says Handler. "If they can't afford to come to see you do comedy, and you can't make them laugh, you might as well help them financially any way you can."

Saturday, October 18

5 pm, book signing at the Tattered Cover downtown

8 pm, performance at the Paramount Theatre

1621 Glenarm Pl.

Tickets: $35 | $75 | $500

For tickets: 866.461.6556 or tickethorse.com

For more info on New Genesis: panhandlingsucks.com