Chelsea Handler appeared on Deon Cole’s podcast Funny Knowing You and did not hold back when the conversation turned to the Kevin Hart roast and her thoughts on Tony Hinchcliffe and Shane Gillis.
When Cole asked Handler about walking into the roast for the first time, she revealed she had already done plenty of homework on the comics involved.
“I knew enough about Tony Hinchcliffe and Shane and their backgrounds,” Handler said. “I had girls, ex-girlfriends blowing up my DMs that had dated Shane and were telling me stuff about him. So based on that, I was like, these guys are pretty bad.”
She went on to explain what some of Gillis’ former partners had allegedly told her.
“It’s just everything we know, that they’re racist, that they’re bigots, that they’re sexist, that they think they’re like invincible,” she said. “Shane got fired from SNL but then was on SNL years later. So he got fired. So what happened in between those two events? So he believes, this is per one of his exes, that he’s invincible. He’s like, doesn’t matter. I can say anything I want.”
Cole later asked whether she enjoyed the material Hinchcliffe and Gillis delivered during the roast, but Handler made it clear she did not.
“No. I mean it was ick. It was gross,” she said. “I don’t find those jokes to be funny. Jokes about lynching Black people, lynching is not a joke. That’s worse than r*pe. Like you’re not joking about r*pe, are you? Are you saying I’m going to go r*pe you? You can’t do that, but you can say lynching. I find that to be, I don’t know. People are like it’s a roast, you go for it. I’m like, you can go for it without being gross.”
Handler also criticized jokes directed at Sheryl Underwood’s late husband, who committed s**cide.
“I found them making fun of Sheryl Underwood’s husband who committed s**cide,” she said. “She’s fine with that if she says she’s fine with that. I wasn’t fine with that. I thought that was disgusting too.”
According to Handler, the tone of the night motivated her to take a different approach with her own performance.
“There was so much disgustingness that I knew it was going to be such a gross vibe,” she said. “Then I would be able to elevate it no problem. And that’s what I went to do. I was like, all right, well, I’ll pick it up because they’re going to try and bring it down. And Kevin didn’t deserve that. He deserved an elevated roast.”
The conversation later shifted toward what Handler sees as a trend in modern comedy. After Cole asked whether some white comics were leaning into racist material to build careers, Handler agreed.
“Oh yeah,” she said. “They’re going to get in with that group of Roganites and that Austin group of Joe Rogan and all of those guys. And I just, you know, that’s their MO. Even some girl comics have started to do it to be like in with that group.”
Handler also brushed off the jokes made about her during the roast, saying they lacked creativity.
“They couldn’t say anything other than that I’m a sl*t or my age,” she said. “Those aren’t jokes. That’s not clever writing. And I knew they would be lazy because they do that for a living.”
